Novel formatter

What a novel needs that other books don't

• Scene breaks that survive re-wrapping. A blank line vanishes the moment it lands at the edge of a screen. A centred marker does not.
• Chapters opening on the right. The convention in printed fiction, and it means accepting the occasional blank left-hand page rather than shuffling text to avoid it.
• No contents page, usually. Nobody looks up chapter seven of a novel. The ebook still carries navigation in the file, where the device reads it.
• Nothing pinned in the ebook. No forced fonts or sizes. A reader who has chosen large type has chosen it for a reason.
• Prose left alone. Punctuation style is normalised — curly quotes, em dashes. The words are not touched.

The order most novels go in

Manuscript first, while you are querying — plain, monospace, easy to mark up. Then, if you self-publish, the ebook and the print interior from the same document. The manuscript version is never the one a reader sees, and the print interior is never the one an agent wants.

Before any of them, the front matter generator will write the copyright page — the one page of a novel nobody knows how to write.

Questions

Is there a separate novel formatter, or is this the normal one?

It is the normal one, and that is the honest answer. A novel is chapters and prose, which is exactly what the tools were built around — so rather than a fourth tool with a different name, this page is about which of the three you need. Poetry is the one genre that genuinely needs different handling, because its whitespace is meaningful.

How are scene breaks handled?

A blank line between scenes is invisible in an ebook the moment it falls at the top or bottom of a screen, and ambiguous in print. Scene breaks become a centred marker instead, which survives re-wrapping and reads as deliberate. If you used asterisks or a hash, those are recognised as scene breaks rather than treated as text.

Do chapters start on a new page?

In print, yes — and on a right-hand page, which is the convention for a novel and means the occasional blank left-hand page. In an ebook each chapter becomes its own section, which is the equivalent: it is where the Go To menu and the progress bar get their structure.

Does a novel need a table of contents?

In print, usually not — readers do not look up chapter seven of a novel. In an ebook the navigation is built into the file whether or not you show a contents page, so the Go To menu works either way. A visible contents page in a novel is optional and slightly old-fashioned.

What about a prologue or epilogue?

Treated as chapters, because structurally that is what they are — they open on a new page and get their own navigation entry. If the detection is unsure whether something is a chapter opening or a line of text, it asks rather than guessing.

Will anything change my prose?

No. Layout and punctuation style only — curly quotes, real em dashes, consistent spacing. Nothing is rewritten, reordered or edited.