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Formatting for Lulu.com

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.

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