Howdy all. I have finally started putting pen to paper/finger to plastic and I found a template on Word called “Write a Novel”. It’s got tips on layout and formats a lot of it for you. I’m also aware of the fact that Microsoft may not keep up with publishing standards, so I wondered what folk here thought about it? Obviously I’m only asking folk that have used it or are keen enough to look it up on their copy of word. No one should make any special effort. I am certain I’ll have to change the format to a degree anyway, but I was curious about whether it was a reasonable starting point. Thanks for any help in advance.
I haven't come across it before, but I would simply say, if you're happy with it, use it. I simply created two styles - "novel" and "chapter" which format the body text and chapter headings respectively. Just that. The important thing is to get the story written. One of the great things about Word is that if you use a named style (built in or your own) it is easy to change later. The important thing is to get the story written. Did I mention the important thing?
Perhaps making it bold and italics would help. I’m no expert in formatting. Hence my question, I guess.
Making what bold or italics? As someone who writes in Word, I find myself wondering what a template for writing a book would be, or what it could possibly provide. Word has built-in styles for body text, multiple levels of heading, headers and footers. That's all you need to "format" a manuscript. If you are talking about doing actual interior formatting for printing, that's a different matter entirely. I have looked at a lot of book templates from the Internet, and IMHO they're all terrible. I do my own formatting.
I went looking. Is this template something you downloaded from the Microsoft web site? I found one that's six pages. It's a template for a manuscript, and it has some tips to help you approach writing a book without missing something important. That said -- it can't make you write any better. And I don't see any reason to change anything in the template, unless you will be submitting the finished manuscript to a publisher that has its own format for manuscript submissions. Is this it?
That’s the one. Thanks for the feedback and advice. The mention of bold and italics was a response to the previous poster. It was a joke about the emphasis on “important”.
I'm a little suprised the format isn't something that is optimized for HTML files, since many works are coverted to eReaders. Instead, it looks like it's just there to keep your writing records straight.
It's a template for a manuscript, for submission to an agent or to a publisher. It's not intended as a base for instant conversion to an e-book.
