Starting and Finishing your Book – 31:00 Minutes Verbatim Transcript

(Note: as I speak, not as I write)

KEYWORDS: book, documents, finish, heading, writing, change, set, font, read, typing, module, size, spaces, people, story, paragraph, splitting, manuscript, section, italics

Hi, and welcome. Thank you very much for joining me.

Welcome to Module Two, starting and finishing your book. In Module One, we looked at targeting your audience. So we looked at choosing, planning, structuring your book. And now, in Module Two, we’re going to touch on starting and finishing your book, and everything that’s in between that. So finishing your draft manuscript up to when you hold the full draft manuscript, which is ready now to go for editing and looking at by other people. Okay, this is the work that you do yourself. So when I did my survey, asking people what they wanted to see, the first bit was around targeting the audience. The second bit was about starting and finishing, how do I start the book? How do I finish? How do I know I’ve done enough. And then the third part was about selling and diversifying.

Today, we are looking at the second part; Starting and finishing your book, formatting, editing, and proofreading your manuscript. That’s what we’re going to look at. I’m trying to make this as succinct and short as possible. I’m not going to really deep details, I do that in my other course, which you can find on the website if you want to look at it. But for this one, I am just going to take you through the top basics of what you need. So looking at the first point, how do I start, as I said in the previous module, and I’m gonna say it again, the best way to start is just to start. So you have decided in Module One, you’ve already decided, what you want to write about you, you’ve already decided what type of book you feel, you can write and bear in mind that it’s working, work in progress. And until you completely finished the book, you’re not really knowing exactly what it comes out, like because your story has to flow out of you, then you have to turn it into a masterpiece. So don’t be too hard on yourself thinking you already have to know everything. It’s just like driving, when you’re going to go somewhere. You start by the first turn and then the next turn. And then the next turn, you don’t see where you’re going, but you have an idea in your mind where you need to go. If because I’m in the UK right now, if I need to get to London, I know which corners to turn. But I don’t I can’t see what’s in London right now I can see this traffic, I can’t see I can’t see it, I can’t see the roadworks but at least I know that there is the rough direction of where I’m going. And it’s the same thing as the same thing, as with the book.

So you know, the subject that you’re writing about, you know, this, the type of book that you’re writing, and then you start let me talk about two ways in which you can write your book. There are two different types of people, people that like typing, and you can just stop and start typing on your computer. The other group of people, you record, you record yourself the way I’m recording myself right now. And then once you’ve recorded, you transcribe and work with your transcription, to turn it into a book. But whichever one of the two structures you need, eventually, you will come to a point where you need to use computer software.  The best software to use for setting up books is the same software that I use for work the same software that you use for anything else. And so I’m going to talk to you about Microsoft Office, Microsoft Word. Because within Word, if you learn how to study a book, how to set things up how to use it an at an advanced level, it will not only help you with your book, but it will help you with everything else that you do in your life as well. There’s no point in getting a specialized software that you will even struggle to learn how to use and then after you finished you didn’t use it for anything else when you paid a lot of money for it. Okay, so first things first. Let’s start with the document.

So I am now going to share my screen with you so that I can take you through a basic wave document. So I have a word documents open here. And you can see it’s a very basic word document so it could have even been a blank document, it could have been a document that has nothing on it. The first thing that I’m going to do is I’m going to set it up with the styles that I want to use. Okay, so to set it up with a style that I want to use, first and foremost, you need a little bit of text on it. So just type something, just put something on there. And then you can go from there. A lot of people know how to use Word for basic writing. But what they don’t know is this so much else that you can do. All these things that you see here, titles here, all these tools that you have here, you can use them. And for me, the most important tool in here is this little guy here, the show and hide.

What this helps you to do is it helps you to see where you have pressed buttons on your keyboard. So if I switch it on, I call it a non-printing character because it doesn’t print even if you can see it on the screen, it just tells me to say there, I used the enter the return key. And if I use spaces, it will tell me that I’ve used spaces. If I use the tab key, it will tell me that I’ve used the tab key. So this is very, very good for you for your book as you go along. And it will teach you where you are making mistakes where you’re going wrong in your book. Anyway, let’s start for now I’m going to switch it off because it might be deflecting from what you want to see.

We have the title here of the book. So you can have a working title for your book, the final title, you come up with it, once you finish writing the book. So in styles, here, you can change the type of style that you want to use for your book. So for this, I just want it to be a title. And there you go. All I have by a click of a button, that title has changed, I can make that title go bigger, and I can make it go smaller, I can bring it in the middle, change the font of it to something else. Okay, that’s fairly straightforward. You know how to do that. And that’s fairly straightforward. So we’re going to move on now to the main document. So this is something I did a long time ago, which I’ve just show you how you can set up your book. So think about it, if you had a page, within written within your book, just start typing, and then start thinking, thinking about the headings that you can have in your book. So the good thing with when you’re setting up the book is you can go to the layout. And already, you can change the size of the paper that you want to use for your book. So for the UK, your standard size is either is A4 normally, so A4 very wide.

As you can see now, it’s on a4. But if I want to know exactly how many pages I will have in my book, there is only to keep it on a4 because I can change into any of these sizes. Or I can change to the book size. Some of the most common book sizes, especially like in my business, the book sizes that we use the most are for novel size, which is a smaller size, it’s five by eight, five inches by eight inches. The larger size for normal size books, which is mostly a standard size that you find in a lot of books in the UK in the US and other countries as well. And they fit very well on the bookshelf, the size is six by nine inches. Now six by nine inches. I’ve written it down him in centimetres, it’s 15.24 by 22.86. And in millimetres, which is what you can use if you want to use millimetres, it’s 154 by 229.

So let’s change our book to that size to the six by nine. So I’m going to go here to more paper sizes. And then I’m going to type here. So the size is the width of the book that I want, which is the smaller bits. So the width of the book is going to be 15.24. Okay, and then here, on the book’s height, I’m going to have 22.86. There we go. So we have that. And that’s our book size, and everything within our book will change. The other thing that’s important to do beforehand is changing your margins. So this is normal. And I’m not going to take you through the book margins right now. But normal is basically okay to work with. If you want it to be moderate, you can change it to moderate because most of the books will end up being on the moderate side anyway, not so much in the normal. Otherwise, all the text will be too much in the middle, because of the size of the book. So now that we’ve got our size set, just going to make that a little bigger so that it can be you can, you can see a little bit more. And then I’m going to go to the first paragraph.

So you’ve written a few words. And you can see like here, this is exactly what I was talking about. Because like here, you can see that the distance between the first paragraph and the second paragraph is very big. And then there, the distance is very small. If you see this, you can tell. But sometimes you might not be able to tell, and you just want to see what’s happening there. So you switch on your non-printing character, there we go, I press the return key, so I have too much space there. And I don’t want If anything when you’re writing a book, don’t put manual spaces, because you can set up the spacing as you go, making life easier for you. And it will certainly make life easier for anybody who’s helping you. So we have now the text in there. So I already have that in heading one, I’ll just take out the heading one and then see. So that’s my text as I have it, the first thing I want to do is go into design. So when I click on a design, I can pick any designs that I want and change. They’re already set designs, but also the beauty is you don’t have to pick those designs because you can just go here and change the font so that it’s too one that you like using. So for typing most of the times for books, I like using Cambria because I think the text for a book for Cambria looks very good. So to me anyway, does look very good. So I like using Cambria.

You see the font has changed on everything, including here, you can now come back to the main documents here. And then you can set up your headings. So because this is a book, we’ll have heading one will be the sections. So always try to reserve heading one and start at Heading Two, because it will make it easier for you. So let’s just quickly go back into the design here so that I can change the colours here. Because I don’t want the red and whatever I want it to be grayscale. So everything I want it to be black and white. If you want to increase the size to 11, you can do it in the fonts, or you can do it as you go. So we’re going to leave it at a very where it is at the moment. And we’re just going to change. So for heading one, what I want is if I make this affirmation here as heading one, and then I want to have a subheading as well for each of these. So if I click on Heading one, it becomes grey. And then I don’t like the green colour. I like the fact that it’s 18 slightly bigger, which is fine, but I want to change it. So I’ll just simply highlight it and change it to black. And now I want it to be on the right side of the screen. So that’s my heading, and I want it to be bold. Now, this will not change any other heading in my book. So for me to set it up so that it appears like that in all of that in the rest of the document. I will have to go and set it up on here. So I go on where the heading is and right-click, and then our updates. Everything to match the selection. So which means anywhere else in the document where there’s heading one that will change to black.

So let’s change now heading two. So if I wanted to make this one now heading two, there’s a different way that I can do that. So I just have to go in there and directly click right click on there, and they’ll say modify. I can change the colour there. Black automatic. And the font is already 16 by Hang on, I just want it to be. I want you to be in italics. So I change it that way. And I click at the bottom here, I click automatic update, it means everywhere, where is that heading, Heading two, it will change. So when I pick up here, that’s my heading two. That’s how it appears. So heading three will be different. If I want to pick again, three, and I just want to leave it as it is. I’ll go on like that. And as you can see that there are all these headings, you can go up to heading, whatever number you want to choose. But my advice is stick to the first three in your book. For the chapter for the parts of the book, part one, you use heading one, chapter one you use heading to, for any subsections within the book, you can use heading three, don’t worry about having it justify that it looks nice. The reason to leave it as it is because it will tell you, if you leave it left-aligned, it will tell you when you have any spaces that you need to take out in your document. Okay.

So if I decided then that I was going to have a quote, if I decide that for inherent in the styles, you already have quotes set for you. So you will not see intense quotes on there. But no, I just want the normal quote, which is there. Again, I can change if I wanted to be in italics and the same way that I did for the first one. But equally, I can also just change it to be an emphasis. So this is roughly how you set up your document. And once you’ve set up your documents, all you have to do is to start typing and start going with your documents. And you will find that if you go to letter B there and you decide, okay, that’s heading one, all you have to do is go and add a heading one, heading one, and it will change. And then if you decide that that’s going to be heading two, you just go there and click on heading to you don’t have to keep changing it all the time. And if I decide that I want that to be a quote. Then again, I can just go down and look for my quotes where there is an intense quote, let’s try that. That’s massive. Yeah, I don’t like the size of that. If I need to change that intense quote, let’s just change the port, go there, I can go. Okay, I wanted to be in italics. And I also wanted to have a line above and another line underneath.

Because that’s the one I want. That’s the way I want to have it. And I also want it to be centred. So I can do that. And then I can reduce the font so that it’s nice and neat and small. And I can have it that way. So which means once I’ve made it that way. And I go back to here and update the style, everywhere where I pick that it will just change automatically to be the way I want it to be. Okay, brilliant. So this is basically how you set up your documents and from them. Now you start typing. Remember, if you finish typing a paragraph, try not to use your space to keep moving like this. So you see those dots there, that’s wrong. Don’t do that. Don’t keep going. What you need to do, I’ll delete that. What you need to do is when you finish your paragraph, that’s the only time you can use the enter button. If you have not finished your paragraph, just keep typing. And when you get to the end, it will come it will wrap, and it will come to them to the next line that you need to be to type on. Only use those if you need to end the paragraph because it will help you a lot. And you go through the documents and remove all the funny spaces that are there. That’s how you change your book. So that’s how you start your book. So you see nowhere you can see that both of these are heading one. I want to change that to be a heading two because I don’t want it to be hitting one. There you go. Very easy. Okay. So thanks for that. I will stop now sharing my screen

Right Okay, so now we’ve talked about setting up Your documents from now, then you start typing, you Type and Type and Type until you’re finished. I have learnt that the best way of checking your manuscript is not to try and correct the errors as you go. Because when you’re telling a story, you don’t tell a story and correct yourself. You want everything you want to braindump, you want to put everything on paper, and then you can go back and start making changes. So make sure you’ve written the whole story or at least 90% of the story. You can read it through, go back, give yourself a break after you finish, you think, okay, now I’ve told my story, until we’re finished, then go back and listen to it once. Once you’ve listened to it, or read it through by listening to it. Because I’m, I’ve got dyslexia. So I listen to audios a lot. So but for you, it might be because you want to read or because you want to print it out and put lines and whatever.

First and foremost, read it as it is to see where you may have, how the story sounds. Also, to see where you may need to add a bit more information or things that are not relevant. Once you finished that stage, that’s when now you come back with what I call a pen-to-go-through. Now, it’s time to start moving things around. Because when you’re telling a story, for example, if your story is about your own autobiography, something happened to you in the 1990s. When you were young, then something else happened, which was similar in the 2000s, you’re not going to start telling that the 1980s story and then say, oh, I’ll go and tell the 2000 story. And then I’ll come back to this one. You talk about how things happened. For instance, I travelled from Zambia to the UK in 2001. And I left my children in Zambia. Later on, somebody had to bring them to me so that they can come and live with me. And then my first child finished primary school, and then the second child finished primary school. And then this happened. What you hear there is me telling my story. But what there are two things that you hear the two, there are things about when my children went to school, and then there’s a lot of, and then and then and then we all have those words that we use a lot. It could be so it could be due it could be and then like me, or any other words some people is that. That’s okay if it comes through in your writing for the first draft because what you’re going to do is trying to cut those and make sure that your sentences are not too long.

And also you start splitting the paragraphs is that’s splitting is splitting the parts of your book. That is when you’re going to take similar stories, even if they were told at a different time in your book, you’re now going to copy-paste and go and put them in the right section. So you have similar themes in your book. Those themes are the ones that are going to become the parts of your book. So if it’s a bad one, but two, part three, Part Four, then you’re going to have once you’ve had those parts of your book, within those parts, if the first story is talking about one specific thing, right, like child number one went to school. Let’s go child, number one, Mary. Mary started school. And then when Mary started school, she was having difficulties with the teacher. Then years later, Jane started school as well. But Jane had different things. She wasn’t very much interested in school, so she was interested in something else. So those two stories are talking about children and school at different times of their lives.

So they’ll come together as the theme, which is a school theme. But within that, the chapter will be Mary’s chapter. Maybe we’ll be chapter one within that part. And then the second chapter will be Jane’s chapter and then anything else that comes on within that section. But then let’s go back to the marriage section with the marriage section. When Mary started going to school, and then you had to bring in somebody to help her with reading and writing. So the subheading there becomes Mary learning how to read and write properly. And then ‘Mary improving the writing’ and then Mary playing netball. So those are three different. Within the chapter that’s married, you have three different sections with which I have subheadings. I’m sure you get the gist of what I’m talking about. But that’s how you start splitting your book. Roughly, there’s no set number in terms of how much you write. Most books end up being around anything between maybe 120 pages to 200 pages, that will be an okay book. Before people used to write really big books, you’d read a very thick book. But what you have to remember now is your book is competing with people that have got no time that are always on the internet, they’re always on social media. So they want to pick up a book and read it and finish it or read it for a short time, they don’t want to spend years reading one book. So what you have to remember is make your book, one that will be easy to read, make your book that that will be easy to finish.

So I normally suggest under 200 pages, if you can get it down to 150 pages at six by nine, that’s already a quite a chunky book, and that will be fine. But when you start and where you finish, is when you’ve told your story in full. And you feel like there’s no more to add one. And you feel like the story has a good enough flow. So you included everything that you wanted to include, you might include everything and then find that the book is too big, which is okay because then you can have two books. But you may also find that you’ve written your story, and then it’s just 50 pages, you can choose to have a smaller book size. Or you can choose, to add more sections, you can choose to add more teaching, you can choose to, there’s a lot that you can do. But there’s no set way of saying the prescription is like this, you have to have so many pages, and then you have to have to do this. And then you have to have to do this. It’s all with you. It starts with you, and it ends with you. Once you finish that, splitting a book into sections, that will not be the last bit. Again, every time you read through, you’ll find that there are things you need to move around the things that you need to remove, there are things that you need to add. What I would suggest is every time you do that, when you change anything, leave it for a bit and read through until you get to a point where you think Yep, I think I’ve got everything in order, then. And only then do you start now looking out for those typos, grammatical mistakes that you may have.

Word has an inbuilt editor that you can use. But also, MS Word also has other plugins that you can put in. Personally, I like using the word editor. And then I use the Grammarly editor because that gives me two levels of editing my book of changing my spellings even the sentence structure, it does help you to change the sentence structure as well. So when you use Grammarly, especially if you’re using the premium one, which I use, that’s very helpful to help you to adjust your text, but no machine is perfect. So even if, it will ask you to change something and then it will ask you to change it again. So eventually you will need to do that work yourself to make sure that you’ve gone through. The best way that I do that is to listen to myself. Read Aloud, you get the plugin, put it in your documents, and then it will read aloud to you. That way, at least you’re listening to your voice, and you’re listening when you don’t sound very good, then you can adjust it.

When you finish that it’s time to call in the other people to help us. And that is what we are going to cover in Module Three, together with how you set up your covers, how you give it to proofreaders professional editors, using your peers and things like that. We’ll cover that in Module Three. So thank you very much. This has been quite a long session, but I just wanted to make sure that I’ve covered everything that you needed to know in this section. If you have any questions, let me know. And I’ll be more than happy to answer the questions.

If you send me an email and I don’t reply straight away, sometimes I get a lot of emails, and because I get a lot of emails, I try to group the answers and then I’ll send an email out to everybody so that I can answer everybody’s question. So thank you very much for your time. Start writing that book because this is the best time there will never be a better time for you to start writing. Don’t put off what you can do today, for tomorrow.

Take care.

Thank you very much.

Bye