Information provided courtesy of Carol Killman Rosenberg
Microsoft Word is the undisputed industry standard for book publishing because of its professional-grade features, widespread industry adoption, and superior ability to handle long, complex documents. While Google Docs and Apple Pages have their strengths, they fall short of the specific and demanding requirements of professional publishing.
Industry Standard & Universal Compatibility
The publishing industry’s entire workflow is built around Microsoft Word’s .docx file format. This is the universal currency of the publishing world, and most publishers and agents explicitly require manuscripts to be submitted in this format. Submitting a manuscript in a different format, even if it has been exported to a .docx file, risks introducing formatting errors during the conversion process.
Powerful Editing & Collaboration Tools
Word’s “Track Changes” feature is the gold standard for editorial work. It provides a robust, clear system for editors to suggest changes and for authors to review and accept or reject them. While Google Docs has a similar “Suggesting” mode, Word’s system is more powerful, especially when dealing with complex changes like moved paragraphs. Editors and proofreaders also use specialized macros, plugins, and custom dictionaries that work exclusively with Word, making the editing process faster and more accurate.
Apple Pages also has its own change-tracking feature, but it’s not ideal for this process. The main problem is cross-platform compatibility. When a Pages document with tracked changes is converted and exported to a Word file, the formatting often breaks, and the changes may not display correctly for the editor. This can lead to a messy, confusing review process where the editor can’t see all the proposed changes or comments, creating extra work and frustration for everyone involved.
Superior Formatting & Layout Control
For a book, consistent formatting is essential. Word offers a far more comprehensive and precise set of tools for paragraph styles, page layout, and pagination. The “Styles” feature is a powerful tool for maintaining consistency across a manuscript with hundreds of pages. Word is also built to handle complex elements like automatic tables of contents, footnotes, and indexes, which are often limited or difficult to manage in Google Docs and Pages.
Handling of Large Documents
As a desktop application, Microsoft Word is designed to handle very large files without a drop in performance. In contrast, Google Docs, as a web-based application, can become sluggish and even crash when faced with a document of that size, making a reliable local application the safer choice.
Pages can handle long documents, so It’s not a matter of a hard page limit, but rather a question of performance and file size management. One of the main issues with Pages is how it saves files. By default, it saves documents as a single file, but Apple recommends saving larger documents as a “package” to improve performance. This package is essentially a folder containing all the elements of your document, like text, images, and other media. This is different from Microsoft Word’s .docx format, which is a compressed file that handles embedded content differently.
Why Google Docs and Pages Fall Short
- Google Docs: While great for collaborative, real-time drafting, its formatting features are less robust, and its performance with large documents can be a major issue.
- Apple Pages: Pages’ biggest drawback is its lack of cross-platform compatibility. Its proprietary format can introduce significant formatting errors when converted to a Word document, making it a liability when collaborating with editors and publishers.
In conclusion, while Google Docs and Pages are excellent for general use, Microsoft Word’s extensive feature set, offline functionality, and status as the industry-standard software make it the go-to choice for every step of the professional book publishing process.
What about converting a PDF to a Word file?
Converting a PDF to a Word file is problematic because the two formats are designed for different purposes. A PDF is a static image of a document, intended to look the same everywhere. A Word file is a dynamic, editable document with a flexible structure.
When you convert a PDF to Word, the software has to guess how to translate the static layout into an editable format. This often results in:
- Formatting issues: Text, images, and tables get jumbled.
- Font problems: Fonts may be replaced or lost.
- Inaccurate text: Characters can be corrupted, especially in scanned documents.
The conversion process destroys the underlying structure of the book, making it difficult for an editor and book designer to work with. The resulting file is a messy collection of broken formatting that requires a significant amount of manual effort to fix.
Note: While some PDF software offers basic editing features, this is still not suitable for book publishing. These tools are generally designed for minor changes like fixing a typo or adding a signature, not for full-scale manuscript editing. The PDF’s fixed nature means that even with an editing tool, you’re not working with the original document’s underlying structure, which is crucial for a smooth editing process. An editor needs to be able to apply styles and make large-scale changes efficiently, which is impossible with the limited capabilities of a PDF editor.
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