Does Formatting Matter?

I speculated to a friend that with more people reading on electronic readers, tablets, and phones, perhaps many people are no longer bothered by wonky formatting issues. And I then wondered: would that tolerance gradually spread to printed material as well?

Effective April 13, 2016 I regain all publishing rights to BAD POLICY, my first released of the Seamus McCree series, (but chronologically second in the series . . . and therein lies a tale). The first edition of the book included some typos no one, including me, caught before publication and some stylesheet inconsistencies introduced by the editor that I was not sufficiently savvy to get straightened out. This second edition gave me a chance to take care of all those niggling annoyances (and probably an opportunity to introduce another couple of errors for eagle-eyed readers to find).

I spent more time than I probably should have trying to catch everything. The next step was to format the book for print and electronic versions. The electronic issues were annoying but not severe. For example, Kindle’s format (mobi) does not accept variable spacing between characters. That means when you have a sentence such as,

“ ’Cause I told you,” Gabriel said, “Lincoln’s Gettysburg address starts out ‘Four score and seven years ago.’ ”

I either have to leave a full space between the single and double quotes (which makes it look a bit goofy, and leads to the possibility of the final quotation mark ending on the next line) or eliminate the spaces all together, making it more difficult to read (as follows):

“’Cause I told you,” Gabriel said, “Lincoln’s Gettysburg address starts out ‘Four score and seven years ago.’”

When it came to the print edition, the question of “who cares” arrives full force. The answer, in this case, is that I do. . . but not quite enough to spend the money for design software like InDesign and then invest however many hours to learn to use the software. In retrospect, given how much time I wasted getting the formatting more or less correct, I might have been better off learning the software.

My first “mistake” was wanting to use AdobeGaramondPro as the font, because apparently Microsoft doesn’t want to play well with this particular font. (You ask if this refusal to play well is because Microsoft competes with Adobe. Oh, surely you jest. No gigantic corporation run by a bazillionaire would be that petty.) In Microsoft Word there is a nice little box to check to embed fonts so when you send a Word document to someone else they can read it using the fonts you chose. Great, except that when you export a Word document to PDF using Word’s software, those fonts do not embed.

I finally figured out that was the problem and found a free version of the software program novaPDF that would properly embed the fonts. But then I noticed that every so often something would happen to a paragraph that made it a line longer or shorter than it was in Word.

Arrrgggh!

I can’t tell you how many hours I spent eliminating orphans and widows, all the while maintaining the last line on the page at exactly the same place except when scene breaks caused extra white space. As hours piled on hours and my supply of wine diminished, I wondered if I was the only one who cares.

Actually, I knew I wasn’t the only one. I received a review of CABIN FEVER that took exception to the formatting because the publisher had used both indents and extra space between paragraphs—a real error in that reviewer’s eye. (And that reviewer will be happy to know I formatted the book with indents {other than the opening paragraph of a chapter or after a scene break} and no extra space between paragraphs.) His exact words on this point were:

Then there is the formatting. Traditional rules of formatting say you either indent paragraphs or you insert a blank line between them, but not both. Moreover, in fiction, readers expect indents, not spaces. I suggest, if readers let that and some other formatting anomalies bother them, they’ll miss an enjoyable reading experience.

I, too, have a sense that while layout does not change the words, it can subtly affect my feelings of enjoyment. It’s similar to my finding multiple typos or egregious grammar or punctuation errors. Those discoveries cause me to think that if the author cares so little for her story, why should I? I know that is not necessarily fair to the author, because the publisher may have introduced the issues after the author had any input. I can’t use that excuse when the author and publisher (using my Wolf’s Echo imprint) are the same person.

So question for y’all: Do you care about the layout and type used in printed books, and if you do, how much?

~ Jim