Style Sheets: KISS (Keep It Simple, Sweetheart!) The Road to Self or Indie Publishing Part 7
Today, we’re going to take the final steps to create a manuscript ready for conversion to EPUB/MOBI. As you’ve probably figured out by now, the manuscripts I convert are written in Mac word processing software. Although I’m training myself to write in Storyist, I currently use iWorks ’09 Pages in the Mavericks OS. Although I write in Pages, I learned to clean up a manuscript in Microsoft Word (for Mac 2011) because my small publishers requested I use Word for submissions. As I do with any software, I learned enough about Word to do what I have to do. I’ve compiled a manuscript preparation checklist (available at www.gingerhanson.com on the For Writers page) for cleaning up a manuscript that was written or pasted into Word. I go through each of these steps to ensure possible HTML stumbling blocks to a clean copy for e-book conversion are removed. This is the first step in my publishing process. Even when I write the original story in Storyist, I still copy the manusc