Do I need to format my Word file before sending it to a formatter?

You need to structure it, not format it. What a formatter or a conversion tool reads is which style each paragraph carries, not how the page looks. A manuscript that marks its chapters with Heading 1 and its body text with Normal is ready, even if it is set in Times New Roman at double spacing. A manuscript that marks its chapters by making the first line of each one 16 point and bold is not, no matter how consistent it looks.

Should my manuscript use smart quotes?

Yes. Curly quotes and apostrophes are what a book prints, and converting them later is a step that can go wrong in ways that are hard to see. Word does this automatically through autocorrect — turn the option on, type normally, and the file carries typographic punctuation from the start. If the manuscript is already written, find and replace converts straight quotes, but do it carefully and read the results: a global replace can turn every apostrophe in "don't" the wrong way.

How do I know whether my chapter headings are real styles?

Click into the line. Word's style gallery shows which style the paragraph carries. If it says Normal, the size and boldness you applied are decoration attached to a body paragraph, and every tool downstream reads it as body text. The Navigation pane is the quicker test: it lists the document's structure, and a manuscript with real heading styles lists its chapters there.

Should I add page numbers, headers, or a title page design in Word?

No. Page numbers, running heads, and the layout of the title page belong to the book, not the manuscript, and they are built by the typesetting. Anything you build in Word gets stripped, so the hour spent is an hour spent on something no reader will see. Put the title, the subtitle and your name on the first page as plain text and stop there.

How to prepare a Word manuscript for formatting

Most formatting problems are not formatting problems. They are problems that were already in the Word file, waiting: chapters that are big bold text rather than headings, indents made of tab characters, a scene break that is three asterisks here and a blank line there, straight quotes where curly ones should be. The conversion does not create these problems. It surfaces them.

An hour of preparation makes every later step — conversion, layout, export — quieter.

The one principle

Word documents carry two layers: what each paragraph is, and what each paragraph looks like.

A line set at 14 point, bold, centred, in a paragraph marked Normal is, to every tool that reads the file, a body paragraph with decoration on it. The same line in a paragraph marked Heading 1 is a chapter, whatever it looks like.

Everything below follows from that. A manuscript is ready when its structure lives in styles.

Use the real heading styles

Heading 1 for chapter titles. One per chapter, nothing else.
Heading 2 for sections inside a chapter, if your book has them.
Normal for body text. Every paragraph of it, including the ones after a scene break.

The test is Word’s Navigation pane. If it lists your chapters, the file is structured. If it is empty, the headings are decoration, and the conversion will read a novel with no chapters in it.

Renaming a style does not change what it means. If your chapters were typed as **Title**, or as **Heading 3** because you liked its size, either change the style's formatting to match what you wanted, or select the paragraphs and apply the right style. What matters downstream is which style the paragraph carries, not what the style is called.

Stop making indents by hand

A first-line indent made with the Tab key is a tab character inside the paragraph. In a book it prints as a gap that no style can control, and it survives into the EPUB as a tab where an indent should be.

Set the indent on the Normal style itself: Paragraph → Indentation → Special → First line. Then remove the tabs. The same goes for indents made by typing spaces, and for blank paragraphs used to push text down the page — spacing between paragraphs belongs to the style, and a blank paragraph in a book is a paragraph that prints as nothing.

Punctuation: the three find-and-replaces

Three characters behave differently in a manuscript than in a book, and all three are fixable in minutes.

Straight quotes. Books print curly ones. Word’s autocorrect produces them as you type if “straight quotes” with smart quotes is enabled; for a finished manuscript, Find and Replace with the same option on converts them. Read the results rather than trusting the count — a quote that opens a quotation and never closes it comes out facing the wrong way.

Double spaces between sentences. A typesetting engine collapses them anyway, but every one of them survives into word counts, line-break decisions and e-readers that do not. Replace two spaces with one until the count reports zero replacements.

Hyphens standing in for dashes. A pause in fiction is an em dash — like this — with no spaces. Two hyphens typed quickly convert to an em dash under autocorrect; a finished manuscript typed with autocorrect off often carries thousands of double hyphens, and they print as double hyphens.

Mark scene breaks one way

If the manuscript uses a centred line of asterisks between scenes, use it every time. If it uses a blank line, know that a blank line is invisible at the top or bottom of a printed page — the reason books print a mark is covered in scene breaks, and how to set them.

What matters here is consistency. A converter can find * * * and turn every one into a proper scene break. It cannot find ***, * * *, three blank lines, and the words scene break and know that all four are the same intention.

Chapters without page breaks

Do not start each chapter with a manual page break. The typesetting decides where chapters begin — on a new page, on a right-hand page, with how much space above the title — and a manual break inside the manuscript fights it.

A chapter is a Heading 1 paragraph, and that is the whole marking. If the file has a century of Ctrl+Enter in it, remove them; they will otherwise drag blank pages into the layout.

What not to do in Word

The manuscript is not the book. It is worth saying plainly, because most of the effort people put into Word manuscripts goes into things the book discards:

No headers, footers, or page numbers. The book builds its own.
No fonts chosen for the body text. The book’s design sets the typeface. Your Times New Roman or Calibri carries no information worth keeping.
No line spacing set to double. That exists so a human can mark up a printout.
No designed title page. The title, subtitle and author name, as plain text, is all the input the title page needs.
No chapter titles typed in ALL CAPS for effect. Capitalisation of headings is a design decision, applied everywhere at once — write the chapter title the way it should read.

Notes, links, and images

Footnotes typed at the foot of the page as normal paragraphs have lost their attachment to the sentence that refers to them. Use Word’s real footnotes — References → Insert Footnote — so the connection travels with the file; endnotes are covered in footnotes and endnotes.

Images should be inserted into the document, not pasted as screenshots of other applications, and they should be the largest version you have: resolution is covered in putting images inside a book. Hyperlinks can stay as links; they export to the EPUB and are dropped in print, where a link has nothing to point at.

The short version

Every chapter title is Heading 1; every body paragraph is Normal.
No tabs, no space-indents, no blank spacer paragraphs.
Curly quotes, one space between sentences, real em dashes.
Scene breaks marked the same way throughout.
No manual page breaks, headers, footers, or designed title page.
Real footnotes. Images inserted, full size.

A manuscript that passes this list converts cleanly because there is nothing left to guess: the structure is explicit, and the appearance no longer pretends to be structure.

Nueel reads the styles and the structure rather than the surface of the file, and shows you what it found before anything is laid out — so a manuscript that is honest about its chapters, its scene breaks and its notes goes in cleanly, and one that is not gets caught at the review step instead of after the book is built.

Common questions

Do I need to format my Word file before sending it to a formatter?: You need to structure it, not format it. What a formatter or a conversion tool reads is which style each paragraph carries, not how the page looks. A manuscript that marks its chapters with Heading 1 and its body text with Normal is ready, even if it is set in Times New Roman at double spacing. A manuscript that marks its chapters by making the first line of each one 16 point and bold is not, no matter how consistent it looks.
Should my manuscript use smart quotes?: Yes. Curly quotes and apostrophes are what a book prints, and converting them later is a step that can go wrong in ways that are hard to see. Word does this automatically through autocorrect — turn the option on, type normally, and the file carries typographic punctuation from the start. If the manuscript is already written, find and replace converts straight quotes, but do it carefully and read the results: a global replace can turn every apostrophe in "don't" the wrong way.
How do I know whether my chapter headings are real styles?: Click into the line. Word's style gallery shows which style the paragraph carries. If it says Normal, the size and boldness you applied are decoration attached to a body paragraph, and every tool downstream reads it as body text. The Navigation pane is the quicker test: it lists the document's structure, and a manuscript with real heading styles lists its chapters there.
Should I add page numbers, headers, or a title page design in Word?: No. Page numbers, running heads, and the layout of the title page belong to the book, not the manuscript, and they are built by the typesetting. Anything you build in Word gets stripped, so the hour spent is an hour spent on something no reader will see. Put the title, the subtitle and your name on the first page as plain text and stop there.