I finally have a good PDF of Starstrikers. At least it’s formatted correctly. There are still errors here and there. Every time I get a few of them squashed I will do another upload and there will be another version number under the copyright. If you purchased a low version number – they started at v2007-001 and are up to only v2007-003 at this time, you can expect to see more errors.
Since I cannot afford to hire a professional editor, the book will be in a constant state of upgrade. I would like to have a better back cover design. I’m pretty happy with how the front cover came out.
Here are some formatting lessons I had to learn the hard way. Unfortunately, the only program that I was able to use was Microsoft Word 2003. After downloading the template for 6×9 novels, I cut and pasted the entire novel into the template from the RTF formatted output of my CopyWrite editor.
Then I created page breaks at the end of each chapter, starting a new chapter on a fresh page. I gave the chapter titles a bolder font. If the main text was set to 12pt I used 24 pt for the chapter titles. I also used 24pt for the first letter in the chapter’s first paragraph. I also went to the File -> Page Setup menu and selected the Layout tab where I made sure I checked the Different Odd and Even and Different First Page options. This is all standard novel formatting .
In order to fake out Word and not have it format my title page, copyright page and dedication with a header and footer, I created those in a separate document that was not using the template, but had the same 6×9 page size. Then I cut those pages out and pasted them at the start of my Prologue. This seemed to work. Don’t ask me why. I may be able to do this all in Open Office, and if I am, I will try that next. I hate having to go out to the radio shack and fire up my Windows box just to use it for formatting my novels.