Tears of the Fallen

Get a Life Word

I swear to everything above, Word just does whatever it wants to when it wants to. Continuing the theme of "nothing is gonna work right today" the author I was working on the cover for (the one that refused to convert to CMYK in color) doesn't know how to format her manuscript for print because she's never had to do it before. She's always had a publisher and they did it for her. She doesn't self-publish but this book is sci-fi and her publishers doesn't do sci-fi so she's publishing it herself. 

The page count changes when you format it for print because the trim size is not going to be 8.5 by 11 (or A4 depending on the country you're in) most of us who publish through Amazon do a trim size of 6x9 so a book that's say 120 pages in 8.5x11 will be over 200 pages when made 6x9. She didn't realize this and told me the page count for the 8.5x11, needless to say I had to redo the cover.

Since she doesn't know how to format for the 6x9 trim size, I offered to do it for her. For whatever reason Word decided to put page numbers only on the first page (and not the first page of chapter one, no, it put it on the copy right page) and to begin numbering at zero, why? No clue. I spent half an hour trying to get the page numbers to work. I finally thought I had it only to discover it made the last like six pages the same number (again, no clue why). I removed page breaks, added them back in and generally messed with the file until I finally got the damn page numbers to cooperate. If you asked me how I fixed I couldn't even begin to tell you how. 

I swear to God if there is a programmer out there who is interested in designing a word processing program geared toward authors I would be more than happy to help by giving feedback and letting you know what we need because Word just isn't designed for it and I've found most other 'publishing' processors are overly complicated and have a bunch of fluff you don't really need. 

Right, I'm off now to drink copious amounts of alcohol, curse at Word, and probably cry a little.