Using LibreOffice to Format an eBook or Printed Novel
Preamble
Once, I mentioned on the Fediverse how I use LibreOffice to format my books, formatting as I type, and I received a response from some guy telling me how some fancy software makes formatting much, much easier and that is better because then writers can concentrate on writing rather than formatting.
I don’t follow closely other people’s writing practices, and from that exchange I came to assume most writers use some paid-for software to make sure their novels are formatted properly. There’s nothing wrong with that, LibreOffice isn't great when dealing with images, and I'm sure a complex layout with images would be more easily achieved with a desktop publishing software. But for text-based novels I have never had any problems and have never found a need to look further than LibreOffice, since it has given me all the tools I’ve needed to format books.
I later mentioned on Mastodon I was considering writing a guide for formatting on LibreOffice, and I received quite a few responses, and it seems there are a few people who would be interested in a LibreOffice guide.
To repeat: the book formatting I’m talking about here is a mostly text-based novel format. I’m not going to write about a book layout that includes pictures and diagrams, nor am I going to discuss anything particularly complicated in layout. Pictures are easily added to a manuscript and can be anchored to the page so they remain fixed in place while the text is altered; or anchored to the paragraph or character, so the image stays next to the relevant text, and moves along with it as you edit and add more text.
More complex layouts are achievable with LibreOffice. I wrote a short experimental novel that used a layout similar to the layout of social media sites. This involved a name in bold, the next line being a date and time, then the next paragraph being the post content. Then if there was a reply to a post, the reply was laid out in a similar fashion but indented to show it as a reply.
The results were satisfactory, although when saved for ebook, different ebook formats applied spacing differently. However, it looked pretty much how I intended and was perfectly readable.
All this was done using paragraph styles. And that is the key to successful print and ebook publishing.
All spaces between sections are added via Paragraph Styles, never by inserting multiple line breaks. At no point am I manually shifting text to indent it, or using the tab key to create an indent. And if I ever feel like changing a style, all text assigned to that style will change automatically.
Ebook Formatting
This is a guide begins with formatting your novel so it is ready for self-published printing. But the completed manuscript can be easily tinkered for ebook publication. I stopped using Amaz0n to self publish, which is an easy way to self-publish printed books, so now I mostly only publish ebooks. However, I still format my books for printing for two reasons:
- So my manuscript is ready to upload for printing if I want to publish a printed version.
- When I read through my work and edit, either on screen or printed, the text is displayed in a neat, readable layout, and not stretched across pages of A4.
Even if you are aiming to publish ebooks only, formatting your layout gives you an idea of how your book might appear on an ebook reader. In my opinion, it’s generally good practice to format to a novel layout.
One other thing that is often done before uploading an ebook is a thing known as the nuclear option. This involves copying all text and pasting it into a notepad or text file so that all formatting is lost, then re-copying the text and pasting it back into a fresh LibreOffice (or Word) file. I have found I don’t always have to do this. The nuclear option is only necessary if you use poor formatting in the first place. If you format correctly, you should have no problems.
However, it’s good to know how to do the nuclear option, and for that you will need to mark all your uses of italics or bold in order to restore them again using Find and Replace. The nuclear option isn’t such a chore if you are writing a novel because most of your manuscript is usually nothing more than paragraphs of text, and any headings are usually at the beginning of each chapter, so easily found to reapply the formatting. But as I said, as long as you only use paragraph styles to format, the nuclear option might not be necessary.
I’ll come to formatting the ebook at the end.
Planning
The first thing you need to do to format a novel with LibreOffice is to plan how you want your book to look – before you type it.
I know writers and aspiring writers might be: I can’t think about that! I haven’t even the written the damn thing yet! But there’s a couple of things to say to that:
SImplicity
The first is, novels are usually mostly paragraphs with chapter pages at the beginning of each chapter. The formatting isn’t particularly complex and, I’d argue, nor should it be. Your aim is for people to read your words, undistracted. They should be impressed by mental imagery, not the alignment of words on a page.
My advice is to pick up a novel – pretty much any novel – and copy the layout. There’s not much to it. You don’t need to think about elaborate layouts; you just need to make your novel look professional and for it to be readable. You should spend more time on the actual words.
Format as you type
The second thing is it is much easier to format as you type. You can type it all up first, then format it, but you might find some issues and difficulties. The thing with LibreOffice is that successful formatting relies on creating Manual Page Breaks, so if you already have your text written up, you might have to keep adding Manual Page Breaks and creating new Page Styles, then deleting the redundant pages. You can work like this, but formatting as you go can make it simpler.
If you have already typed up your manuscript, I would set up the formatting in a separate file and copy each section at a time and apply the corresponding Paragraph Style to each, rather than copy and paste the whole thing.
You can change your mind later
The third thing is you can change all the formatting at any time. So once you’ve completed your novel, you can fine tune the layout to your liking. The main thing with formatting as you type is that you’re assigning Styles to each section of your novel. Once you’ve done that, any changes to the Styles will affect all text assigned to that style.
It’s easy
And fourth, it’s actually really easy to format as you type. Once you’ve set up LibreOffice in your desired format to type your novel, you can save it to be used again and again.
You can either save it as a template to be used again, or, like I do, you an just save a blank document, which is ready to be typed onto, and you just need to save it under a new title before you begin.
Self-Publishing Service
You might also find whichever Self-publishing service you use offers some free, auto formatting tools. And these might be all you need, and might work well for your book. While they are perfectly fine, I find they are not quite right for my liking, so I prefer to format myself to make sure the book looks how I want it.
[End of Transmission]
Stay tuned for Part 1 which can be found here: Part 1