Tag: Scrivener

Stop Hitting That Tab Key. . . NOW!

So you’re writing and editing to digitally prepare and submit a manuscript for your first-ever book-baby.  Well, it might surprise you to know that there is one crucial thing you may very well be doing completely wrong!

If you’ve gotten in the habit, over the years, of hitting the tab key to indent your paragraphs, stop it, and stop it now!

As I’ve stated on my “Ahoy!” page, I’m here to report any mistakes I make in this ongoing learning process, as I make them.  And here I am. . . because for over twenty years, I’ve been hitting that trusty ol’ TAB key to indent my paragraphs.

So, why is this a mistake?  What’s wrong with it?  Aren’t most word-processors set up from the get-go for their tab-key results to indent paragraphs properly?

Well, in a word, no.

The tab key is set up for “tabulating” tables and columns.  From the Wikipedia:  “In word processing and text editing the Tab key will often move the insertion point to the next tab stop in a table, or may insert the ASCII tab character or many space characters.”

Sure, if you’re just printing out a chapter or three of your story, or looking at it on the screen, the indentations created by the tab key will look dead-on correct. . . all nice and professional-looking.

But the problem comes in when you submit a novel or novella that has been “tabbed” within an inch of its life.  Even if you submit a PDF to an online publisher (such as CreateSpace or SmashWords), they still have to do their own formatting, and tab indents can often choke their conversion programs.

Oh, it may still go through, but when you proof it, it will probably look like the first lines of your paragraphs start all the way an entire half of the page over!  It took me a bit of research and playing around with a few different word processors to figure out why my proofs were looking like this, and how to fix them (because I have been, for my entire life, a tab indenter).

So, as you’re blazing along through your first draft, pounding out paragraph after paragraph, get your fingers off of that tab key!  Try this instead:  Move your mouse cursor to the top of the screen, and, depending on the program you’re using, look for a tab called “format” or “formatting” or something along those lines, and in the menu for that tab, look for “paragraph” or “indentations.”  Set the field to read “0.5” (as in inches).  This should, theoretically, set things up to where you don’t have to do anything at all at the start of the new paragraph. . . just hit “enter” when you’re done with a paragraph and the next line should be automatically indented for you.

In Scrivener, if you’ve copied and pasted a body of text in which you have previously used tabs, you can select “Format > Convert > Strip Leading Tabs” to get rid of all of those unholy tabs at once, then press “command”+”a” to highlight the entire text, and go to “Format > Text > Tabs and Indents” to set all those now-missing tabs to 0.5″ indentations.  Voila!

The result of proper indentation will be a text that will compile correctly, convert to other word-processing programs correctly, and basically just save yourself time, effort and headaches on down the road.  Your PDFs and digi-publisher proofs will look, for the lack of a better word, “correct.”  You’ll smile, because you’ve made something that looks and “feels” professional. . . as opposed to lines that start somewhere off in the bedroom closet instead of roughly 5 characters over.

Rookie Fears: Little Computer Details (pt 2)

“. . . from the research I was doing, it takes a modicum of technical knowledge- the tiniest bit of coding savvy- which, as a writer in the 21st century, I felt almost required to have, and which, as a writer overall who just wants to pound out stories and not worry about computer details, I don’t really possess in the least. . .”

A couple of nights ago, I hammered out the first part of this post, about my worries and doubts concerning the details of just how to get a book onto the Amazon Kindle Store.  As I allowed Mr. Cubbon to illustrate in his video, my fears turned out to be completely unfounded. . . almost comically so.

But, as I was writing the first draft of Blue Daunia Issue #1 back in early June, other fears as a first-time indie author began to creep in to take the place of those that had been placated.  And, as it turns out, there was a collective name for those fears:  “ebook formatting.”

Yes, I had done a modicum of research in the past, and what I knew off-hand from those past browsings amounted to this:  Uploading a Word document to Kindle is possible (and possibly tricky); Amazon uses the “mobi” format, preferably with a hyperlinked table of contents; PDFs are doable but extremely tricky when it comes to Amazon auto-converting to its native mobi; and then there’s epub, which is the easiest format for Amazon to auto-convert.

But, when the time came, how would I get my final draft into one of the better two formats: mobi and epub (I just didn’t want to take chances with the possible conversion errors of Word or PDF)?  And, almost more importantly (to perfectionist me anyway), how would I go about hyperlinking my table of contents, so that, when I finally see my book-baby on the kindle screen, I could tap on a chapter name and be instantly transported to that chapter?

Other authors dabbling in the ebook format had hyperlinked their TOCs… heck, almost all of them!  The small handful of books I had seen on my kindle which weren’t hyperlinked, looked extremely cheap in other ways as well, from typos to poor cover designs to outright public domain rehashes done with very little care.  In other words, early on in my readership of ebooks, I almost instantly began to equate non-hyperlinked TOCs with lousy, time-wasting quality.  Therefore, if my then-“future” self were ever to write and publish an ebook, it had to have a hyperlinked TOC. . . it just had to.  I considered it an absolute necessity!

Ah, hyperlinked Tables of Contents and ebook formatting. . . from the research I was doing, it takes a modicum of technical knowledge- the tiniest bit of coding savvy- which, as a writer in the 21st century, I felt almost required to have, and which, as a writer overall who just wants to pound out stories and not worry about computer details, I don’t really possess in the least.  I had seen programs and apps which would take flat text and convert it to mobi or epub, but the details I craved, like hyperlinking, still required other measures.  But I have a limited attention span when it comes to such things. . . more like an impatience. . . so what was I to do?  I considered it a hurdle I would have to cross.  Where to turn?  Was there to be no “magic bullet”?

Enter the Scrivener program, from Literature and Latte.  I found out about it during that worried fit of research, and I’m here to tell you, it was like a godsend.  One of the best parts was, for a good bit of time, it is actually free!  Here’s the blurb from their own website:

“The trial runs for 30 days of actual use: if you use it every day it lasts 30 days; if you use it only two days a week, it lasts fifteen weeks. Before the trial expires, you can export all of your work or buy a licence to continue using Scrivener.”

And here’s another cool thing about it: although there is a rough tonnage of things you can learn about the features of the program, there isn’t really all that much you really need to know in order to churn out a mobi or epub ebook, complete with my coveted hyperlinked TOC!

When you first open the program, and select the “Fiction” category followed by the “Novel” template, there will be a tab in the upper lefthand corner titled “Novel Format.”  Take the ten or so minutes to read and digest that, and you have basically everything you need (except for text and talent) to get yourself well underway.

At $45 US to own outright, it’s not the world’s cheapest bit of software, nor is it the world’s most expensive.  But, for what it does for you as a hopeful indie author and publisher. . . for all that it can do, this program is to ebook formatting what Mr. Cubbon’s video is to Kindle uploading.  It makes things just that drop-dead simple, and the results are spot-on.  There are things I am still learning (it’s nearly as limitless as the game of chess), but all you need to get yourself up and running are right there on that one screenful of primary instruction.

With the guidance of video content such as Rob Cubbon, and the ease, convenience and near-perfection of tools such as Scrivener, there is, in my inexperience and my humbled opinion, no better era in which to enter into the world of self-published ebooks.

More Scrivener goodness to follow. . . .