My Formatting Disaster

What does it look like when a book's formatting goes wrong in basically every way it can? My first book, The Fractured Tree, is the answer. I'd formatted it like a poem, everything left-aligned instead of properly indented prose, and I'd messed up the trim size so badly that the finished book came out the size of a notebook instead of a normal paperback.

How I fixed it, and what I use now

These days I use Google Docs, with a default formatting template already set up correctly for books: margins, spacing, indentation, all pre-configured, so I don't have to think about any of it each time I start a new manuscript.

But back then, for The Fractured Tree, there was no quick patch available. Why not? Because the problems weren't cosmetic, they were structural, baked into the file from the start. I had to unpublish the book entirely, restructure and completely reformat the manuscript, and redesign the cover to match. I deconstructed my entire publishing process and started over from scratch.

It's the same zen-garden mindset from Write a Book: being willing to tear the whole thing down and rebuild it from nothing, even after it's already published and live for readers to buy, rather than staying attached to a broken version just because you already put the work in once.