I have a novel with parts. What is the best way to format back matter?
There aren’t too many standards for this to my knowledge, are you looking to add a glossary or some background information? That is probably all up to you, but if your publisher wants some additional material, they probably have a specification for that. Whatever the case, there isn’t anything dedicated for this in Scrivener, so you can just approach it like you would any other section of your book. You may have to do some post-production work in a word processor if you need to switch to a different heading style. Hard to say without any more detail!
Basically I just want an acknowledgements section, author information, call to action. Stuff like that.
Here’s the problem. My novel is set up as a novel with parts. If I just add a new part/chapter to the end for this, it formats everything according to the compile settings for those sections. This could all be solved if there was just some way to manually designate a scene as a particular section type, such as a 1+ or something I don’t use in the main body. Then I could format it however I want. But no.
What I really need to do is be able to have those sections without the title information from part/chapter folders and without the padding that is specified for any of these sections. I’m sure there’s a work around without trying to format in another program. That kind of defeats the purpose.
They should really add this functionality. Think I’ll add this to the feature request section.
This is the sort of thing publishers do, unless you’re self-publishing, in which case . . .
I don’t do self-publishing, but I should think an easy workaround would be to format the backmatter the way you want it to look, then when you compile set it to compile as-is.
For an easy way to format it the way you want it (or anything else) to look, copy a page of backmatter from a book you admire, and save it as a Template. Break down its component parts (headings, paragraphs, whatever) and save as Formatting Presets.
Yes, but there’s no way to get rid of the titles for part/chapter folders because that stuff is already formatted in the compile settings for the rest of the document. The only thing Scrivener lets you do is get rid of the prefix/suffix information for individual sections. It will still compile the title of the section because I need it to display that information for the rest of the document, i.e. part titles and chapter titles.
And, yes, I am self-publishing, so I’m doing it myself.
Any folder or text-group or text that is individually marked to be compiled As-Is will not include the title in the compile. Folders, text-groups, and texts not so marked, will compile with or without their titles according to how you choose in the Formatting pane of the compile settings.
But as indicated above by Ahab, when a text is compiled As-Is, whatever formatting you see in editing is the formatting you get in output. In your case, if these back matter folders have no text, only titles, that should make no difference to you.
You might also need to check Page Break Before on the individual back matter texts as well.
- asotir
You have Part folders, and Chapter folders in them, right? And scene documents in the chapter folders?
Why not customize a Level 1 document formatting line in the compile window’s Formatting section?
Okay, thanks. I finally figured out how to insert a Level 1 document inside my manuscript. Now, I just need to figure out how to put a blank page in front of it because the acknowledgments should be on a the right page (for the print version). I tried adding a blank document before but it just ignores it on compile.
Look under the Help Menu for the list of Placeholder Tags; lots of neat things there.
The one you are looking for is:
<$BLANK_PAGE>
Make that the text of an otherwise empty document that goes right before the doc that opens on a verso which you want to open on a recto.
- asotir
There are already existing discussions on features like this; there is no need to create a new thread. In short Keith has already stated that there will most likely be something for back matter in the future.
Meanwhile some people recommend having two different sets of compile settings (not too difficult with the Project Format Presets feature), and selecting the back matter folder separately from the main content, compiling that to a file and then joining the files together after compile.
Myself, I prefer using the Formatting pane, as described above, for this kind of thing, and As-Is can work as well, though you then have to keep the formatting of the text in sync with your compile settings by hand.
Also note the “First Page” tab in the Section Layout… button of the Formatting compile pane. With supported formats you can force a new chapter/section to appear on the recto or verso page. See pages 379–83 for documentation on the feature.
The <$BLANK_PAGE> token was the predecessor for this feature, but it remains useful for one-off cases that don’t fit a formatting formula.