Jonathan Hawkins

I have a knack for writing tutorials and simplifying processes, explaining complex tasks in thorough and sensible ways. You can find my books at Books2Read and read more of my articles on Medium, CBR, and wikiHow.

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An Excerpt From "The Freedom to Share Your Story"

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Step 2: Formatting Your Book Manuscript

There are two distinct methods that will be covered in this guidebook for formatting your e-book’s manuscript file. If you follow along with the guidance provided here, ultimately you will be making use of the Draft2Digital platform to self-publish your e-book across a variety of popular online storefronts.

In March of 2022, Draft2Digital and popular competitor company Smashwords combined their strengths together in a company merger. This enabled both the existing Draft2Digital process, as well as the Smashwords manuscript formatting guidelines, to be valid approaches to publishing content on the Draft2Digital platform.

This guidebook will cover both approaches. The Draft2Digital process is simpler and more automated, making it the recommended approach for most people. However, if the automated system is insufficient for your book’s needs, or you simply want finer control over the end result, following the Smashwords process can provide the solution.

2.1: The Basics Of Using LibreOffice

Before you tackle the manuscript formatting, it is important to understand some basics about using LibreOffice, especially if you are unfamiliar with using word processing software. Start by opening up LibreOffice Writer. To do so, double-click the LibreOffice icon on your main desktop screen, or you can find LibreOffice Writer from the Windows start menu. You can also search for it in your computer’s files by clicking the magnifying glass icon and then typing “LibreOffice” into the search box.

When you first open LibreOffice, it may seem like an overwhelming amount of icons and options are presented to you. The good news is, you won’t need to use everything you are seeing. You start with a new blank text document, and the first step you want to get used to doing is saving your progress to a file on your computer.

At the top-left of the screen you will see a row of words starting with “File”, then “Edit”, then “View” and so on. Each word is a separate menu that you can click on to find a list of options and settings you can modify. Start by clicking where it says “File” and its menu list will appear. About halfway down the list you’ll see “Save” and “Save As…” options. Click where it says “Save As...” and the save window will appear.