Novel Support

Plugging in...

Not novel as in original and of a kind not seen before, but novel as in hard cover book, not ebook, not audiobook, just plain, ordinary book! A client, who is also a published author, was in need of some stitch-witchery. The sixteen chapters of the book were typed into individual Word documents, but paginated as though they were already combined.

Word has a nice feature which allows the insertion of one file within another. Do once, and repeat fifteen times. But for the one glitch... three individual pages that required inserting at three different locations, but without page numbers. Word again, to the rescue. Word has another useful feature referred to as section breaks, which allows for different headers and footers to repeat on different pages. Stop page numbering, insert breaks, start page numbering, repeat two additional times. Proofread, proofread, proofread.

Last but not least, the agent required the book to be in PDF (portable document format) form. Word 2003, the version the client was using, does not have the ability to save as a PDF (Word 2007 and 2010 do). One more trick, find and download a free PDF creator, save the Word document as a PDF, and email the PDF attachment to the agent. The Tutor chose the free version of Nitro PDF reader because it's small, easy to use, and less prone to assault by computer hackers than the free Adobe PDF Reader software.

The Tutor's client longed for the good old days, when one typed the book on a typewriter, collated the pages, and mailed them to their agent. The days when authors did not also have to be "tech savy" to get their work published.

ALWAYS REMEMBER: before calling for help - is it plugged in, is the file in PDF form, and is it turned on?

Unplugged