I’ve been trying to format my first book for print, write another using voice-to-text, and overhaul my cover. I’m doing mostly okay on the voice-to-text and the cover’s done, but I am pulling my hair out over the formatting for print.
When I initially uploaded things I used Office 2003, and got most of my content up and ready to fly. However I was missing some key pages, so I decided to go back and rework things. Only now I’m using the latest and greatest (said with all due sarcasm) Office 365, which is just one more example of Microsoft deciding since everyone had learned its original, it was time to totally fuck it up and make sure NOTHING was the same in the newest version.
I finally gave up on trying to match the format, so I downloaded a pre-formatted template from Createspace (Amazon’s print-on-demand option) and had the brilliant idea to simply paste my content across!
Except when I pasted it across it overwrote the template’s formatting.
Can I scream now?
I tried just editing in chapter by chapter, but their example has ten chapters and my book has 18 plus an introduction. Add another chapter, you say? That’s what I thought too. Silly me. It doesn’t like that.
So I’m debating now whether I’m going to have to uninstall Office 365 and reinstall Office 2003 and reformat the whole damned thing. I can’t do any of this voice-to-text, which means a lot of wear and tear on my hands, too. Gah! Yes, I know it’s a first-world problem, but in my case it is something I really need to figure out. I need eventually to be able to make some kind of a living outside of what I NOW do for a living. I had hoped to get enough up and running to have at least a little income coming in. But I need a print option and I’m beginning to think that’s impossible.
Yes there was a private entry before this, for anyone who’s still reading. It’s not password protected. It was a mini-rant, and I won’t be making the details public until I figure out which way I’m going to address the issue. Long, nasty story.