Welcome to the Hambone Publishing non-fiction book-writing template!

Did you know that the Table of Contents in Microsoft Word is like a webpage, that hyperlinks to the content? Go ahead and try it out, click on the first heading…

Hambone Template	3

The first bad habit	3

The second bad habit	4

Chapter Title Here	6

Using Topic Sentences	6

Why we use topic sentences	6

You can use the Topic Sentences as a way to navigate to various ideas in your book through the table of contents.	6

How we use topic sentences	7

Topic sentences like this one show up in blue.	7

Try turning this topic sentence’ style back to normal. It should turn black.	7

Other Common Styles	7

Chapter Beginning Quote	7

Regular Quote	8

Important Point	8

Breakout Box	8

Stories	9

Emphasis and Reference	9

Next Chapter Title	10

CHAPTER ONE

Hambone Template

“Following these instructions will save you time and money!” —Ben Phillips

This Microsoft Word template is designed to help you write your book as easily as possible. You are the author of the book, and your job is to encode this document with meaning. Later in the process, there will be a designer and a typesetter, their job is to design and lay out the book to most effectively communicate the meaning you gave it.

Most of us have used Word for many years, and unfortunately almost all of us have learned some bad habits which make the publishing process slower, more expensive, and more error-prone. The goal of this document is to help you use the styling tools in Microsoft Word to make the process faster, cheaper, and better.

Sounds good, don’t you think?

The first bad habit

The bad habit we all share is we use the font and paragraph tools to make the text look different. You might decide to change text to be bold, or italic, or larger, or a different font, for example.

What’s important as the author of a book, however, is capturing why you felt the need to make those changes to the text. Are you making it larger because it’s a category heading? Are you italicizing it for emphasis?

The answer to these questions is critical to ensuring that the format of your book matches your intentions as you write it, and to capture these intentions in the document we need to use ‘Styles’ in Word, rather than use the formatting tools directly.

Before you start writing, set up Word so that you have the ‘Styles Pane’ visible on the right-hand side of your screen. (If you’re not sure how, type “show styles pane” into Google).

The styles pane gives you a better view of all the possible styles you can use. Choose the option so that the list shows you just what is “In the current document”.

That’ll give you a list of all the style types used in this template, which we think cover most traditional ‘business book’ needs.

If you want to learn more about setting up styles, we recommend this article from Shauna Kelly. It’s an older article so the images are a little out of date, but the content is clear and concise.

The second bad habit

The second thing we’ve learned to do in Word which is unhelpful for the project of publishing a book, is to use keyboard entries to get the layout we want.

What do we mean by that? When you press ‘enter’ five times to get a new page. Or when you don’t know how to set up paragraph spacing, so you press enter twice to make a gap. Or you’re not sure how to indent text, so you press the space bar ten times.

If you use them, all of these workarounds will need to be corrected before your book can be published. That means you’re paying someone to seek them all out and delete them before your manuscript can be properly typeset and designed.

Remember, how your script appears in Word isn’t how it will appear in the book. It doesn’t matter if it looks terrible in Word, so long as you have applied all the appropriate styles to the text. The typesetter can tweak the styles until your book looks amazing, and it’s a quick and easy process if you’ve followed the guidelines in this template.

Hopefully, you’re happy enough with the paragraph layouts in this template that you can go ahead and write your book without feeling the need to change too much. If you really want to update the look, however, please make sure you’re doing so by updating the Style, not just by using the text formatting tools directly.

If you want to emphasize a word, don’t use italic or bold directly. Highlight the word, and then click on ‘emphasis’ in the style pane.

If you want to go to a new page, don’t click “enter” many times, go to the Insert menu and insert a ‘page break’.

CHAPTER TWO

Chapter Title Here

“Put a quote here if you like” —Mish Phillips

This chapter uses all the standard styles used in this template. Feel free to replace the text with your own writing!

Using Topic Sentences

Why we use topic sentences

You can use the Topic Sentences as a way to navigate to various ideas in your book through the table of contents.

The idea behind topic sentences in this template is that you start your book by creating the structure. Create all the chapters and major headings first to get a feel for the shape of your book. Once you’re feeling good about those, brainstorm a list of the key ideas you want to share in each chapter or under each heading, and style each of them as a Topic Sentence.

When you update the Table of Contents, you’ll see all those ideas appear.

Then, when you sit down to write tomorrow, you can scan your Table of Contents for a topic you’re excited by, click on the link, and start typing! It helps avoid the problem of reading and re-reading your introduction over and over!

How we use topic sentences

If you write your book “The Hambone Way”, you’ll start with a document of about a thousand words. It’ll have a table of contents, a bunch of chapter titles, a bunch of headings and sub-headings, and a whole heap of ideas styled “Topic Sentence”.

Topic sentences like this one show up in blue.

Each topic is just a sentence or two that is a concise description of the point you want to make in that section of the book. The wording isn’t critical, your job is to articulate the point clearly and effectively another day.

Each topic sentence will be replaced by at least a paragraph, and possibly even a whole page or two, of text. Once you’ve turned a topic sentence into prose you can either delete it, or—if it has become part of the text itself—change its style back to ‘normal’.

Try turning this topic sentence’ style back to normal. It should turn black.

Other Common Styles

There are a few styles we’ve created which appear in many books we’ve published. These are some of the standard choices to use in works of popular non-fiction.

Chapter Beginning Quote

“It’s very common to start a chapter with a quote.”

If you want to start your chapter with a relevant quote from a credible source, this is the style to use. Of course, once you’re into the body of the chapter you may wish to use more quotes, but they will likely be styled differently which is why we have…

Regular Quote

“Put quotes in your chapters.”

If you want quotations of other thinkers to be differentiated from the body text, you can use the Regular Quote style.

Important Point

This style is called ‘Important Point’, and you use it to highlight a key idea someone might want to absorb if they are skimming the book.

It’s common for people to skim non-fiction, and if you use the Important Point style effectively, someone could absorb the overall thrust of your message by skimming your book in five minutes and reading all of the headings and Important Points.

Breakout Box

This style is called ‘Breakout Box’, and you use it hold a certain ‘type’ of information consistently throughout the book.

We typically use breakout boxes to signify that the information contained is of a certain type. You might keep all of your practical exercises in the breakout boxes, for example.

It’s common to put information that someone might want to refer back to later in breakout boxes, since they are visually easy to find.

Stories

Often non-fiction books pull together lots of different perspectives on a topic, and it can be important to ensure that the reader doesn’t misunderstand whose perspective they are currently reading.

To that end, if you include extended stories or perspectives from others, it often pays to style them differently so the reader doesn’t fall under the misconception that it’s the opinion of the author they’re reading, since you might have a differing or nuanced point of view.

Including other voices in your book can be a powerful form of communication. Ensuring the reader understands when they’re reading your thoughts—and when they’re reading someone else’s perspective or story—can be critical to clear communication.

Use the Story style every time you want the reader to understand it’s someone else’s view they’re reading.

Emphasis and Reference

The two most common reasons authors reach for the font styling buttons are for emphasis and reference. In order to ensure that the finished, designed, typeset and published book includes all the emphasis you wanted (and highlights all the references you made correctly), rather than using italic or bold, you will use the emphasis and reference styles.

The nature of design and typesetting technology is that italics and bolded adjustments can go missing really easily, and once they’re gone they’re very difficult to notice in their absence!

Using the proper styles ensures the meaning you’re intending is baked into the code of the document and won’t be lost on the path to publication.

CHAPTER THREE

Next Chapter Title

“Quotes aren’t a necessity, just FYI” —Col Fink

Okay, if you understand how to use the template document, now you’re ready to start writing your book. Here’s the process:

Step One: Mind Map

Create a mind map of the structure of your book. Ideas are complex, often interconnected and non-linear. Because you’re going to publish them in a book, you’ll need to work out how you’re going to order them linearly.

Usually the best way to do this is with a mind map. Generally non-fiction works well to begin with Why (eg, you want the start of the book to motivate and inspire your readers), move to What (eg, give the audience the ‘big picture’ overview of the topic), and finally detail the How (eg, share the prescription and processes they might implement).

Of course, every topic and every author is different, so do it your way. The goal is to end up with a map of the book’s key ideas.

Step Two: Establish Priorities

The next step is to turn the mind map (which is probably non-linear, complex and colourful) into a linear series of ideas. The goal is to create a list of points (declarations, sentences, whatever feels right to you), and to assign them a priority.

Top priority is Chapter. This point will have a whole chapter dedicated to exploring it.

Second priority is Heading 1. This point will have a number of pages dedicated to exploring it.

Third priority is Heading 2. This point will have a number of paragraphs exploring it.

Fourth priority is Topic Sentence. This point will have a paragraph or two exploring it.

(All the above intended as general guides, you should feel free to tweak as you see fit).

Step Three: Paste and Format

Paste your list of points into this document, and format each one with the appropriate style from the Quick Style pane:

Once you’ve formatted them all, scroll back up to the Table of Contents, right click on it and update it. Now you can navigate to any chapter, heading, or topic sentence with a single click!

Step Four: Choose Your Discipline

Writing a book is a big job, but you’ve already made it much smaller by preparing the structure of your document. Your job now is to write, and it’s easy because you don’t have to think about what to write about.

You’ll still need a little discipline to get this project finished, and we suggest you choose one of two ways:

The first option is Time Discipline. Set aside a period of time that you’re going to write, and stick to it. Maybe it’s an hour per day, maybe it’s ten hours per week. Whatever you decide is right for you, choose an amount of time to dedicate to the job and mark it off in your calendar.

The second option is Word Count Discipline. Decide on a daily or weekly word count target and make sure you hit it. If you’ve done the work of preparing your Topic Sentences, 1000 words per day should be achievable.

Step Five: Write

Sit down, open your computer, choose a chapter, a heading or a topic sentence that resonates with your present mood, and start typing.