Nyx Nyghtingale
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Random Publication Question
🕑 Added 2025-01-07 18:00:05 +0000 UTCHappy Tuesday everyone!
As I continue with my publication journey, I'm constantly running into tiny details that catch me off guard. I'm very happy with how everything is coming together, but I have one topic that's giving me a hard time—text message formatting in books.
How do you prefer they be displayed?
The formatting software I use does have a function that displays text messages as actual phone bubbles, but I think it looks terrible.
When I post stories to online websites, I just start a new line, bold the character's name, and continue from there. (This is the second example, you've all seen me use this formatting dozens of times.)
The other option is the first picture I linked. It's not fully committing to the phone format, but it subtly recreates it by putting the names on opposite sides of the page. I also add additional vertical space at the start and end of the text conversation to make it stand out slightly.
Which do you think looks better?
Comments
Walking in LA
Going to go contrarian along with Benn and say I prefer the non-phone look. It's easier to follow the conversation.
Nathan
I definitely say the left looks better, but I will say that I know some authors try to make it more immersive by just making text message sections as 1 giant image they add to the next page. In this way, it is easy to add stuff like Avatars, time stamps, etc. It is admittedly a lot of extra work though.
