Non-fiction & Memoir Formatter — Built for Books Readers Navigate
Format memoirs, biographies, business books and practical non-fiction with clear chapter structure, useful navigation and publishing-ready ebook and print output.
Contents
- 1 · The Beginning
- 2 · Leaving Home
- 3 · Starting Again
- 4 · What Came After
Chapter three
Starting Again
Section
The first week
Body text sits under a subheading a reader can find from the contents page in print, and from the navigation menu on a device.
How it is read
Non-fiction is navigated, not just read
A novel is read front to back, so its structure can be almost invisible. Non-fiction is dipped into, referred back to and searched: a reader arrives wanting the section on one thing, and the structure is how they find it.
That means the contents page and the ebook navigation are not decoration, and they are not the same object. In print, a contents page lists chapters against page numbers. In an ebook there are no page numbers, so the navigation document does that job — built from the same headings, and useless if those headings were only ever bold text.
Both come from one thing: consistent heading levels in the manuscript. Get those right and each edition builds its own navigation correctly.
Before you start
Footnotes and indexes are not supported yet
This matters more here than on any other page, because the books that need those features are non-fiction books.
Supported
- Chapters
- Subheadings, at consistent levels
- Paragraphs and block quotes
- Front matter
- Contents and ebook navigation
- Scene and section breaks
Not yet
- Footnotes
- Endnotes
- Indexes
- Bibliographies as structured references
Academic and referenced books are not the right fit yet
If your book depends on footnotes, an index, or a formatted bibliography, this will not produce what you need, and we would rather say that here than let you find out after formatting.
Memoir, business books, biography and practical non-fiction generally do not need any of the three, which is why they work well.
Which kind
What sort of non-fiction are you formatting?
- Memoir
- Reads like a novel and is navigated like one. Chapters, scene breaks, rarely a contents page in print — and never the fiction disclaimer.
- Business
- Leans hardest on subheadings. Readers arrive looking for one section, so the contents page and the ebook navigation are doing real work.
- Biography
- Chapters usually run chronologically and long. Front matter matters more than in fiction — sources, acknowledgements, a note on method.
- Self-help
- Structured in steps, often with lists and pull-outs. Consistent heading levels are what make the structure legible rather than decorative.
They all take the same route through the same tools. The differences are in what you write and how heavily you lean on headings, not in which formatter to use — which is why there is one page rather than four.
The editions
The same structure, three ways out
manuscript.docx
Front matter is worth settling first — a copyright page, and for memoir the disclaimer question, which fiction and non-fiction must not answer the same way. The front matter generator handles both.
Where next
Ready to format it
Publishing the ebook?
Printing it?
Writing the opening pages?
Questions
Non-fiction and memoir, answered
Does non-fiction need a table of contents?
Yes, unlike a novel. Readers of non-fiction navigate — they look up the chapter on pricing, they come back to a section they half-remember. In print that means a real contents page; in an ebook it means the navigation in the file, which is built automatically and is what the Go To menu reads.
Can you handle footnotes and endnotes?
Not yet, and this is the honest limit of the tool for academic and heavily-cited work. Notes need their own numbering, their own placement rules, and links back to the text in an ebook. Rather than flatten them into ordinary paragraphs and let you discover it later, the pipeline does not claim to support them. A memoir or a business book without notes formats cleanly; a book with two hundred citations does not.
What about an index?
No. An index is tied to page numbers, which means it can only be built after the interior is laid out and is meaningless in a reflowable ebook. Traditionally it is a specialist job done at proof stage. If your book needs one, that happens after the print interior exists.
How are subheadings within a chapter handled?
They stay subheadings — a level below chapter openings, so they do not each start a new page or clutter the navigation with an entry per section. That distinction is more important in non-fiction than fiction, because non-fiction chapters usually have internal structure and novels usually do not.
Is a memoir formatted like a novel or like non-fiction?
Structurally like a novel — chapters and continuous prose, often without subheadings — but it is not fiction, and that matters on one page: the copyright page. A memoir must not carry the “any resemblance to actual persons is coincidental” disclaimer, because it is a claim about your own life that is not true.
What does it cost?
Formatting is free. Free files include a short closing line crediting the tool, allow three adjustments, and are kept for 24 hours. Unlocking one file costs $5 once, with no subscription.