This article originally appeared on BookBaby.com

Formatting is how your manuscript looks and reads. Things like font size, page color, word count, page number, line spacing, paragraph breaks–everything that goes into the visual appearance. This means manuscript format is the proper way your manuscript should look when you send it in for editing. MICROSOFT WORD TIPS FOR WRITERS.MAC EDITION. A little while back, we compiled some “Word hacks” that our writers have learned over the years of working with Microsoft Word. But we realized that Microsoft Word is, like all things, different across platforms. So not to be left out, our Mac users piped up with tips and tricks of their own. Fixing right-to-left text in Microsoft Word. Release Date: November 7, 2018 Category: Writing Tools Author: Amanda W., Ph.D. Many versions of Word allow users to enter text in right-to-left format to accommodate other languages. Most of these change the formatting to left-to-right text direction when users select English for the text language.

Here are instructions on how to format your book using Microsoft Word on a Mac. Interior templates are also available on bookbaby.com/templates, where you can download a template for your book’s specific measurements.

US Trade

It is impossible to produce a guide for all the versions of Word for Mac and PC. But in any version, it is still only a matter of finding the Styles formatting button or menu. The process remains the same. However, if you are having problems using Word, you could try Kindle Create. It is much easier to use to format an ebook than Word. MICROSOFT WORD TIPS FOR WRITERS.MAC EDITION. A little while back, we compiled some “Word hacks” that our writers have learned over the years of working with Microsoft Word. But we realized that Microsoft Word is, like all things, different across platforms. So not to be left out, our Mac users piped up with tips and tricks of their own.

For a 6″x9″ book, start by changing the paper size and the margins to match the dimensions of a US Trade, 6″ x 9″ book (these instructions are applicable to whatever book trim size you choose).

Start by double-clicking on the ruler at the top of your document and bring up the document formatting window. Click on the “Margins” tab, then the “Page Setup” button. Click on “Paper Size,” then “Manage Custom Sizes.”

Make a new dimension by clicking on the “plus” button, and name it “US Trade.”

The paper size is actually going to be 6.25″ x 9.25″ to accommodate for the image bleed that Microsoft Word does not take into consideration. Image bleed allows images or colors to go to the edge of a page. When you print a book using commercial presses, it is essential to include this extra space beyond the trim line. (For more information, watch our “Image Bleed” tutorial.)

Once it’s set to 6.25″ x 9.25″, adjust the margins. For the top and bottom, set it to 0.44 inches and click “OK.” For the left and right, set it to one inch. You can increase gutter in the middle if you’d like to have a larger space running down where your book is bound.

Format Word 2018 In Mac For Fiction Writing Pdf

Make your header and footer 0.5″ or 0.44” to match the top and bottom print margins.

Check “mirror margins” to set your book up like a printed book spread.

Chapters

Next, click the “Layout” tab.

If you would like your chapters to all start on a right-hand page,set each chapter as a new section break, and set those new sections to start on anodd page.

For headers and footers, select the “different odd and even” option if you want to have an author name on one side and the title of the book or chapter name on the other side. Select “different first page” if you don’t want to have your headers at the beginning of each chapter.

Now click “OK” to apply the changes to the whole document.

The page size is now set to U.S. Trade 6″ x 9″ as opposed to the 8.5″ by 11″ you probably started out with.

Basic formatting

Let’s continue with some basic formatting. Turn on “show all non-printing characters” to help you identify what type of breaks you are using.

Assuming you have the text of your book and your chapters defined, you will want to include a title page and a copyright page for the year of publication.

Do not hit the enter button several times to create a new page. Instead, go to “Insert > Break > PageBreak” to define a break in the page.

Now, you can design a title page. Type in your book title and increase the font size. Bring it down to about the middle of your first page.

This will print as our right-side title page when you first open your printed book. (For more information on how a printed book is laid out, please watch our “Book Pagination” tutorial.)

Now, add your copyright information to be on the backside of that title page. That will be on page two, so insert another page break.

Include the publication year and anything else you would like to list. Copyright information is typically down at the bottom of the page.

Next, insert a “Section break” (we recommend the “next odd page”), then highlight the chapter text. Click on the formatting style in the formatting palette or at the top of your document and select “Heading.” Now this will be defined as a “Chapter Heading.”

Go ahead and find where you designated chapter 2 and repeat the same instructions as before: insert a “section break odd page” and mark the chapter text as a “Heading.”

Table of Contents and more

After your Copyright page, insert a “section break.” Then, go to the “Insert” dropdown, select “Table of Contents,” pick a style, and insert it. Now you’ll see a “Table of Contents” list with page numbers.

Next, to set your footers, double-click in the area below your text. You’ll see they’re defined as odd and even page footers. Go to “Insert Page Numbers.” Choose to have them all align to the “Outside” or “Centered.” If you have them all aligned to the same side, half of them are will face the gutter and inside of your book. If you have them on the “Inside,” they are ALL going to be on your gutter side.

You can choose whether or not to “Show numbers on the first page” by clicking or unclicking the appropriate box.

Next, double-click above your text to insert a header. If you chose earlier to set it up as different odd and even headers, you can put the “Author Name” on one side and the title of the book on the other.

Go to your “Basic Paragraph” style. After you change your page size from “US Letter” down to US Trade, you might find that your text is too large. Instead of 12 point font, we recommend size 10 or 11. You also might want to decrease or increase the space between your lines. You can set it “single” if you want it to be tight or “double” if you like a lot of space in-between. We recommend 1.5 for a happy medium.

Next is your text alignment: left-align, center-align, right-align, and justified. A lot of books are designed with justified text, but select what fits best for your book.

Steven Spatz: Breaking down barriers

Steven Spatz, BookBaby President, is typically known for his calm and reasoned demeanor around the office. But that didn’t stop him from wielding a sledgehammer to literally and metaphorically break down barriers for independent authors. Literally, in that we’re expanding our BookBaby office to house our growing team and operation. Metaphorically… well, because BookBaby helps break down the barriers for writers to become self-published authors. But you already knew that.

See more how-to videos at theBookBaby YouTube channel.

If you have any other questions, be sure to send us an email atsupport@bookbaby.comand we’ll get back to you!

This post was excerpted and adapted fromHow to Format Your Book Using Microsoft Word on a Mac.

About BookBaby

Based in the Philadelphia-area,BookBabyis a team of authors, poets, bloggers, and artists — so they know the thrills and challenges of bringing a book into this world.

Since 2011,BookBabyhas helped thousands realize their publishing goals by offering the largest eBook distribution network, including Amazon, Apple, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, and many other popular retailers in over 170 countries around the globe.

Learn more atwww.BookBaby.com.

Finding simple book formatting for your nonfiction book can be tricky.

For one, if you’ve never formatted a book before, how do you even know what it should look like?

How should you space your paragraphs?

What about images?

And how do you make certain parts of your book stand out, like chapter headings, quotes, or bonus tips…?

Wanna know how I figured out how to format my own books?

Yes? Good.

Because that’s what I’m gonna share with you in today’s blog post.

The tools

Before we get started, you should know that I use Scrivener to format my nonfiction books.

Scrivener is not only a great writing tool, but it also allows you to format and export books to every format you could need.

Want a PDF? Done.

Format Word 2018 In Mac For Fiction Writing Free

Need a .mobi file for Kindle. Check.

Looking to distribute it to iBooks and Google Play?

You’ll need a .epub file for that. Done and done.

There are many options available for formatting your book, but Scrivener makes things simple, at least for me.

And I like simple.

In the tutorial videos below, I’m going to show you two ways you can format your nonfiction book (for print) using Scrivener.

Simple Book Formatting With Scrivener

In this tutorial video, I’m going to walk you through how to set up your nonfiction formatting: how to format a book inside Scrivener.

Now the reason that I use Scrivener is that one, it’s my go-to writing tool. I write everything inside it. But it’s also because it exports to pretty much every single format that you could need for getting your book out there, in terms of distribution.

But there’s a slight caveat — when it comes to Scrivener and the formatting side of things — it’s all about keeping things simple.

If you’re looking for amazing graphics coming off the page or if you need formatting that’s outside the norm, then you’ll need to go to something like InDesign or pay for a designer to do that for you.

But if you want to keep your nonfiction book simple and easy for people to consume, then Scrivener is definitely what I recommend.

Simple book formatting best practices

First things first, let’s talk about best practices.

You want to choose one or two fonts only. One for your headings and one for your book main contents.

You can change the way a book looks and feels with the fonts you choose.

Not sure how to pair fonts? This post by Canva.com should give you some inspiration.

That’s one of the great things about Scrivener is that you can choose different fonts to make things stand out.

Now, as I mentioned, I’m talking about the print version in these tutorials.

When it comes to your ebook versions, your fonts are chosen based on the device the user has and there are only three or four font options.

So any fonts you choose for your ebook version will always be converted based on those options.

If you keep in mind that you don’t have a lot of control over the font when it comes to the e-book side, you’ll see that simple is better.

But when it comes to the print version, you can choose whatever you like.

In the video below I’m gonna walk you through, from a print perspective, how you can use fonts and other functions within Scrivener to get simple book formatting for your nonfiction book.

I love print books, so whenever I publish a book I do both a print and an ebook because I always like to have my own books in my hands!

Sorry for the long video, but I wanted to show you EXACTLY what I do.

You’ll see from the video that I always switch between Helvetica and Cambria for the fonts, those are my two go-to fonts.

I tend to change fonts based on the topic of the book.

Again, if you’re not sure on the best font pairings, make sure you read the blog post on Canva.com, it gives you best fonts for specific niches, so you should be able to find one that suits your topic well.

Another way to make different parts of your print book stand out is to use tables.

I’ve done that with the quotes in this book inside the video. Put a table around your quote and voila, instant ‘pop’.

And I’ve used caps to make other words stand out too. You can use italics as well.

Simple book formatting is about getting familiar with how you can use different fonts and different font sizes and variations to make things work for you and your book’s niche.

Getting your book out of Scrivener

The cool thing about Scrivener is there are two ways that you can export your book in terms of how it’s going to look once printed.

#1: You can come into Scrivener and you can apply all your formatting from within your main document area or

Format Word 2018 In Mac For Fiction Writing Style

#2: You can do that from within the compile formatting settings.

This is what makes Scrivener so powerful.

With this particular book (in the video) I have set up the main document formatting to be overwritten by the compile formatting settings.

I have chosen to do a couple of different levels to format the font and the body text.

All that you need to do is come into Scrivener and then choose Compile > Formatting (as shown in the image above).

Click on the different levels. If you need to format them, you will click on the font and this will pop open a table where you can choose a font from the list, change the size, and appearance etc.

As you click through all the different levels you’ll see where the formatting will be applied, as it will be highlighted in yellow in the Binder.

Make sure that you are including the title and the text of whatever’s in the document (shown by a tick within the formatting main screen).

Those two things are important, so make sure that those have been included because if they are not then they won’t “print” to your PDF, aka, your document will have no text!

Then whatever formatting you’ve got set inside the actual document — will be overridden by what you have set inside the compile formatting settings.

This is how compile formats EVERYTHING for you.

So simple.

There’s lots of different things that you can do to format your book using the Compile function. But I tend not to do more than what I’ve shown inside the video because I’m all about simplicity.

I want to keep things as simple as possible, make it easier for my readers to consume and understand the words inside my book.

Simple Book Formatting (Part 2)

This is part two of book formatting with Scrivener.

In the last video we talked about using the compile functionality to format your book — now in this video things are a little different — we are going to format using compile as-is, which you will see over on the right-hand side of your document when the Inspector is open.

You tick this option if you want to keep the formatting as is.

What I mean by that is what you see is what you get.

Now the reason that you might want to choose to do this versus using the compile formatting functionality is if you have a lot of sub-subheadings.

For instance, in this particular book (featured in the video) — which is not mine it’s one of my clients — there are a lot of subheadings and sections.

Mitch Matthews is one of my amazing clients and he wanted to do this book a little differently.

I’ve been working on this book for him and it launches in January 2018 (it’s called DREAM JOB: Redefined), so if you’re reading this and it’s after January 2018, you’ll be able to grab it as it will be live on Amazon.

What we’ve done to format the book is chosen to use “compile as-is” because we wanted a bit more control over how the book formatting looked in the end.

Using the compile functionality and letting that override all the formatting wasn’t an option for this book.

The reason I did this is that there’s a lot of quotes throughout the book and there are lots of variations in font sizes.

One of the drawbacks of the compile formatting function is that you can’t stipulate more than two font sizes within each level (document heading and then document content).

During compile, it’s going to override everything from within the document.

The only other way around this would be to have many documents underneath each chapter.

So every time you wanted a different heading you would start a new document…

Every time you wanted a different subheading you would start a new document…

It can make your document get quite big and while Scrivener can still handle that; I don’t know about you but my mind struggles with keeping it all straight, so I keep things simple.

More formatting options

Now in terms of forcing chapters to start on a new page and all those sorts of things, you can manage that by using a blank page.

To create this, click the plus sign to add a new page and you call it “blank page”. Then you need to make sure that you put this code <$blank_page> in the body of the blank page.

And that’s it.

You don’t need to worry about trying to insert hundreds of empty spaces, as this can result in some weird formatting once it converts to PDF.

Depending on how the book looks when you preview it in PDF mode, you can play around and adjust your blank pages so that you have chapters starting where you want them.

Compile as-is gives you a lot more control. But it’s time-consuming to set up if your book is large.

So you have a few decisions to make when it comes to formatting, and it will largely depend on how your mind likes to organize things.

So there you have it.

Two options when it comes to formatting your nonfiction book inside Scrivener with simple book formatting.