Formatting tips in MS Publisher 2010

Here is a link to a proposal I have written as an independent book formatting contractor. This document contains useful formatting tips. If you already have MS Publisher, or if you are willing to purchase it, I can set up your document for you for a fee, and send you the file. Set up is the most important part of formatting your book. If you are interested in a set-up plan, please e-mail dbdkho@aol.com.

Self-publishing with Blurb.

First Edition at Blurb.com: The first version of my book was created at Blurb.com. You can download software from the site to create your book called Book Smart. When I downloaded the software a few years ago, it was free. I believe the price may now be $3.95, but it may still be free. Blurb provides TEMPLATES to create your book. There are some tutorials on the site that provide instructions for working with the templates. Since I last worked in Blurb, they have incorporated a Microsoft Word add-in feature. I am no longer selling my book at Blurb. I have added a lot of information to my book and the second version at Lulu.com is a much better version. Although Blurb does provide a verly lovely finished product, I would reccommend it for photography or picture books with small blocks of text rather than large segments of text combined with graphics. It's been a long time since I have used them and the program may be more user friendly than it was when I used them. I have included a video for them and a screen shot of the software as it was when I used it.

Here is a screen capture of the layout in Blurb. Use the zoom feature to enlarge your view.

Page numbering, MS Publisher 2010.

Page Numbering: The first basic step you must take in MS Publisher is to create a text box. There is a tab on the "ribbon" (formerly called a tool bar) that says "draw text box." This will give you a special cursor to create any sized text box anywhere on the page in a custom document. But what I am demonstrating here are page numbers, not text boxes. Notice to the far left in this screen shot you can see page numbers. However, these page numbers are not inserted into the document unless and until you 1) Hit the insert key at the top left in the ribbon. 2) Go to the page numbers tab at the far right upper corner of the ribbon and insert page numbers. In the example below you can see the page numbers to the far right that are not inserted into the document. The circles indicate where the insert tab & page number tabs are on the ribbon. Click on the screen shot to enlarge for better viewing. You will need to arrange your document in sections for front matter such as the Table of Contents (seen below) usually without page numbers, middle material, such as Introductions which generally contain Roman numerals, and the main body of text, which contains regular numbers. Creating sections is done by right clicking the mouse on the page you want to begin or end a section and you will be given a drop down menu.