I am finishing the draft of my first book and thought I may ask here in hope for insights and suggestions.
My book has a streamlined structure, the audience is academics and postgrad students. So you expect chapters, sections and subsections. It is around 70000 words, and there are no tables or visual content.
Now to my questions, how possible is it to do all the fine formatting by myself without seeking sighted assistance? What apps can I reliably use for this purpose if it is possible?
I have iPad with keyboard and Mac, in addition to my Focus 40 braille display. I consider myself good enough in them to proceed with any of the recommendations here.
So please let me know about your experiences if you have been through this.
Thanks
By Maldalain, 30 September, 2023
Forum
Other Apple Chat
Comments
Anthology
If you have had any college experience, chances are you have had to do a metric crapton of writing. God knows I have had my fair share of this. One of my more interesting writing assignments was to write an anthology of collected works. In this case the collected works were all poetry, from authors like Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and so on.
The anthology was very easy to write in Apple's Pages app, wherein I did everything from the first draft to the final product. Pages has a means of counting by characters, words, pages etc, so if you are keeping it at 70,000, this should be no trouble. Spell check was pretty straight-forward. You may want to check over your work (perhaps once per page) to ensure punctuation hasn't been typoed.
Finally, the only thing I can think of that you may actually want sighted assistance on would be cover art.
Just my thoughts. 😃
Oliver, Thanks!
Well, I did the writing myself,and there are no issues in spelling and grammar. The issue here is the visual appearance of writing. Like for example titles at the bottom of pages and the actual discussion starts at the next page. Another example with variation of font sizes, types and alignment. Do titles have to have different font type and size and alignment? Lots of questions come up while I go through the pages of the book, so I apologize if this is a lot of questions.
@Brian
Thanks Brian for the suggestion. Back in my PhD thesis writing things were easier, as we were requested to send out draft to editor to do the required formatting and check for language problems. Now being a lecturer in university, things are more demanding with the very minimal support I receive from the disability office.
Thanks again for your comment.
@Maldalain
First, you are welcome. I have a degree in IT, but I did not take it to the PhD level. I shudder to think of how many essays I would have had to write, ya know, that had absolutely nothing to do with my field of study -- where I spent more time writing code than my own name.
Ah, university. Like a good woman, we all need them, and we never want to displease them... 😖
Second, I would agree with the points @The Oliver Kennett made, save for Microsoft Word on the Mac can be frustrating. Some people claim it works well. Others claim it is sluggish and difficult to work with.
Your mileage may vary..
Oliver
At this stage I will be sending publishers to see what possibility is there for publishing. I need to have copies for myself, you know it is an emotional thing to have a printout for something you have worked on for forteen months. I need the copies for myself and for the publisher to have satisfactory level of being visually pleasing, pleasing for publishers and people who are going to look into the book, while not sending me notes about oddities where they established implicit connection between these oddities and the author being blind.
For Microsoft Word on Mac, the issue here is that I set it to Print layout, but when I open the book it keeps not responding, I am not sure but it seems to me due to the size of the book.