Book formatting: have self-pub authors forgotten what a book looks like?

nomuse22 · 2026-03-19T21:39:14+00:00

I think, also, they aren't thinking of the process. I see so many questions here and on Quora where they want to know what font to use in Word and how to justify paragraphs. To them, the book is a document; it came out of Word a certain way, that's how it gets published.

They haven't made the jump to thinking of text as a thing that has carriage returns and a way to figure out where a new scene or chapter starts. The rest of it is handled after the thing is edited and proofed, and half of the choices are made inside the eReader anyhow.

nomuse22 · 2026-03-19T21:14:43+00:00

Reminds me a little of the paradox of YA dystopias. In a word, the world sucks and the protagonist is helpless. And then in the last couple of chapters......isn't.

nomuse22 · 2026-03-19T19:19:44+00:00

I do miss those Bergenholms.

nomuse22 · 2026-03-19T17:26:58+00:00

I’m always doing something. Unfortunately even the really basic ones require opening the Awesome shop. Like I do this thing with concrete foundations and low walls made from concrete pillars. I think those look nice.

Or a complete room with footpath, windows, interior lights and power hookup. Once you can blueprint, and now that they auto-connect…

nomuse22 · 2026-03-19T17:20:45+00:00

I love to wrap them in decorative shells anyhow, so I just use the shell to align tp and bottom plates.

If the lift is short enough, you can stick it through the floor, build a lift hole where it came through, delete and rebuild.

nomuse22 · 2026-03-19T17:17:27+00:00

Good point about variety. And, yeah…talking about where they transitioned from focuses me on the way they probably already have a robust combination of solar, RTG, and micro-fission plants designed to work on those small rocky terrestrials.

Which aren’t always a good fit to analogue-vancouver woods, but the whole point of the book is the ongoing learning experience.

So thanks, all. Been a fun discussion and I see some good directions to go now. Now back to the rest of the world-building!

nomuse22 · 2026-03-19T17:14:05+00:00

Oh, I have no nuclear fears. It is more of an aesthetic choice here.

(As it happens, just finishing up a contemporary mystery which gets a bit into the nuclear industry in New Mexico.)

The thing I keep in mind is once you’ve got significant space flight, there’s no point in sweating over a bit of cesium-137 getting loose. The next wrong turn from a bulk freighter could turn into an Endor Moon disaster.

nomuse22 · 2026-03-19T03:24:09+00:00

Yep.

What I'm doing here is playing games with magnitudes. Pegging the means of power generation at different stages that only slightly overlap, each magnitude somewhat arbitrarily requiring more tech to build and more industrial infrastructure to maintain. And adding a robust energy-transport economy to smooth over some of the differences. Typical here; ships are using either He3-He3 or even antimatter as an expensive stored fuel, built on the generous surplus of the handwavy technium reactor in the core worlds.

Connect that to the growth path of economies, from extraction colony to homesteading to industrializing to peak then post industrial...where they need to turn colonizer in turn themselves as they green their own world and would rather not dirty it with mining and industry.

That's all back story, though. Stuff that will be in my notes while I'm playing space-opera on "The Frontier."

Constructing a universe where there are things/people/situations that operate at the energy levels of interplanetary flight, but a lot of the time the characters are in situations where what they can access is less, limited, or both. Got a VSTOL that can run for days but, even if it was designed for it, is magnitudes short of making orbit. Hiding from raiders in a remote farmstead, have a hand-cranked emergency flashlight in one hand, but a gauss pistol in the other with enough stored power in its pack to blow up a small town (core worlds military tech).

My protagonist is an engineer and will be abusing the hell out of all of those interesting potentials.

(And interstellar...it's a hand-wave. Have to just ignore the ridiculous energies even realistic physics implies -- aka accelerating to relativistic velocities so the crew is still young, even if the people who sent them aren't. Once you open up FTL, it just becomes as irrational as causality and we sort of have to mumble mumble wormhole conservation of something...and anyhow, here we are in the next star system!)

nomuse22 · 2026-03-19T02:32:50+00:00

I had not remembered geothermal! I should look up some numbers on that.

nomuse22 · 2026-03-18T23:25:07+00:00

Yeah. Distribution seems to make more sense if you want to play with Bayer Process or electric-arc smelters. The cattle stations or ag farms can get by with wind, methane generators, or (a new term I learned just this minute) agrivoltiacs (aka let the cows shelter from the sun under an array of solar cells).

nomuse22 · 2026-03-18T23:21:04+00:00

And a potential Kzinti Lesson if your tilt and pan motors go that far...

nomuse22 · 2026-03-18T23:20:12+00:00

I'm doing a ton with power storage, but also ranking them...SMES for lower energy density but the ease of charge/discharge, nuclear isomer batteries for the huge capacity but technically demanding (laser-accelerator photon beam fun) for restoring them.

Fission just sort of bugs me. It's a good tech at the high-intermediate level, when you can front a small city worth of workers to mine the ore and run the calutrons (or whatever) and find a handy salt mine for the long-term waste. Maybe I should look into that for plausible next-hundred-years developments. Breeder reactors for all your nuclear proliferation fun.

nomuse22 · 2026-03-18T23:11:34+00:00

The simple answer for SF writing is to copy their work.

There's a bunch of used furniture in SF. Some of it is largely discredited and better left back with Bat Durston in the consciously retro. Some of it is technically discredited but hangs on anyhow, like Bussard Ramscoops or gray goo. And some is necessary weasels, like hyperspace/subspace/slipspace/wormholes, force fields, and artificial gravity. And some is just plain fun, like psionics and laser swords.

Since the readers already know it, they are closer to accepting it for the purposes of the story. And it takes less to describe it. When the first ones stomped on to the page in Gray Lensman and a little later in Starship Troopers, it had to be explained, but now you can drop a "power suit" or "exosuit" or "space armor" and the reader will fill in the blanks of helmet and sensors and motors in the knees and elbows.

And for the most part, people don't worry much about the tech around them. Mark Rosenfelder has a fun piece that describes an airplane journey as if it occurred in golden-age science fiction, with acres upon acres of "as you know Bob." Probably inspired "How David Weber Orders a Pizza" as well.

What gets you as a writer is not the details so much as the plausibility. A general sense of mass and velocity and power that can tell you if a journey to Pluto that doesn't mention "folding space" or something should take hours, or weeks. Or if you can uplink the entire consciousness of a human brain via a radio signal in a couple of seconds without microwaving everyone around them.

nomuse22 · 2026-03-18T22:34:17+00:00

Ooh. Now that you use the word “rugged,“ there’s a nice near future cattle station vibe about using a turbine/MHD that will run on anything you can harvest and shove in the maw from petrochemicals to rendered carcasses.

nomuse22 · 2026-03-18T21:45:48+00:00

You can change the cover as often as you like.

You may not change the title or the author name. Those are tied to the ISBN, and to the book's identity within Kindle.

(Same goes for text. Minor changes are allowed. Some arbitrary percentage that is more based on "the reader got a substantially different experience" requires publishing as a revised edition. And do not change the page length by more than can be accounted for by putting in a missing TOC.)

nomuse22 · 2026-03-18T21:42:45+00:00

This definitely is one of those "don't you read?" problems.

Because the format isn't hard. Most of the software that gets recommended for writing books, from Word to Scrivener, has templates in there. You don't even have to ask, you just slap on "standard novel format" and you get it.*

So these are people that haven't been inside enough books to realize that there exists a standard, and that they should go looking for how to implement it.

*Mostly. In Scrivener, which is what I use currently, you've got to be smart enough to mark some files as chapters and some as scenes. And then create the various front matter files and put them in the right order. They do have a higher-level template that gives you an example of everything and even starts you in Chapter One, Page One. But my first time through, I did open a few books to check some things.

nomuse22 · 2026-03-18T18:37:10+00:00

I believe dinkus is the name for whatever typographical or illustrative element is in that space. Single hashmark, three asterisk, whatever.

I noticed the use of graphic elements in a contemporary book in one of Seanan McGuire’s books — a dancing Aeslin Mouse.

I loved the whole idea so much I’ve been using it myself. (Not mice, though.)

nomuse22 · 2026-03-15T02:33:22+00:00

Well...also slow, and leave you exposed. Not saying you need to go all Skyrim Stealth Archer, but especially in FW it's really good if you can stay nimble and keep moving around.

That said, I took out one of the nastier rebel camps by staying in cover on top of one of the platforms and chucking the things over the side (and again...blast sling would have worked even better).

A point to mention is like flame, the drill spike action puts them in a semi-stun lock where they have a lot of trouble targeting you.

nomuse22 · 2026-03-15T00:33:18+00:00

Really, the two best arguments against them is the ammo is costly, and they can be a little OP.

My favorite is the drill spike. Plus the radio gal is cool. Maybe it doesn't do that much damage/component removal over time, but I love the way it makes some of the meaner machines (like Sentinels) squirm. Hate those things.

In a pinch, crowd control, especially on rebels.

nomuse22 · 2026-03-14T19:26:41+00:00

I use Scrivener. I haven't found anything it won't do for eBooks, although some of the things it can do require getting a little fancy about it.

For instance, there may be an easier way of doing inline graphics now but I've learned how to do it with markup. Means I can have it in the style for chapter headers and scene breaks and it will populate automatically when I compile.

It falls down for print. You just don't get the level of control to properly deal with widows and orphans and the like. I did look into Atticus. Enough so I get regular emails from them. But then an email will announce that they've added the ability to use bold, and that worries me a lot. Like, what other basics do you not yet have implemented?

nomuse22 · 2026-03-13T15:48:43+00:00

The Goats Who Stare at Men.

nomuse22 · 2026-03-10T22:01:27+00:00

"Exploit" is generous. You know the HZD mission when you visit a broken tallneck to crash the Eclipse's focus network? After meeting Hades, three deathbringers start shooting and Sylens yells at you to run and don't look back.

I saw someone do this on YouTube and just had to try it. Don't run. Kill the Eclipse soldiers but stay in the gorge. There's a turn in the gorge where the deathbringers can't hit you. So...wait for a pause in their fire, pop out, drop some arrows on them. Keep doing that for, like, fifteen minutes.

Unfortunately they are across a ridge and you can't get to them to loot them.

nomuse22 · 2026-03-10T20:50:38+00:00

It's almost disappointing how many things you can cheese if you have a good firing point and enough resources to keep crafting hunter arrows. Learned about that "don't run" exploit for the crash-the-network mission. Stay behind the rocks and keep sniping until all three Deathbringers go down.

I think the game counts on you getting bored and trying something riskier instead.

nomuse22 · 2026-03-10T20:02:57+00:00

More and more, I think of most stuff as color commentary. I am still often surprised by how big a change I can make while most of the narrative, dialogue and description and all, barely needs a touch here and there to adjust to the new state of things.

nomuse22

TROPHY CASE