#372: Publish with a Purpose: Should You Write in Your Formatting Tool?

Welcome to Kingdom Writers, where we help equip and empower Christian writers of all genres to share your unique gifts with the world. We're your hosts, C.J. and Shelley Hitz.

This podcast is filled with spiritual encouragement as well as prayers to help you overcome the resistance you face as a writer. Your story matters foreign.

Welcome back to the Kingdom Writers Podcast. My name is Shelly Hits, the owner and founder of ChristianBookAcademy.com and in this Published With a Purpose episode, I'm going to be talking about, you know, should you write in your formatting tool? And what I mean by this is should you type and write your first draft, your ugly, messy first draft, as well as having your self editing and the professional editing from the final draft stage in that same file? What I recommend from all my years of doing my own formatting, but also working with writers like yourself, is to separate the process. So like, if you, if you type and write in a software like Scrivener, you just may need to still write in Scrivener and then export a file later that your editor can use. But typically what I recommend is to write in a separate document because what can happen is your editor, a professional editor, is going to need access to, to your draft that you have, you know, you've written that first ugly, messy draft and then you've self edited the draft and now you're bringing it to a professional editor for the final touches, you know, for that final work of polishing it and getting it ready for publication. Most editors that I know prefer to work in Microsoft Word. And so if you ask them to edit your manuscript in a software like Atticus or vellum or Adobe InDesign, which Adobe InDesign is the gold standard in the publishing industry. It's, you know, a monthly fee, it can be expensive, but you can sign up for it and cancel it after your formatting is done if needed. However, it is a lot more complicated to learn and we do have tutorials on how to format your book in many different formats in ChristianBookAcademy.com so if you want to learn this, we have those tutorials there for you in our tech library and then you can also format in Microsoft Word. So in Christian Book Academy we have a template for you to format for print, a Word template for ebooks, and we give you the training on how to do that. So if you already own Microsoft Word, you can literally learn how to format your books basically for free, right? And so you're able to do that. However, again, you need to know, like Most editors prefer Microsoft Word. They just have so many options related to tracking changes and giving comments and updates. And so if you are using another tool, you may have to export it or you may have to, you know, somehow get it into Microsoft Word for your editor. And so in my opinion, it's just easier and simpler just to write it in Microsoft Word from the beginning. Now I do use Google Docs a lot of times now to write my books, but it's really easy to select all and copy and then paste that into a Word document, right? So if you're in Pages or if you're something else, you can always do that as well and be able to work with your editor that way. I will say I did have one editor that worked with me in Google Docs and the, the process wasn't quite as smooth. There were some, you know, different things we had to figure out with it. But that is possible. You know, you can add comments and different things, but it's not, not quite the same and not quite as easy as getting a professional editor to track those changes in Microsoft Word. And then I did have an editor once work with me in Adobe InDesign. It was my art book, brush lettering workbook. And to be honest, I got the cart ahead of the horse. I was so excited about the book, I totally forgot to have all the text and edited before we formatted it in Adobe InDesign. So I found an editor that was willing to edit my file in Adobe InDesign. It was clunky. We both had to learn some things. I would not recommend it, but for this particular project it was just the easier way to do it at that point. And so if you have the choice and if you can think, think about it ahead of time, I just recommend in whatever word processing software you're using, maybe it is Word, maybe it's Google Docs, maybe it's Pages, maybe it's something else. Write out your manuscript in that file. Have yourself, you know, just get that ugly, messy first draft out of your head onto paper, then go through the process of self editing. We have a step by step process that we teach you in Christian Book Academy. It's in the final draft module. And then you can go to the, the next step of hiring your professional editor and that editor can then let you know what is their system, what is their process? I will tell you, most editors that I know still use Microsoft Word. But you, you can communicate with them, find out like what their process is, what kind of file they want to work in. And once you have the final, final draft. So you've, you've done all the editing, you've, you know, tracked all the changes, you've, you know, made all of the recommended changes from your editor and then you've added your different, you know, references and images and all the things. Then you can work on copying and pasting it in to whatever formatting tool you're using. Now some of you might say, well, Shelly, I'm using the Word templates that you've given us and so why can't I just do all of this in those templates and just be done with it? Well, Microsoft Word has something called hidden formatting. And so what happens is if you're writing in this and then you're self editing it and then you have a professional editor come in and you're tracking changes and there's just a lot of stuff going on. There can be hidden formatting that gets stuck in your document. And we actually just had a Christian Book Academy member wrestling with this technology, trying to get her proof to look correctly on IngramSpark. And I, I'm 99.9% sure that it was because there was hidden formatting. So what you can do then is take that final, final draft that you have here in Microsoft Word, take a clean version of the Microsoft template for the books. So make sure you haven't used it before. You haven't like, you know, copied and pasted from something else, but it's a clean version. And then you transfer, you copy and paste your manuscript into that clean version and you remove all the formatting. So you just, you, you paste it as just plain text. That, and then you are going to have to do a little work of adding back in, you know, any bullets or bold or whatever. But you can just have, you know, your other one up and you can, you can see what you're doing. And this is going to save you a lot of headaches in the long run. I know it does seem like an extra step, but if you're using something like Atticus or Vellum or Even, you know, InDesign or some other formatting tool, there are so many out there now. Amazon also has their own formatting tool form for KDP eBooks. It's Kindle Create. Like there's so many options and we have tutorials for almost all of these options in Christian Book Academy. I mean, did you know you can actually use Microsoft PowerPoint to format books? It's actually a great option for full color books and we have a training on this in our tech library. As well. But I digress. So, you know, if you're using some of these other formatting tools, they, they may not have the issue with the hidden formatting that Word has. So I mean, it might be easier to copy and paste into those. I don't know. I haven't used all of them, so I can't tell you for sure. But I will tell you that doing it this way, so doing all the writing and the self editing and the professional editing in one document, having everything there, having that final draft and then copying it cleanly into your template or into your formatting tool is going to most likely give you the best results. Again, you, you do you, you know, if you have a system that is working for you and great, you know, that's great, maybe you have an editor that will work with you in Scrivener or in another kind of software and it's working out. So I mean, you can choose what works best for you. I just wanted to share with you some ideas and things to consider. The two biggest reasons I recommend writing and editing your manuscript in a separate file in a separate document than you do the formatting. Those two reasons are, number one, you typically will need to be working with a professional editor. I recommend that we all have editors, we all hire editors. Even if you are an editor yourself, even if you are a great proofreader and you can catch a lot of things. So, so number one, most editors will want to work in Microsoft Word and they'll want to track the changes, do all the things. So if you're working in a separate tool, that's going to, you know, it's, it's going to be a little bit confusing both for you and potentially even your editor. And so it's just easier when you're working with a professional editor to, to give them your draft of that manuscript in Microsoft Word. Number two is because if you are going to format your book in Microsoft wor, or maybe even somewhere else, there can be all kinds of hidden formatting that Microsoft Word, you know, embeds into your manuscript. And so if you just do everything in a separate file on a separate document, then you can get a really clean version to import into either your template in Microsoft Word or into another software later. Whew. That was a lot, right? Formatting can feel scary, but I want to tell you, you can do this. And if you want, hire someone like me. Like, I personally don't enjoy the formatting. I'm not a perfectionist. And so trying to figure out all these things and If I get errors or if something happens, it stresses me out. So for me, it's worth it now to just hire someone and have somebody else do all of that for me. We've got you covered as well in ChristianBookAcademy.com you can join today and we also have recommendations on who you can hire. And in our Self publish module, if you're the do it yourself type person and you want to learn this, this is a great way for you to save money when you're self publishing your book. And so we provide all sorts of tutorials for you on all the different tools that you can use to format your book in the tech library in Christian Book Academy. So we'd love to have you join us. Come join us at ChristianBookAcademy.com and our private group is amazing. We're we have so many wonderful people in there that are willing to jump in and help you out. I will tell you, I don't do my own formatting anymore, so I'm not an expert in this, but several of our mentors on our mentoring team are. So they are in there and they're willing to help you and problem solve with you as well. But I hope that you found this episode helpful that it got you just thinking through a few things on why it might be wise to do all of your first draft and even into your final final draft in a separate file in Microsoft Word or in whatever you're using and then transfer things over. I will talk to you in the next episode and I pray that you have a blessed day. Would you like more? If you are enjoying this podcast but want more, I have something exciting to share with you. We have released what's called a private podcast. So a private podcast you will not find by searching an apple. You have to know specific how to subscribe to it. It's more private and exclusive and it just can be more relaxed behind the scenes. And my new private podcast is called Hits Blitz and it's wisdom for writers that you're going to learn from my 18 plus years of experience in publishing and online marketing so that you can move forward in God's call to write. I am best known for injecting energy and enthusiasm into everything I do and inspiring those around me to take action. So I encourage you to listen in to this exclusive private podcast. It is free, 100% free. You don't have to pay for it. And be prepared to be inspired by my next Hits Blitz so you can sign up@trainingauthors.com hits blitz and if you have any other writing friends that you think could benefit from it, definitely share it with them. They can go to the Same link training authors.com forward/hits blitz to get access Again this is a private podcast so you cannot get access to it any other way. It's completely free. All you have to do is sign up and then you'll get all the information on how to add it to your podcast player of choice. So I can't wait for you to join me over there. I share a lot of things behind the scenes and more content just in a real time basis. So it's more like chatting with a friend or following someone on stories on social media. Except you don't have to get caught up in any of the algorithms. You'll just have this in your podcast player and be able to listen in wherever you're at, whatever you're doing. Some of the listeners told me this week that they were listening while waiting in the Target parking lot, while brushing their teeth. You can fit this into the pockets of time that you have, so I hope you'll join me. Come over to trainingauthors.com hitsblitz.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Kingdom Writers. We believe that you, as a Christian writer, have a specific role to play in the Kingdom of Heaven to impact lives for eternity.

And because of this, we choose to pour out our lives into encouraging writers like you to not only tell your stories, but to take the courageous step of self publishing your stories in books that will outlive you and leave behind a powerful legacy. This podcast is sponsored by Christian Book Academy, where we help you give birth to to your books. We invite you to join our community of Kingdom Writers.