What are general rules one should follow for formatting a novel, if one was to write one? Most notably, with using conversion to PDF or epub software like pandoc, it's not difficult to get page numbering. But it becomes a pain with doing stuff like alternating header with title of book and author on even/odd pages. Can I just omit that and only have page numbers at the top or bottom of the page? Any other rules of thumb for formatting a novel I should know about?
At 8/26/23 06:00 PM, lwpage wrote: What are general rules one should follow for formatting a novel, if one was to write one? Most notably, with using conversion to PDF or epub software like pandoc, it's not difficult to get page numbering. But it becomes a pain with doing stuff like alternating header with title of book and author on even/odd pages. Can I just omit that and only have page numbers at the top or bottom of the page? Any other rules of thumb for formatting a novel I should know about?
When I formatted my novelette, I inserted page breaks as opposed to using tab. I also applied paragraph styles for both the chapter headers and the body. For the main body I used 0.25cm indentation for the first line, and Times New Roman font. You can either set it to single spaced or double spaced. I just went with single spaced since I prefer it. For the chapter header I added 72pt spacing before and 12pt spacing after, in order to push the header lower. You could even set it to 90pt if you want it lower. I like my headers bold and centre.
When formatting one should display formatting marks in their Word document, this helps to show how many times you've used tab for example. I hope this helps.
