Formatting Self-Published Fiction, Part 1 - Widows

There were many things I had never learned about publishing when I approached the publication of my first title, and which I had never noticed about the thousands of books I had read. Among these things, perhaps the first one I did learn about (accidentally) was the infamous widow.

What is a widow?

In day-to-day life, a widow is a woman who has lost her husband through death. In a book, a widow is the final line of a paragraph appearing as the first line of a page of text. Pick up the nearest fiction book and scan quickly through the pages, as though it were a flip-book. Watch the tops of the pages. If you see any short lines there at all, they will turn out to be lines of dialogue, where a single short line can be an entire paragraph in its own right. In the three years that I have been searching for widows in traditionally published fiction, I've not found a single one.

I should note here that some authorities reverse the definitions of widow and orphan, in which a widow is listed as the first line of a paragraph at the bottom of a page, and an orphan is the last line of a paragraph appearing at the top of a page (definitions which actually make more sense to me); however, in my experience, most authorities define them in the manner I have given here.

They are, however, the hallmark error of the self-published author. Don't let this happen to your book.

If you know what a widow is before you release your first title for publication, you're already ahead of the game. The next step is to learn how to get rid of them. There are two ways to do this. HINT: Neither of them is to let your word processor do the job. Turning "widow control" on will not do the job. More on that later.

Avoiding the problem.

The first, and perhaps the easiest, way to keep widows out of your finished book is to keep them from appearing in the first place. If you write directly into your final page format, you will see them as they occur, and if you write in a more traditional "manuscript" format (8 1/2 x 11, double-spaced, etc), then you will see them when you place the text in its final publication format. In either case, when you see a widow, you can simply go into the text anywhere on the previous page and reword it, adding or subtracting until the widow is gone. The final line of the paragraph will now be the last line on the previous page, or it will be the second line on the next page.

This is fairly easy. And it can be a major headache. Here are some reasons why:

1) You can't even begin to do this until you're through writing the portion of the book you wish to "de-widow," as subsequent changes will wipe out all your hard work.

2) Sooner or later, you're going to find a page that you just can't rewrite to get rid of a widow.

3) Sooner or later, you're going to want to release a book in another format, perhaps with a different page size or text size, both of which are going to create a whole new set of widows.

The far better way is to adjust the lines per page.

Pick up that same fiction book you just scanned through. Flip it again, this time watching the bottoms of the pages. You'll see the last line of the text block appear to jump up and down as the pages progress. This is the industry standard for getting rid of widows.

Here's the "more" I promised on letting the program do this for you: facing pages must match. If you simply turn on widow control and write, then you will have a left-hand page with one line more or less than the right-hand page. don't let this happen to you book, either!

You can, however, leave widow control on while you write, rewrite, edit, and generally agonize over your masterpiece. Just be sure you turn it off for this next phase.

When the book is finished, before you create the file you're going to send off to the publisher or printer, go very, very carefully through your book. Find every single widow, one at a time, beginning from the front of the book. When you find a widow, take these steps:

1) Manually break the paragraph at the end of the next-to-last line on the page before the widow. Be sure to get rid of the space that was between the words.

2) Insert an empty paragraph between the two you just created. Now there is a blank line in the last position on the page, a full line at the top of the next page, and the partial line in the second position.

3) Manually change the alignment options for the two paragraphs that straddle the page break. The last paragraph of the first page needs to have its last line set with full justification, while the indent in the first line after the break needs to be gotten rid of.

4) You will find all of these settings in the "paragraph properties" of your word processor. To make this easiest, you can define new paragraph styles that have the settings you need for these two situations, and after you break the paragraph, simply set the preceding and following paragraphs to the right style.

5) You're not done! You need to make the facing page match. Do the left-hand page first, then the right-hand page.

This may seem like a lot of work, but if you want your self-published book to be taken seriously, these are steps that your really need to take.

Coming next: Formatting Self-Published Fiction, Part 2 - Orphans