The best advice I can give anyone for formatting any kind of book is to go
to the library and look at a lot of books of the kind you intend to produce.
In this case, you need to look at a lot of children's books to get a feel
for how much text there is on the page and what font sizes are used. I'm
assuming you're wanting to produce camera-ready copy. If you're writing a
children's book for a publisher, you don't have to worry about any of this;
you just send the whole wad of text with page breaks indicated and perhaps
some suggestions about places for illustrations if it's to be illustrated.
As for the writing, I would do that first. I would start with a very simple
manuscript format. If this is a picture book, all you need is body text. If
it's a "chapter book," select a heading style (Heading 1 will do as well as
any other) for your chapter numbers or titles and use Body Text or Body Text
First Indent for everything else. You can modify the format of Body Text to
be double-spaced if you like (just for manuscript purposes), but you don't
really need to worry about final formatting till you're through writing. If
you format your Heading 1 or chapter title style as "Page break before,"
you'll get a new page for the beginning of each chapter. That's about as
much format chapter formatting as you need. Stick a page number in the
footer of each page so if you drop the manuscript on the floor you can get
it back into order easily.
Once you've finished writing, then it will be relatively easy (and that is a
very relative statement!) to reformat the heading and body text styles to
what you need for the book, change the margins, insert section breaks
between chapters (if any), add headers and footers as needed, add front
matter, etc.
--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site:
http://www.mvps.org/word