Allyson Johnson

The Publishing Journey: Step 10 – Chapter Breaks

My final draft of The Three Lives of Mary Sutton has been proofread. (Yes, “Mellie” and “Melly” are the same person, as are “Micky” and “Mickey”. Standardize on “Mellie” and “Mickey.” No, the family did not move from 16th Street to 6th Street; that’s a typo. Yes, I know this speech by Mame is not grammatically correct, but that’s how she would have talked in 1877.)

Now comes the layout stage. How is the book going to look? I confess, I haven’t thought beyond the cover, but my project manager is full of questions.

PM: Do you have thoughts on how to divide the book?

AJ: It should be divided into three sections corresponding to the three lives.

PM: Where should the part markers appear? Before which chapters?

AJ: I had thought that there should be four page-breaks – the first introduction to Mary Sutton and then for each of the three lives there would be the start of a new page. If the designer thinks we need a separate page with just the  name and year to mark each section, that’s ok, though the first section is very short.

PM: I didn’t realize that you only include those section headers—there’s no chapter breaks at all. We can definitely keep it this way if you’d like; however, I wanted to note that the reading experience will be better for a reader if we have chapters. Let me know what you think.

[to myself: Chapters! It’s a story, it goes along. I indicated breaks in the story line by the standard Chicago Book of Style – no indentation for a paragraph that starts a new section. What more do I need? But if “the experience will be better for a reader” I’ll have to go for it.]

AJ: How would you suggest I break up the sections into chapters?  I did indicate breaks by extra spaces and lack of indentation – would each of these breaks be a new chapter?  Do chapters require numeration? Heading?  Would appreciate your guidance here.

PM: For the chapter numbers we’d just do “Chapter 1,” “Chapter 2,” etc. That said, I think that you have scene breaks too often for every single one to be a chapter break (it’d be like 90 chapters).

AJ: Please send me the cleaned up manuscript and I will submit chapter breaks.

PM: Here is the clean manuscript. Please do not make any changes to this document besides the chapter markers—and please do them in Track Changes as well.

AJ: Do I need to come up with chapter titles as well as numbers?

PM: No, just numbers is good, and I recommend that with historical fiction anyway.

[to myself: Whew! I had enough trouble coming up with a title for the book, and the PM didn’t care for it. No chapter titles!]

AJ: About how long should chapters be? In my first try at segmenting they are running from 3-8 pages.

PM: It’s up to you—I would say that chapter length can vary between 5–15 pages, but there are outliers, of course. I’d recommend pulling a few books off your shelf to see what others have done, but ultimately, it’s up to you.

[Some days pass. Trying to cut my book into smaller digestible pieces is like cutting your little girl’s hair for the first time. A snip here, a snip there…]

AJ: I wrestled it down to 29 chapters with an average length of nine pages and none less than five.  Hope this works.

PM: I’ll be in touch in the next couple weeks with your designed pages for your review. Safe travels!

[to myself: Done for now! I’m off!]

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Dear Reader: I’ll be out of the country for a bit, so there will be a hiatus in my posts. Hang on for the next step in the Publishing Journey!