How to Format your Manuscript for Layout Design

The quick and dirty guide to getting a manuscript ready for layout design.

When the text is done and the edits are complete, it’s time to send your finished manuscript to layout design - the first step to turn a document into a book. Here’s how to set up a document to make your book’s interior the most beautiful it can be.

• Take off any document headers or footers - these are usually set up on the first page in Word, Docs, or Pages, and are automatically added to every subsequent page of the document. This does not mean to remove your chapter numbers or titles.

• Get rid of any page numbers. These get added in layout. Note: page numbers in your provided manuscript document will not correspond to the page numbers in your layout design drafts.

• Remove images from your document. Instead:

  • Put placeholder text in its place, ie [IMG of xyz] or [filename.jpg]
    OR

  • Provide a separate document referencing which image goes where in the text using a snippet of searchable text, for example: “She walked down the stairs” and the image needed, either by file name or description.

• Provide high resolution images, graphs, or other assets via Drive, Dropbox, or WeTransfer - not via text or email, which can compress quality.

• Lose the fancy fonts. You can show/tell your designer what style of font you have in mind, but if they don’t have them installed, they won’t see them anyway. Often, your publishing company will suggest fonts for better marketability.

• Scene breaks should be noted, but not with images. Use a symbol that is not used in your story, ie #, or @, so your layout designer can search for these symbols all at once. Provide any scene break symbols (or we can design them for you) separately.

• Remove Paragraph Indents - found in the layout settings of your document - or any kind of spaces at the start of a paragraph. Don’t worry, there’s an easy way to do it…
  

Use Search and Replace (CTRL+F or ⌘+F) to find and replace the following. You can insert symbols to represent some of these, shown in [brackets].

• Tabs use [^t] for the tab key, or spaces if you’ve used those, change to [] (nothing). These are added in the layout software for consistency across your entire document.

• Ellipses - no spaces should be used [. . .], change to […]. Spaces in between the periods can break layout.

• Forced line breaks [^p]. Ensure that these are used intentionally, not to “make sentences look better” or to add spaces around an indented quote, etc.

• Any extra spaces, especially double spaces after a punctuation mark (usually, this was a period). It’s no longer standard practice. [  .] (two spaces) change to [ .] (one space).

Have questions or are unsure about any of these tips? Contact our team and we’ll be happy to help set up your document for your layout designer.