The easy way to create complex formatting

Authors often have wild ideas about how they want their finished books to look. Sometimes those ideas would result in a book so messy and complicated that the reader wouldn't know where to look, and the problem with poor formatting is that the reader doesn't know it's there, so they blame the content of the book for the poor readability.

I don't think anyone today would attempt to write a book on a typewriter, such is the convenience and ubiquity of word processing software. So, with all of these advanced features to draw upon, why do authors keep on sending me manuscripts in which they've used MS Word, Libreoffice or similar like a typewriter?

Here's the problem; they fill the manuscript with manual formatting. When they create a chapter title, or a subtitle, they select the text, change the font, change the font size, centre the paragraph and so on. As a publisher, this means I have to take all the formatting out and start again, and that greatly lengthens the time required to get a book into print.

Word processing software isn't meant to be used like that, and it's a nightmare to work with. Therefore, I thought I'd make a little video and tutorial to give you some ideas for the complexity of formatting that you can easily achieve with styles.

First, what's a style? It's a description of a recurring format. Let's say you want all your chapter headings to be bold, 20pt size, Arial font. Instead of manually applying that to each chapter heading, you simply set those style elements to be part of a style called 'Heading 1', then simply apply Heading 1 to every chapter title. If you later decide you don't like Arial, you simply change the style and all of the chapter titles magically change at the same time.

More than that, you can set the style to put a page break before each heading, and to start each chapter with a particular page style, so that you can have all of your chapters starting on a left page with a fancy border.

If you're using Libreoffice, which I highly recommend, all you have to do to set a chapter is type your chapter title and press 'Control 1' (hold the control key down and press 1) and the correct styling magically appears.

Here's an example of styling that an author recently requested:

Looks complicated, right? Their graphic designer made this, no doubt by manually placing all of the different elements that you see.

It's typical of what a graphic designer produces. Authors often think that graphic designers know what's best about visual layout. That's not true, at least not where books are concerned. The bullet points, for example, in the 'Apply yourself' section are redundant, take up space and interrupt the reader. The format is already a bulleted list, we don't need more bullets inside it. This isn't a powerpoint presentation.

You might be thinking that this type of formatting would be impossible on a word processor, but in fact it's easy to produce once you know how to use styles. The book that the above page is taken from had 60 chapters of two pages each, and each of those needed the same formatting. If that had been done manually, the book would have taken weeks to format. With automatic styles, it took about half an hour.

This video is a real time screen capture of the sequence for producing the formatting above:


All I had to do was the select the text and apply the style. To make things even easier, I assigned the styles that I needed to keyboard shortcuts so I didn't even need to move the mouse once I'd selected the text.

Here are a few other screenshots to show you some of the tricks.

First, those grey boxes. You don't need to manually insert floating boxes (which are horrible to work with) or tables (which are hard to automate). All you need is to make the background of the paragraph a pale grey colour and you have a grey box. Change the font size to make the box bigger or smaller.

A neat way to add them in the example above is to use Libreoffice's ability to know which order styles should go in. This means that whenever you style a title, for example, and then press return, the next line will automatically be your default paragraph style.

In this example, the paragraph has a style with a left line border to produce the vertical line, and when I press return at the end of the line, the next paragraph is the style that produces the grey box.

Second, how does the grey box look indented? If I made it using a paragraph background, the grey would extend all the way to the black line, which isn't what the author wants. I used Inkscape, another amazing open source program, to create the following image, a grey rectangle with a white area to the left:

Instead of making the paragraph background a fixed colour, I made it the grey box image above. The white area makes it look like the box is indented, when really the image touches the black vertical line.

Here's the paragraph style showing the black left border. Note the padding figure which causes the text to indent. As long as adjacent paragraphs have the same indent, the borders will join together, creating the impression of the vertical line. Neat, eh?

If you're writing a book manuscript, or any kind of complex document, I highly recommend that you download Libreoffice. It's open source, which means free, and is far superior to MS Word. For a start, it's free. Also, the support is far better, the features are better, it's more reliable, it creates standard format documents (ODT) rather than proprietary format (DOCX) and it's easier to use, despite MS's best efforts to turn the Word interface into a Fisher Price 'My first word processor'.

Get to know how to use styles and your time investment will be paid back many times over in terms of productivity and in the consistency and quality of your final document.

____________________________

CGW Publishing is an independent publisher specialising in business and non-fiction books for authors who want to build a service business around their intellectual property. We work with a wide range of experts with a breadth and depth of credibility in fields such as sales and marketing, performance psychology, recruitment, coaching and training, IT and ecommerce and business consulting.

www.cgwpublishing.com

Marketing Expert Ashley Hastings to Release 2nd Book

Established CGW author Ashley Hastings is working hard to finalise his second book, entitled 'Copywriting for Marketing Communications'. It's an extension of his first book, 'I'm Here!' which was aimed at business owners wanting to create their own marketing, and delivers Ashley's expertise now to the media community and to corporate clients with their own marketing teams.

His new book, entitled "Copywriting for Marketing Communications" is in production now, so keep an eye on Ashley's book list on our website.

Become a High Potential With Nitin and Peter

Established CGW author Peter Freeth is working on a new book, this time with Asia Pacific Head of Talent Nitin Thakur.

Peter and Nitin have been working closely together since 2014, developing and delivering corporate talent management programs, and they've uncovered some fascinating secrets about what really constitutes 'high potential'.

"We started thinking that so many people in business and the academic world have written about the qualities that get you promoted. There are psychometric tests, assessment centres, leadership programs, all kinds of things that you have to do to be 'leadership material'. But at the same time, we know that leadership is very personal and subjective, so it doesn't make any sense to have one set of criteria for identifying a 'high potential' leadership candidate." says Nitin.

Peter adds, "We know that leadership is actually not a behaviour at all, it's not some set of activities or qualities that the leader possesses, it's in fact a description of a relationship between people. So the relationship that the leader creates with the team is where the magic happens, and therefore that relationship depends as much on the team as it does the leader. The second traditional idea that didn't make sense is the idea that you can measure a person's potential, that you can predict what a person will be able to do in the future. So it seems much more credible and concrete to put a person into a new scenario and then to measure what they actually do. So what we're really measuring isn't potential but performance, but we're doing it before anyone is committed to the hiring decision."

The book will take the research that Nitin and Peter have conducted and turn it into a series of practical steps that anyone can take to dramatically improve their career prospects. Both authors agree that what really matters isn't having the knowledge to achieve more, it's the application of that knowledge, and so many management and leadership books are simply gathering dust on the office bookshelves of the world.

"This is a book that will make a real impact on your career, and we're working hard to make this both evidence-based and practical", says Nitin. "Peter has already made a huge contribution to the talent programs running in my business, and I know that together, we're creating something that really does have something new to say in this crowded career development market."

'How to Become a High Potential' is the working title of the book, which is due for release early in 2018.

Leader on the Pitch Kicks Off

The new book from TV psychologist and established CGW author Paul Boross and rugby legend Scott Quinnell, entitled Leader on the Pitch, launched on Monday to a wonderfully keen audience at Soho's Union Club.

With guests from the worlds of entertainment, sport and business, Paul and Scott got the book off to a flying start, acknowledging the hard work that has gone into its production over the past year or so.

"What started as a crazy idea grew during the filming of Sky's School of Hard Knocks series, and with the support of Christopher and the CGW team, we've turned that idea into something that you can hold in your hands, and we believe that it's going to make a genuine difference to the lives of anyone who reads it. The experiences and concepts that we're sharing aren't just for people in obvious leadership roles, they're for anyone who has to do what they do through a team of people.", says Paul.

Scott adds, "There's a story that I tell in the book, about the time that I scored a try in the 2001 Lions Tour game against Australia. If you’ve ever seen it, I just get over the line, and I just look up, and I just nod my head. That was just a little thank you to everybody who achieved my goal. I'd say that around 250 people, family, friends, doctors, teammates, all supported me, and I couldn't have done it without them. Any leader has to recognise that they can't do it alone."
The 80 or so guests at the launch event are part of that success too, because it's very easy for an author to lose touch with their readers.

Paul says, "The act of creating something new can be so isolating that we lose sight of the reason for creating it. So our book launch was a wonderful opportunity to reconnect with the people who we wrote the book for.

The atmosphere at the launch was wonderful, and all of our guests were so charming and supportive of Leader on the Pitch. So many people gave us such lovely feedback that meant a great deal to both Scott and I, and that’s what gives us the strength and energy for all the hard work that is yet to come."

With so many books on leadership, and even sport and leadership, many people have asked what Paul and Scott have got to say about the subject that’s new. Scott replies, "What I would say is that everyone has a unique perspective on leadership because everyone, at some time in their life, has been inspired to follow a leader. Our angle is that leadership isn’t about the amazing charisma of the leader, it’s about the relationship that they create with their team, because in the end, the results that the leader shows for all their hard work aren’t achieved by that leader, those results come from the hard work of their team."

Join Paul and Scott's team by getting your own copy of
Leader on the Pitch, available now from all good book shops

ISBN 978-1-9082934-1-1

£7.99

How Many Books Will I Sell?

We receive many author submissions which promise to earn millions from guaranteed sales. Unfortunately, for business books, this is almost never the case. Business books generate revenue by adding value to a business rather than through direct sales, unless you happen to be a 'household name' business guru.

When I recently visited our main supplier and distributor, they shared some interesting statistics. They print and distribute literally millions of books every year, and according to their data, the subject categories break down as follows:

That's a lot of categories, so let's combine some of the similar ones:

Business books make up 5% of the total books that are distributed to bookshops.

Remember, the primary purpose of a business book is to create value for the author's business. That's where our expertise is.

How is it made?

Yesterday, I spent a very interesting morning at our print and distribution supplier's UK print facility. We had a super tour of the whole facility, showing how rolls of paper work their way through various complicated machines to end up as printed books.

The paper arrives on rolls about a metre in diameter which are loaded onto the presses. The older presses use toner like a photocopier, the newer ones that they're moving to are inkjet printers, just like the one you have at home but bigger. They print the pages of the books in a seamless sequence onto the paper rolls, and a cutter then separates the stream of paper into individual pages and assembles them in the right order for each separate book.

Meanwhile, a colour printer produces the covers and they are laminated, again in a continuous stream.

The interiors or 'book blocks' and covers are then glued together, trimmed and given a final quality check.

Three things surprised me:

1. How quiet the factory was
2. How many manual steps were in the process
3. How many books they produce per day

I guess I expected to see one big machine sucking in paper and spitting out books, but in fact people were present at every stage. The only part of the process that was completely automated was the printing of the book blocks, where two giant printers work in series to print one side, then the other, as the stream of paper flies by too fast to see. Each print line, of which there are eight, will take roughly one minute to produce a book. It was nice to see that each person who managed part of the overall process performed their own quality checks to ensure any problems are caught early in the production process.

The factory turns out close to 20,000 books each day. And you can imagine how delighted I was to learn that they class me as a 'big publisher'!

Those books are then hand picked and packed for delivery either to book retailers, or for direct fulfillment to individual customers.

Very interesting indeed!

Peter Freeth's latest book 'Learning Changes' is available now

The Radically Sensible Approach to 21st Century Learning

http://www.cgwpublishing.com/index.php/published-books/15-education-training-hr/114-learning-changes-by-peter-freeth

Buy from Amazon


ISBN 978-1-908293-36-7

You have been learning since before you were born, and you’ll never stop learning. It’s automatic, it’s easy and it’s what your brain does best.

Whilst learning is a natural and automatic process, learning how to do a job is not. To perform in a particular job, we need a lot of knowledge that we don’t know that we need.

Traditional training and teaching focus on knowledge, and concepts such as 'accelerated learning' are simply attempts to increase the retention of that knowledge.
What if knowledge, in itself, is irrelevant?

Because, let's face it, you don't really want people just to know stuff. You want people to be able to do stuff. And for that, traditional training methods are ineffective.

What if there was a way to structure learning so that learners do the right things, whether they're being watched or not?

What if there was a way to combine learning with performance management to create true engagement and accountability?

What if there was a way to structure learning so that it could be delivered easily, any time, any place, by anyone, faster and with immediate, observable, measurable results?

Well, now there is.

Mark Jaffe's Let Me Give It to You Straight reviewed in Fortune magazine

http://fortune.com/tag/wyatt-jaffe/

Not every business advice book has a diagram on the cover showing how to tie a noose, but this one does.

“We now know beyond any reasonable doubt that much of what we were taught about how to succeed in life is goofy, wrong-headed, or just plain false,” writes Mark Jaffe about halfway through Let Me Give It to You Straight.

By his lights, feeling overwhelmed by the pace of change these days is normal. “If every single morning at work feels like an audition for a play that is yet to be written, you’ve got the idea.”

Still, Jaffe, of eponymous recruiting powerhouse Wyatt & Jaffe, has spent 30 years observing — and shaping — executive careers, and his book is evidence that even tumultuous times can be funny. At just shy of 200 pages, it’s about the right length for a flight from, say, New York to Minneapolis, and it reads as if its author were coaching you on your next career move over an old-fashioned three-martini lunch.

Consider, for instance, what’s (probably) wrong with your resume. If you’re like most candidates for senior management jobs, it’s too long. “Less is more. The sole purpose of a resume is to get you an interview, period,” Jaffe writes. “It’s not an autobiography. If you blurt it all out now, why would anyone want to meet you?”

If your CV is spangled with glowing adjectives, lose them. “Before I forget to ask, did your last employer sign off on you being a ‘visionary, world-class entrepreneur,’ or did you kind of decide that on your own?” Jaffe wonders. “What would she say about you? That the thesaurus called and they want their synonyms back?”

A chapter called Choose Better Habits and Enjoy Them Less lists Jaffe’s seven tips on setting yourself up for success. “Get up before the sun” is one: “No practice could ever feel more bizarre and unnatural, particularly to yours truly. But it’s the right thing to do and you know it…. Set your alarm for the same ridiculous time each day and get moving.”

Want to know how Jaffe and his clients spot which candidates to avoid, and how not to be one of them? Take a look at Chapter 10, dubbed Danger! Bad Candidate! Run Away! It’s a checklist of nine red flags that can pop up in interviews, and most of them are errors that well-intentioned interviewees don’t realize they’re making.

It seems reasonable, for instance, to assume that one way to make a great impression is to downplay any disasters in your past. Yet Jaffe says a prospective hire’s “lack of ‘crash and burn’ experience makes it impossible to know how he or she deals with situational failures, setbacks, and disappointments. Will the candidate fold like a cheap suit at the first sign of serious pressure?”

So how does Jaffe recommend that a management job candidate wow an employer? “My solution is ridiculously simple,” Jaffe writes. “Forget about being a candidate. Imagine instead that you’re a consultant, and that you’ve already been paid a non-refundable consulting fee to attend this meeting.”

It works because “you don’t have to worry about selling yourself. No posing, no posturing, no tap dancing of any kind. You’re there to be helpful, to identify your client’s needs…. Now you can sit on the same side of the table, metaphorically speaking, and ask the hard questions” — including where the company has been, where it’s going, how this executive job opening is defined and why, what great performance in it would look like, and how excellence would be measured.

“What will stick with them is that you asked the right questions, paid close attention to the answers, and really fathomed what their organization is all about,” Jaffe writes. “Now they’re hooked.

“Just remember: It’s not about you; it’s all about them. The more you want to be taken seriously as a candidate, the more you should forget that you are one.”

One Small Stumble for a Newsreader, One Giant Leap for Paul Boross

The 'entertainer' Lenny Henry has recently received a Knighthood from the queen, however the researchers at ITV news didn't think the viewers would notice which bald funny black guy they showed on TV, because they obviously all look alike, and as a result our author Paul Boross received some unexpected and always welcome airtime...

Let Me Give It To You Straight by Mark Jaffe

Mark Jaffe's new book, Let Me Give It To You Straight, An Outspoken Guide to Working With Headhunters, Advancing Your Career and Reaching Enlightenment... Without the Sugarcoating, is available now.

Let Me Give It To You Straight is an examination of the human condition as seen through the striving of corporate management, a guide to getting ahead without getting mustard on your jacket. If you’re bored to tears with business books that take themselves too seriously and then don’t even bother to tell you the meaning of life, look no further.

You can order your first edition copy online right now. No waiting. It’s a perfect gift for anyone old enough to get a job. Plus, they’ll probably enjoy not receiving a box from Harry & David again this year.

Let Me Give It To You Straight. It may be the last book you’ll ever need.

http://book.wyattjaffe.net/