Obviously spaced-out words on one line...: "Filling word" use?

Because it's easily fixed through formatting? i.e. not using justified text.

I've never seen this in a trade published novel. Maybe I'm not reading the right (wrong?) books

That's why typographers are so very important for printed books. With slightly more sophisticated software, you can adjust the tracking, the spacing between words. MS Word used to have an automated tracking tool of sorts on older Mac versions; I'm not sure it's still in MS Word.

In Design of course does tracking, as does Quark. Pages for the Mac also lets you adjust tracking; this is a standard task in creating printed books.

ETA: See this for MS Word.

Filler words are most definitely not added to trade-published books. Instead, we employ typesetters, who are skilled beyond words. A good typesetter can transform a book. A bad one can make a book almost unreadable.

You cannot duplicate the skill of a good typesetter by tweaking the formatting of your book. It's far more complex than Word can manage.

Gaston said:

Before publishing my own work on Create Space, I had never paid attention to this: Some lines have huge spaces between words! Just before a big word stretched it by jumping the line of course... While this exists in all publications, some have very modest amounts, leading me to believe "filler words" are edited in...

Left totally unchecked, the effect can be hugely jarring I find.

The funny part is, except for critical parts, especially in dialogues (those being better minimally altered), the actual reading "flow", beyond the spacing, is often slightly improved by this re-thinking.

This cost me a huge effort to fix this on 700 pages (to a degree I felt acceptable), yet I realize all this work is valid only for my ONE format...

I can't imagine an editor wading in all this, mucking up the intricate balance of my neat, consistent paragraphs...

I had never heard of this editing issue, although in narrow column magazines (mostly) it would often be really obvious. But a hugely stretched line (say 1/4 "air") still seems very uncommon in the broader paragraphs of books. How is it that this is never mentioned among editing woes?

Gaston

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I don't know how that's the explanation you came up with as most likely, but it's decidedly not the case. No one is sticking in extra words to not have spaces due to wonky justifying. They fix the text through formatting or typesetting.

Is your book going to be published as an e-book or as a paper book? I believe there is software that helps with formatting e-books correctly too.

One issue I've seen, even with trade-published e-books, are incorrect letters and words showing up at random (one e-book from a major SFF publisher I read recently had the word "mere" subbed in for "merc" frequently, along with an unacceptably high number of typos, not to mention occasional "nonsense" phrases that are most definitely not present in the original paper edition). This seems to be a problem with the digital scanning of older books that are recently re-issued as e-books for Kindle. There are also those odd little boxes that occasionally replace a single letter in some e-books. These are things a human proof reader would catch.

That's a different issue than what you are describing, though. In general, trade-published e-books don't have the spacing issue you describe, and they must have better software for formatting than what create space utilizes.

starrystorm said:

If it's justified then go to the end of the sentence and press Tab button on your keyboard.

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Dear god no. Only use tabs for data in tables. That's it.

Roxxsmom said:

That's a different issue than what you are describing, though. In general, trade-published e-books don't have the spacing issue you describe, and they must have better software for formatting than what create space utilizes.

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It's not on Create Space to typeset the book. That's on the author.

This is a tracking issue. Use a layout / typesetting application that supports tracking to produce the file you submit to Amazon.

Check the file (usually a .PDF) by printing it out in hardcopy and looking at Every Single Page.

AW Admin said:

Dear god no. Only use tabs for data in tables. That's it.

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Yes, sorry. Anyway, good luck, and I hope this issue gets solved.

Gaston said:

I checked the Kindle version of the first half of my book, and despite their changing the margin width (and so the last word per line), and still having both sides justified, you are right: There is no obvious spacing issue. Only slight variations.

The problem seems less avoidable on narrow triple columns like magazines, unless they break up words. The fault is not with Create Space, who simply duplicate my files on paper: The fault is with Microsoft Word not doing this well: It is a Word file that Kindle gets, yet the Kindle outcome is ok...

You do see significant variations between lines in publishing, but what Microsoft Word does is just terrible... It did force me to improve a lot of otherwise unattended things, but I wonder: Does this mean avoiding Word as a writing platform?

G.

P.S. I wrote the entire novel on Wordpad, then this got moved to Word itself: Could that explain the issue?

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The problem isn't with Word.

cornflake said:

The problem isn't with Word.

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Correct. It's with knowing how to use Word properly. The margin justification problem hasn't yet been addressed here.

caw

Gaston said:

You do see significant variations between lines in publishing, but what Microsoft Word does is just terrible... It did force me to improve a lot of otherwise unattended things, but I wonder: Does this mean avoiding Word as a writing platform?

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No the problem is not with Word. It's with how you are using MS Word.

Did you follow Amazon's instructions?

Gaston said:

Aside being very slightly narrow on the gutter (for 700 pages), which they fixed, I don't see that I did anything.

It seems to me the problem is in part unavoidable: If a big word is at the end of the first line of any paragraph, and it gets shoved to the next line, then there is no adjustment possible by drawing in from a previous line. This why the first line of a paragraph is often "airy"...: I have two Stephen Kings here, one 1980s small paperback in fine print, and one big 2006 hardcover with oversized print: The old book is a lot tighter generally, with only rarely a noticeably loose line, but the big print has a lot of them, some really bad: Either the big print is less forgiving, or 2006 typesetting is less good than it was in 1985...

G.

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It's not less good -- those are specific choices about justification and typesetting made by the publishing house for a whole variety of reasons, including convention (of the era, the genre, the type of book being printed [mass-market, large-print, hc, etc.], the cost at the time, the decisions of the author, editor, marketing department, designer, etc., etc., as regards font, sizing, yada yada sis boom bah.

Believe us, please. The software is easily used, by those who understand it, in order to format in whatever way is desired. If you just justify to the right, a lot of the issues you describe would seem to be resolvable.

There are multiple ways to prevent this--futzing with the kerning (space between letters within words) as well as the spacing between words themselves and (when it can be gracefully done) splitting words. I do print interior layouts for my author co-op, and spend an average of 12-15 hours on each book going over every page as well as designing the front and back matter, using Word then converting to a pdf. I was recently given a copy of InDesign, and when life calms down I'm looking forward to learning to use it for interiors.

cornflake said:

If you just justify to the right, a lot of the issues you describe would seem to be resolvable.

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This, for starters. Do you not know how to do this?

caw

Gaston said:

Yes, but justifying to both sides seems to be how all professionally printed books have been done for centuries... I actually thought of leaving one side uneven, to relieve the issue. But then I realized only self-published books are like that... And straight sides do look more natural to me.

I did see the Word program "fattening" or "thinning" words as I filled my lines with filler letters, filler words, or even filler punctuation... So that feature of was working, and I doubt I would like badly stretched words.

Maybe my choice of words made this issue more common or obvious... I usually found the "enforced" re-work was a little better, so I kept doing things that way. It made me look at things I would not otherwise have looked at...

Gaston

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It seems to me that learning how to use the program would be a more efficient solution, especially if you plan to publish other books.

Filler... punctuation??

Gaston said:

Yes, but justifying to both sides seems to be how all professionally printed books have been done for centuries... I actually thought of leaving one side uneven, to relieve the issue. But then I realized only self-published books are like that... And straight sides do look more natural to me.
[…]
Gaston

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Ah... no.
I self publish and all my work center justified (both sides straight).

I do my last few editing passes with my novel in the KDP template, and if I see a line that looks funky I look at rewording it. It’s never a huge issue though. However, I did use the word anthropomorphism in this book which may present an problem... I’ll wait and see.

Gaston said:

So it does happen, but is never spoken about... That was my whole point. Rethinking all these random lines does have "enforced" benefits I find, especially when the author himself gets to see and correct to the actual final format... Isn't this part of what an editor used to do, hence the "tighter" 1985 Stephen King and the "looser" 2006 one?

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So you're suggesting Stephen King's 1980s books had words inserted by the editor in order to make the kerning work out?

That's...a pretty big leap.

For a current example: the majority of the edits on my books were done in Word, before the final layout was done in InDesign. After that, there was copy editing, but nobody inserted words or punctuation to make the lines work out. And while I've had plenty of people dislike my work, nobody's carped about the kerning.

But I'm perfectly willing to believe that the reason I don't sell like Stephen King is because the typesetter neglected the spacing on the ellipses.

Gaston said:

So it does happen, but is never spoken about... That was my whole point. Rethinking all these random lines does have "enforced" benefits I find, especially when the author himself gets to see and correct to the actual final format... Isn't this part of what an editor used to do, hence the "tighter" 1985 Stephen King and the "looser" 2006 one?

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No, it doesn't happen.

indianroads is self-published. He does whatever he wants to his books, because it's just him.

Steven King is trade-published. Now, since I can't see the page your referring to, I can't be sure what was done, but I am absolutely positive that his editors are not "adjusting" or editing his books to deal with line length.

Editors don't care about line length, for one thing. And at the point they're dealing with a ms. it's not been type set and so they don't know what the lines will look like.

For another thing, professional editors working for a reputable publishing house don't add or subtract words. They annotate the ms. and ask the author to make changes.

If the 2006 edition is an fact a large-print edition published for the visually disabled, once you're dealing with pages of type in 18 or 24 pt type, there really isn't a lot of adjustment you can make in terms of line-breaks and aesthetic values.

Typesetters deal with line length, using a program like In Design, or Quark.

Self-published authors interested in producing typeset printed books might hire a typesetter, use a program like Publish or Pages (which will at least let them adjust tracking) or bite the bullet, learn about typesetting and buy In Design.

But even in Microsoft Word there are some things that can be done if you're self-publishing.

The "spaced-out words" are caused by less than precise full justification that's automatic, and not adjusted via tracking. It can sometimes be an effect that's increased by using two spaces after terminal punctuation, or tabs for indents or inadvertently inserted invisible characters like control characters or non-breaking spaces that are used incorrectly.