Make your self-published book the absolute best it can be.
I firmly believe it is incumbent upon every self-publishing author to make his or her book perfect in every way. It really isn’t enough to tell a great story, to craft each chapter, each paragraph, each sentence and phrase to say exactly what you want to say, exactly the way you want it said, and then just let the book go to press screaming “Self-published! Right here! Over here, the book with all the design flaws, yep, I’m self-published!”
If we want the bias against self-publishing to go away, we have to stop allowing our books to go to press ugly.
In light of this belief, I’ve decided to cover some of the basics of book design, beginning with widows and orphans. Yes, widows are ladies whose husbands have died, and orphans are children whose parents have died. In the publishing industry, those words have other meanings.
Some basic resources:
Book Design — Wikipedia
Book Design and Production (Paperback)
Dan Poynter’s Self-Publishing Manual, 16th Edition
Also note, of course, that searching for such topics as “book design” or “book layout” will get you many more resources.
Widows:
A widow occurs when the last line of a paragraph falls at the top of a page. This is considered unacceptable. Don’t ask me why, because there is no objection if a line of dialogue, which is basically its own complete paragraph, falls at the top of a page, but everything from The Chicago Manual of Style on down will tell you not to allow them, so don’t.
Orphans:
An orphan occurs when the first line of a paragraph falls at the foot of a page. This is a bit more debatable, with some sources saying they’re unacceptable, some not mentioning them at all, and the occasional maverick saying you can safely ignore them. When I encountered this conflicting advice in the production of my first book, I went to the nearest Barnes & Noble. I simply went scanning through the books, and I found orphans in every single fiction title I checked, but I found widows in none of them. Assuming, then, that widows are not ok, but orphans are, that’s the direction I took.
How to actually deal with these creatures:
First off, your word processing program probably has setting for “Widow and Orphan Control,” and a set of sub-options under that. Don’t bother. It won’t work.
The industry standard for dealing with widows and orphans is to allow the line count to vary (typically by only one line over or under, sometimes two), but only so that facing pages are identical! Except, of course, at the beginning and end of chapters, sections, etc. In the body of your book, facing pages must be the same number of lines. That’s the problem with trying to automate it. Given the prevalence of “mirrored pages” setting in such programs, I would think someone would have solved this problem by now, but maybe that would be too simple. So…
The last thing before you output your PDF file for the printer, go through the book, page by page. If you can set the zoom so that it displays two pages side by side, so much the better, but be sure you are seeing “book format,” that is, the left page on the left, and the right page on the right. Now each pair of pages is a facing pair. If you can’t set it this way, a) be very careful in the following steps, and b) get OpenOffice! (Free, and beats the bejabbers out of Word)
If a widow occurs on (say) page seven (which will be a right-hand page, right? Right? You didn’t start on the left-hand page, right?), then you’ll have to do this at the bottom of page six, to correct the widow, and at the bottom of page seven, to match the facing pages. If the widow occurs on an even page, say eight, you’ll have to do it on seven to correct the widow, and on six to match the pages. So for every widow you find (I don’t need to say that you do this from the front of the book back, right? You essentially “push” the widows out of the book.), you’ll have to correct two pages. In some cases, you’ll get lucky, and find that an orphan on one page can be pushed onto the next to eliminate a widow, or you’ll have a widow on the second page of a chapter, which only needs to be corrected at the bottom of the first page, but for the most part, these will come in pairs.
At the beginning of the last line, backspace to close up to the previous line. Now insert a manual page break. You’re not done. Well, not in any word program I’ve ever used, because the page break is an automatic paragraph break, also. Now you have a line at the bottom of one page that doesn’t extend across the page, and a line at the top of the next that is indented. Set the paragraph styling for the last paragraph of the first page to justify the last line (you are using justified text, right? Right? You’re not using ragged-right? Unless it’s a special case, like a journal entry in a “handwritten” font.), and set the styling for the first paragraph on the second page to no indentation. Hint: If you have a paragraph style called, say Body Text, make one called something like Body Widow 1, and another called Body Widow 2. Now you just reset each paragraph to the appropriate style, and move on to the next page. And the next. And the next. Get a cup of coffee; it can take a while.
You may still face a problem, though.
Sometimes you will discover that you can’t make this work. You’re just moving widows from one page to another. In this case, you will have to “save a line” or “make a line,” meaning to push or pull the text itself to make the widow go away. Find a paragraph on the preceding page that almost makes another line, or just barely makes it, and adjust accordingly. Sometimes you can make a paragraph into two, or combine two into one. This can get painful, since at this point your story is already perfect (right?) and you don’t want to mess things up, but you have to do what you have to do!
Just make it right! We owe it to each other to make our self-published books perfect.
