Preparing a manuscript that typesets cleanly
You spent an evening on the chapter titles. Centered, 16 point, bold, a little extra space above, a page break before each one. None of it survives.
That sounds like wasted work, and it is — but not for the reason most authors assume. A typesetter throws away your visual decisions because it is about to make better ones, against a fixed trim size, on a real page. What it cannot re-make is what you meant. Bold 16-point text and a chapter title look identical in a word processor. Only one of them tells the machine that a chapter starts here.
So the job of a manuscript is not to look like a book. It is to carry structure a machine can read.
The short list of what survives an import is worth memorizing, because it is shorter than most authors expect: where each chapter begins, where each scene breaks, which words are italic, which are bold, and the order of the paragraphs. That is close to everything a novel needs. Type size, line spacing, margins, alignment, indent depth, page breaks, the font you chose — all of it is re-decided against a real trim size, and all of it is discarded on the way in.
Mark what a thing is, not what it should look like
Every item below is the same instruction applied to a different part of the file.
- Chapter starts are headings. Use your word processor's Heading 1 style, not bold text that happens to be big. A heading is a declaration; big bold text is a guess.
- Body text is one paragraph style. Not three near-identical ones you built at different times. One style, applied to every paragraph of prose in the book.
- Never indent with tabs or spaces. The first-line indent belongs to the style, and the typesetter will set it in points against the measure. Tabs arrive as stray characters in the middle of a typeset line.
- Never create space with empty paragraphs. Four returns to push a chapter down the page is four empty paragraphs, and on a re-flowed page they land wherever they land.
- Use a real page break. One page break, not twenty returns. Same reason.
- Italic for emphasis, never underline. Underline is a typewriter's way of asking for italic. Ask for italic.
- Proper quotation marks and a real em dash. Curly quotes, and an em dash rather than two hyphens. A typeset page shows the difference immediately.
Nothing here is about taste. Each one is the difference between an instruction that can be carried across into a book and a piece of decoration that cannot.
The four things that actually break an import
These are the ones that cost authors an afternoon.
Manual line breaks inside paragraphs. Shift+Enter looks like a new line and is not a new paragraph. Writers use it to control where dialog wraps, or to hold a line of verse. On import, one paragraph arrives looking like several — or several arrive fused into one — and the indents go wrong for the rest of the chapter.
Text boxes, columns and floating images. These have no equivalent on a typeset page. A book page is a single column of set type with figures anchored to it. Anything floating in a word processor is floating relative to a page that will not exist once the book is set to its real trim.
Tracked changes and comments left in the file. Accept or reject everything, delete the comments, then save. A file with revisions still live can import either version of a sentence, and the one it picks is not the one you meant.
Direct formatting layered over styles. Selecting text and pressing the buttons produces a paragraph that is Heading 1 and separately 14 point and separately centered. When those disagree — and across 90,000 words they will — the direct formatting wins, inconsistently. The repair is one pass with the style pane open: set every chapter title to Heading 1, every prose paragraph to your body style, then clear direct formatting on the lot.
In the Interior Formatter. It reads your .docx and keeps only the structure — chapter starts, italics, bold, scene breaks — then sets the book itself. It finds chapter starts even in files with no styles at all, including titles that are just bold 16-point text, and it shows you its guesses so you can correct them. Start a book → · about the Interior Formatter
The pre-flight pass
Twenty minutes before you export, run these four checks over the whole file.
One scene-break marker, used everywhere. Pick one — ***, or #, or a blank line you have been consistent about — and make every break in the book identical. Mixed markers read as three different things and get treated as three different things. See Chapter openings and scene breaks.
No double spaces after periods. Find and replace two spaces with one, and run it twice. Justified type stretches word spaces to fill the line; a doubled space stretches to twice the hole.
Straight quotes converted. Turn on smart quotes and re-run the replace, then spot-check apostrophes at the start of a word — 'tis, '70s — which autocorrect turns the wrong way.
Save as .docx. Not a page-layout format, not PDF, not RTF. Page-layout files describe pages; .docx describes a document, and a document is what a typesetter needs.
In the Interior Formatter. Scene breaks come through as breaks, not as blank lines — even six empty paragraphs used as a divider — and you choose the mark that prints in their place from a library of more than fifty ornaments, picked genre-first. Start a book → · about the Interior Formatter
The sanity check
Strip your manuscript to plain text with the headings intact. No fonts, no sizes, no centering, no page breaks — just the words, and a marker saying where each chapter begins and where each scene breaks.
Is it still the book?
If yes, it will typeset, because everything you lost was something the typesetter was going to decide anyway, and everything that mattered came through. If no — if a line only works because of where it sat on the page, or a section only reads as separate because of the space above it — that is the part to fix now, in the manuscript, rather than after the import when you are looking at a page that came out wrong and cannot tell why.
Make yours
Everything here is built into the tools, and they are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Chapter openings and scene breaks · Also: How to format a book interior · Images inside a book