First, I recommend turning on the Navigation Pane, especially if your book uses chapter titles.
To turn this on, click View from the top menu, and then make sure there is a check mark beside “Navigation Pane”. This allows you to navigate within your book quickly and easily, jumping to designated chapters.
Second, turn on the Show Formatting Marks feature. This will show you where you have paragraph breaks, page breaks, and more formatting elements used within your manuscript.
If you click Home from the top menu, you’ll see the "show or hide" paragraph marks button right beside the styles panel. Having formatting marks visible will make the next steps much easier.
Now that we understand the different settings, let’s get into the steps to preparing your manuscript for Atticus. It’s important to understand that your entire manuscript will import into the Body section of Atticus.
Preparing Your Manuscript for Import
First, it’s important to delete any Table of Contents you may have in your original manuscript. If it’s linked within the Word document, it will create internal coding issues when the format is converted in Atticus. Atticus automatically creates a Contents page for every book that is properly formatted for both ePub and Print, and automatically updates with any changes you make.
Front Matter
Atticus automatically creates a Title Page, Copyright Page, and Contents page. Remove these pages from your Word document before importing.
If you have a dedication page, introduction, or any other front matter content, you can leave that in your Word document and simply drag and drop it into place in the Front Matter section after importing. Your chapters will be renumbered in the body section automatically.
Handling Chapter Breaks
Making sure your chapters separate properly once imported into Atticus is one of the most important steps to saving time and energy in the formatting process. Three ways you can format your chapters before importing into Atticus is by :
Insert a page break between chapters
Label your Chapter Title text as Word's default Heading 1.
Ensure each new Chapter Title is 20 points or larger.
Setting Chapter Titles
If you follow these instructions, Atticus knows where to start a new chapter, and your Titles will import into the appropriate Chapter title location.
This will also automatically include your chapter title in the left navigation menu of Atticus, as well as the auto-generated table of contents.
If you use the Heading 1 style, you’ll also see them show up in the Navigation pane inside Word, making it easier to navigate through your original manuscript.
If you don’t use chapter titles, a simple page break between chapters will work perfectly.
Subheadings and Special Paragraph Styles
If you have subheadings in your book, you can apply Word default Heading 2 through Heading 6, and they will import as unique subheading formats to Atticus. Once imported, you can set the style for this subheading in your custom theme settings.
Scene Breaks
Another element you may want to make sure is properly set in your Word document before importing into Atticus is your scene breaks.
If you use three asterisks, with no spacing or any other formatting applied to them between your scenes, Atticus will automatically convert those to placeholder scene breaks when imported. This will allow you to quickly customize the break to an ornamental design element with a single click and apply this design to all scene breaks in your entire book.
Footnotes
Finally, if you plan on having footnotes or endnotes in your final book, you’ll want to set those up in Word as Footnotes. Atticus will import them easily, and you can add your preferences in your theme settings.
Endnotes
If you’ve already set up your notes in Word as endnotes, unfortunately, they won’t translate over to Atticus.
It’s super easy to convert them to footnotes, though.
Make a copy of your Word document (if you don’t want to alter the original).
Open this file in Word and click the References Tab. Click the expand menu icon in the Footnote/Endnote Section.
Click Convert, then select ‘Convert all endnotes to footnotes’ and click OK.
When you upload this version to Atticus, all notes will be recognized and added to the text, you can then select their location on the Formatting Tab.
Importing and Customizing in Atticus
Beyond these simple formatting settings, it doesn’t matter too much how your manuscript is set in Word. You’ll be able to set your font styles, paragraph settings, line spacing, and much more within Atticus.
Docx File Won’t Import?
If you’ve gone through this tutorial and are having trouble getting your manuscript to import into Atticus, here are a few extra steps to check:
Sometimes, online book stores like Amazon will not accept links inside your book. If you have added hyperlinks to your manuscript, we recommend removing all hyperlinks from your manuscript file before you import. Then, place all of your links directly into Atticus. This ensures they will be accepted by online book stores and e-readers.
If you have a lot of images, or even a few large images, your document may be timing out before it can be properly imported. We recommend that you save all your images into a separate folder and remove them from your doc-x file for the most efficient importing.
Once your book is in Atticus, you can import and format each image individually. This way, they can align perfectly with your vision without interrupting your importing process. Atticus fully supports images once your manuscript is inside the app.
Lastly, ensure you are using the correct file type.
Atticus only imports doc.x files. The x at the end is very important. Any other file type, try resaving it as a doc.x, and try to import to Atticus. This time, your manuscript should import smoothly!
What Next
If you’d like to learn more about Writing or Formatting, be sure to check out our videos and training on our tutorials page.
If you’d like to see how to style paragraph settings or customize images for scene breaks, check out our tutorial, Create a Custom Theme next!