Manually Creating a Table of Contents for your eBook.

Creating a Table of Contents with active links in Word is actually pretty simple, but took me forever to figure out. It was only thanks to another author, Danielle Gavan, that the ball finally dropped, and then I wondered what all the fuss was about! I know there are ways to create a TOC using headings, etc. but this is simply the way I do it.

This is the one part of the document where I might use a 1.5 sentence line spacing instead of single.

1.    Create a title: i.e. ‘Table of Contents’! Underline or make the title bold.

2.   Hit ‘return’ a couple of times. Type in your chapter numbers or titles, hitting return after each one.

3.   Go through your document and ‘bookmark’ each chapter title. You do this by clicking right before the chapter title, then going to the tool bar at the top and simply clicking ‘bookmark’. Don’t put a space in your bookmark name as the whole bookmark box will grey out. You also need to remember to bookmark your table of contents as ‘TOC’ so you can link back the chapters to the TOC.

4.   Go back to your TOC. Now you have all your chapters bookmarked, linking them is easy. Start at the top and work your way down. Select the chapter title in the TOC, so it is highlighted. Then right click and select ‘Add Hyperlink’. This will open another text box. Now select ‘add to place in this document’. All your bookmarks will pop up, so simply select the one that matches your chapter title. If it’s active, the link will turn blue and underlined. Hold down ‘ctrl’ and click on the link to make sure it takes you to the place in your document that you want it to!

5.   Repeat this for the whole of your Table of Contents.

6.   Now you want all of your chapters to link back to your TOC heading. Go through your document and on each chapter heading, select, then right click. Choose Hyperlink and link each chapter back to your bookmarked TOC heading. You can even use your newly created links to hop back and forth between your chapter titles and the table of contents so you don’t have to scroll through the document every time. After you click on the link, the colour of the link will change from blue to purple, but don’t worry, it doesn’t make any difference to how it works!

7.   Ta-da! Your Table of Contents is done!

Formatting an eBook in Word - Creating a Clean Document.

This post is going to be the first in a number I plan to post on formatting in Microsoft Word. I know a lot of people who hate Word, but it’s the only thing I’ve ever used. I know nothing about any other formats! So far, I haven’t had any complaints about the formatting of my ebooks, and my books look good on my kindle, so I guess I’m doing something right! I hope this will be a simple explanation about how I do things and will be helpful to others. I'm the least technical person in the world, so if I can figure this one out, you should be able to as well!

1.    If you’re unsure of your formatting from the start, or the document has been through a couple of different computers or editors, copy and paste the whole document into something like Word’s OneNote. This removes all the horrible little formatting issues (some of which may even be hidden when you have the formatting sign on) such as change in font sizes. These things ruin the look of your ebook.

2.   Copy and paste the cleared of formatting piece from OneNote back into a new Word document.

3.   Hit ‘Select All’ on the top tool bar.

4.   Decide which font you want to go with. I tend to use Georgia. So, with the ‘select all’ highlighting your document, choose the Georgia font (or whatever one you want).

5.   Again, with the whole of the document selected, right click and select ‘Paragraph’. Here you need to make a number of selections. Start at the top and work down. Check Alignment is ‘Left’. Check indentation is ‘0’ for both left and right. Choose Special, first line by ‘0.8cm’. (This is the indentation I prefer. You may want to make it bigger or smaller.) Line Spacing needs to be ‘Single’. (Again, some people prefer 0.5, but this is your choice). Finally, check the ‘Don’t add space between paragraphs’ box. Now hit ‘OK’.

6.   This should give you a good looking document with no nasty formatting surprises!

7.   Start to personalise your document. If you want certain things centered, you need to highlight that title and center it. Same with any changes in font, etc. If you want a line to be perfectly centered in the document, you need to right click and select ‘Paragraph’ again. This time make sure everything is the same as above, but change the ‘Special’ to ‘None’ and this will make it perfectly centered.

The next post will be on making your eBook look good on an e-reader, so stay tuned!