Book design: Under Shōko's Bed

Scrivener has a “compile” function that takes all the hundreds of brief documents you’ve written, all your scenes, and strings them together into a novel with chapters and section numbers and everything. It has some impressive formatting capabilities if you’re willing to go to the trouble of learning how to use them—and it is trouble, a lot. But what do you do when your fancy word processing software hyphenates the word wanting after the I instead of the T? How can you fix something that fundamentally broken?

I obviously could not trust Scrivener to format my novel for publication. Its compiler is fine for printing out drafts for editing, but that’s about it. The tool to use for page layout is InDesign from Adobe. I have Adobe’s Creative Cloud, because I use Illustrator and Photoshop, and I had experimented with InDesign. I wasn’t confident enough, however, to format a novel. I did not even know what rules to follow in formatting.

And I like rules. They’re good to have, even if you break them. (But don’t break the ones for hyphenation.)

I needed a book designer. I wanted a beautiful book, even if it made the likelihood of a profit an even further reach. So I asked my cover designer for a recommendation, and she pointed me to Karen Minster. I have been working with Karen since late last year on the layout of Under Shōko’s Bed.

I had hoped to learn enough in working with Karen that I could format a future novel on my own. (I can’t keep paying all the costs of hiring others to prep my books for publication. I don’t have the resources.) And I learned a lot. I can now format ellipses so they look like they do in The Chicago Manual of Style. I learned the two pages that make a spread should be the same number of lines on the page (unless one ends a chapter or section.) But I wish I had learned everything.

One of the minor inconveniences for Karen was that English word processors don’t know where to hyphenate Japanese words. So I went through the manuscript and checked the end of every line. It sounds like a pain, but it goes quickly. Then I gave Karen the syllable breaks, and she chose where to hyphenate.

A more major inconvenience was that I still cannot read through the manuscript without flaws jumping out at me. In reading to check on the formatting, I made edits. It went on longer than it should have. But Karen was patient with me. I don’t know if she cut me some slack because she knew it was my first time doing this or if she is simply that way with everyone.

Karen has now completed her work. It looks great. Now all I have to do is upload it, along with my cover art, to a print-on-demand service and I will have a book for sale.