Industry Standard: NO TABS

In the publishing world, the tab button on your keyboard is evil, particularly to a book formatter. Book publishing formatters would love nothing more than to remove every tab button from every keyboard in existence. Why? Because they have to remove every single tab you put in your manuscript. You know whenever you start a new paragraph and hit tab? They have to remove it. Every. One. Commit to never using the tab button again, and you will make your publisher very happy. And happy publishers keep signing your books. 

"Why? Pray, tell, are they so evil?" You might wonder. Because indentations are used in publishing, not tabs. The tab button gives you no choice on how large you want it to be. Worse yet, when making changes on an entire page, or the entire manuscript, they don't register as indents, which means the spaces you created with them can be lost. Simply put, tabs are a formatting nightmare. 

"But then, how do I indent my paragraphs?" Ah, I'm glad you asked. Indent is the keyword in your question. Click on the "Home" button on the top of your manuscript in Word, then click on the expand arrow in the "Paragraph" group. In the pop-up box: The second section down is titled "Indentation". It is here you'll need to set your indentation. "Left" and "Right" should be at "0". "Special" should be on "First Line", and "By" can be anywhere from .25 to .5. The distance is up to you. This doesn't matter so much to us because once you have set indentation and use them instead of tabs, they are easy for our formatters to change should we need to. On the other hand (as we discussed above) tabs are not easy to change. 

BONUS: Since we're in here, under the "Spacing" section make sure "Before" and "After" are both set at "0" and make sure the box is checked for "Don't add space between paragraphs of the same style". 

Accepting & Rejecting Changes In Track Changes for Word

When working with an editor, it is vital that you know how to use Word's Track Changes feature. It is an industry standard you will want to get comfortable with if you intend to publish traditionally. This is a follow up post to my Word's Track Changes Basic Tutorial. Today we're covering accepting and rejecting changes. 

When you receive your edited manuscript from your editor, open it in Word and double check to make sure it is showing all changes (see the post above). As long as "All Markup" is chosen, you will see suggested deletions and additions as line edits in the manuscript, and comments from your editor in the right margin. If you don't see these changes that means "All Markup" isn't on and you need to refer to the post above to turn it on. 

You will need to accept or reject all changes. To do so, make sure you are on the "Review" tab (top of the page). Under the "Changes" group you will see "Accept" (marked with a green check mark) and "Reject" (marked with a red X) options. If you click the drop down arrow beside each, you'll see options for "Accept And Move to Next", "Accept This Change", "Accept All Changes", "Accept All Changes and Stop Tracking" (same type of options for "Reject"). Use the "Accept and Move to the Next" option. 

Anything new you add will show up in a different color text and be underlined (The color doesn't matter as long as it isn't black and is underlined. If it's black and not underlined, it means you don't have Track Changes on correctly.). It showing up underlined and in a color other than black means your editor will be able to go straight to the new additions via Track Changes and see them rather than having to slog through the entire manuscript again. If it isn't showing up underlined in a different color, do not manually underline it and change the color. Failure to show up as such means Track Changes is not on properly and must be turned on. 

The acceptions and rejections you make will "disappear" by turning into black text once again. For acceptions this is fine because these are changes you editor has suggested and approves of. If you are rejecting a word choice or addition they recommended, you may want to put a comment in the margins to let them know you rejected it and why, because the rejection will disappear and no longer be trackable. You don't need to tell your editor about every small thing you reject (unless you find yourself rejecting a lot), but if you are rejecting grammar changes they recommended, you'll want to talk to them about it.

Next time we'll talk about commenting.

Wednesday's Word

Continuing to build one's vocabular, and use it properly, are vital tools in an author's arsenal. With that in mind, I'm starting a Wednesday's Word post for both fun and vocabulary building. Today's word is:

Captious: tending to find fault or raise petty objections. 

Example: I'm not sure if you want to submit to that book reviewer. Their reviews tend to be very captious, picking at the tiniest flaws.