Play Story Press Style Guide

  2. Play Story Press Style Guide

Formatting the manuscript properly allows Play Story Press™ to work efficiently with your text. This is important in each edition of the book, i.e. hardback, paperback, digital, requires a different level of design. If we don’t have a clean manuscript when the design process starts, we lose focus editing at least three different documents.

We primarily use Vellum (https://vellum.pub/), which is free to download for macOS. You can submit your manuscript as a .vellum or .docx file. You can find some general guidelines for preparing your manuscript to import into Vellum (https://help.vellum.pub/importing/), along with further detailed documentation (https://help.vellum.pub/downloads/VellumAdvancedImportDocuments.zip). If you have different goals for the formatting of your projects, please contact us and we can discuss how we might be able to support your more unique project needs.

That said, in general authors and editors are expected to follow this basic style guide (PlayStoryPress-Style-Guide.pdf). If there are mistakes, Play Story Press editors will work with the authors until the major errors have been fixed.

Process Overview

  • Please make sure you have followed the Play Story Press Book Style Guide available to authors and editors.
  • For edited books, journals, and proceedings that include multiple authors, you should identify one editor who will compile all the essays and work with the Play Story Press editor to ensure that all material is submitted.
  • Manuscripts must be turned created usoing Microsoft Word. You should send your manuscript/journal as one .docx file.
  • If your manuscript contains Images, Graphics, Tables, or Charts, please include in the manuscript and send a folder (“booktitle_images”) with the images formatted as described below.

Once we have imported the files into the system and completed the layout, we will share template drafts with journal editors or book authors. You will be able to make editorial changes and choose various templated layouts for the book.

Info To Include When You Send A Draft

We use this metadata in two places:

  • to generate your book in Lulu, which in turn sends this data out to all the retailers; and
  • to create your book page on the Play Story Press website and repository.

Article/Chapter Formatting

Here’s a few notes about importing into templates

  • Please be sure to use Microsoft Word (.docx).
  • The Table of Contents (TOC) is auto-generated using the Article/Chapter Title and Subtitle using word heading styles. Mark each chapter in H1 heading; Chapter #.
  •         We have the ability to include author names with the TOC depending upon the template.
  • DO NOT indent your work. Please use the ENTER/RETURN key for paragraph breaks. The text should be left justified. If you do this, we can add the paragraph indents later (if you choose.)
  •         Indented paragraphs bring extra formatting into the system, which limits what templates can do.
  • Make sure that your Titles and Subtitles don’t contain any special characters as this can interfere with the process. If necessary, rename your document before submitting.
  • Create footnotes and endnotes with Microsoft Word’s tools and they will transfer into templates.
  • Please make sure you don’t include columns in your work. All pages should be formatted like a basic Word document.
  • Please don’t use Page Breaks to separate any sections.

Article/Chapter Title: Subtitle

Byline

Subheads + Nested Subheads

Please don’t use bold to signify your article or chapter title or any subheads. Instead use H1 for article titles. Our system creates a new article/chapters with Chapter # in H1 style.

Within the article, please use H2, H3, H4 for subheads and nested subheads. Don’t use bold to indicate those. Like the H1 format, the H2, H3, H4 formats are auto-generated within the article so that you can design your document the way you want it.

Other Formatting

If you want to use bold, italics, or underline in your body text, you should add that. Our templates will import those three things.

To create lists, you can use Microsoft bullet points or numbers.

If you want to use block quotes, you will need to set that off by marking the text you would like to be blocked off.

[block quote] Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. [block quote]

Since we use templates that export for print and download, we don’t provide indexes.

Images, Graphics, Tables, and Charts

Our templates created both a print PDF of your work and an ePUB. What this means is we can’t design tables, or charts for you because with ePUB files there is no fixed page size. The only way we can make Images, Graphics, Tables, or Charts work is if you create a .JPEG, .GIF or .PNG file.

How to Arrange Your Files on the Draft

You can embed images, graphics, tables, and charts within the Word document.

If your book includes images, graphics, tables, or charts, embed the image in the text where you would like it to be located AND make sure you have named the image file properly.

Just below this indicated, please write the caption as you’d like it. For instance:

Image 1: This is a picture that does the thing I want it to do.

You will then include a separate folder (entitled “booktitle_images”) where you will include backup copies of the images. Each image should be labeled to match its place in the book. (image_1.1, table_1.1, etc).

Specs for Images, Graphics, Tables, and Charts

  • Images should be high resolution, 300 dpi if possible; and
  • Since we use templates, we generally format all pictures to be proportionally sized on the page.
  •         We have some ability to manipulate the height and width once the Images, Graphics, Tables, or Charts are in the system.

Other Notes

Copy Editing

We strongly encourage writers and editors to hire professional copy editors for their work. While Play Story Press doesn’t provide those services, we can recommend professional copy editors who work in various formats, e.g. Chicago, APA, MLA. Most copy editors work on either a per hour ($25-50) or per project basis.

Design-Heavy Book

While many of the books we publish at Play Story Press can be handled with our basic style guide, we do from time to time work with books that require a great deal of design work, such a coffee table book or those with a great deal of graphics. In those cases, we will coordinate with the editor or author to develop a specialized style guide to handle these particular books.

As an editor or author, you can help us with that process by describing the type of book you’d like to see published in the Play Story Press™ Book Proposal Form. The earlier we begin to style guide modifications, the easier it is for everyone in the publishing chain.