Part 1 – “Look Who’s TOC-ing”
There are days when being an independent author feels
very much like being an independent author.
And then there are days when being an independent author
feels like being a detective.
Today was one of those days.
I’m putting the finishing touches on the second volume of
my Sherlock Holmes Thematic Readers Edition, and I decided it was time
to tackle something that should have been relatively simple: the table of
contents.
Simple.
That word would come back to haunt me. I should learn by now
that saying something should be a simple task is just too tempting for Fate.
I had already formatted the book to the 6-by-9-inch
dimensions required for the finished edition per Amazon’s suggestions, so this
wasn’t going to be a matter of simply throwing some text into Microsoft Word
and calling it a book. As an independent author, I do not have an editor, a
social media manager, or a formatting specialist. I wear all the hats.
This day, I would wear a new hat—the Detective Hat, so I
could deduce why my Table of Contents entries went off the page and into
Oblivion. It showed “Chapter”, then the infinite dots going off the page (….)
and the associated page number on the next line down. Ugh.
Eventually, after some poking, prodding, and probably more
muttering at my computer than was strictly necessary, I figured it out.
Word’s TOC generator is automated in the academic sense.
However, it’s not like you simply tell it, “OK, make me a table of contents”,
and Presto. Nope, you must go through your document, in my case a 130-plus-page
book, and manually format your headings so that Word knows to look for “Heading
1” – Title, “Heading 2” – Subtitle, and so on.
So really, it’s not automatic, it’s manual. One step
closer now to being publisher ready. My simple 10-second task turned into over
an hour of searching, researching, employing some shall we say, “colorful”
language, and final discovery.
But that’s ok. Whenever you feel like you failed at a task
(and it’s safe to say I failed epically), as long as you learn from it
and don’t repeat this mistake going forward, you didn’t really fail. You
succeeded in finding a new way not to do the thing you are doing.
Writing a book, especially without a team of editors and
collaborators, can be a rewarding, freeing, and wonderfully creative process.
And some days, it feels like you’re jumping off of a cliff holding only the raw
materials to build a parachute.
So I’m sewing my little life-saving parachute, solving one
small mystery at a time, and each day getting one step closer to Launch Day
