Publishing books with LibreOffice, CreateSpace, and KDP

Saving

If you've been following this article closely, you now have two files, a manuscript file in Writer and a graphics file in Draw. Always save these files in ODF format. Writing a book can be an ordeal, so you'll be opening and closing these two files frequently, which can only occur in the native format.

The motto "save early, save often" is particularly applicable here. Few things cause more frustration than losing work because of a simple mistake. A total data loss is not something you would expect from Libre/OpenOffice, but don't rely on the autosave function, which is basically every 15 minutes – a thought flash can be lost in much less time.

References

Every non-fiction book needs a good list of references, which is best placed in a separate chapter at the end of the book. Each reference is numbered in square brackets. You use the same numbering in the body text, which you can easily automate. This involves inserting all references as a bulleted list in the index. You can set the bullet style using Bullets and Numbering on the Options tab, where you specify setting a left square bracket before the number and a right square bracket after it (Figure 8).

Figure 8: Create references using the numbering function in a separate chapter.

Inserting references in text uses cross-references as usual. Select the Numbered Paragraphs type and the corresponding selection element. For the insert reference, specify Number , which inserts the number along with the square brackets in text. However, this method provides no real advantage over manual reference insertion, in that Writer doesn't update the cross-reference with changes.

Reorganizing or subsequently inserting references is discouraged. In practice, it's better simply to append the added reference to the end of the list. In this way the existing linkage is maintained, and only a new reference needs to be added.

In this first section, I covered preparing the manuscript using LibreOffice or OpenOffice. This resulted in two files: a manuscript file created with Writer in ODT format and an ODG image file created in Draw. Successfully saving these two files completes this part of the process. Next, I'll explain how to prepare the manuscript file for publication as a printed book with CreateSpace and as an e-book with KDP.