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They say that everyone has a good book in them, and while that may or may not be true, it’s certainly the case that anyone can put it to the test. Basically, you upload a manuscript to a site like Lulu, and books are only printed off in the quantities ordered – leaving you with just royalties from every sale.

Submitting a manuscript using Office Word 2007 is easy. The set-up tools make sure that you’re working to the right page size, while the Styles ensure consistency throughout the book.

1. Stylish

The Styles panel is your best friend while both typesetting and writing a document. It lets you mark up bits of text as headlines, quotes, paragraphs or anything else, and perform instant style changes across the whole document.

2. Black Type

First we need to colour the headlines black rather than the default blue. We must also centre the text and, on the Format button, reduce the distance between lines so that Heading 2 can be the chapter heading and name.

3. Page Plan

Before we worry about how the text looks on the page, we have to find out what that page is. From www.lulu.com you can download templates of the different books it can print in .doc format, and copy your text across.

4. New look

The result isn’t pretty: chapter heads are all over the place and the Garamond text is uncomfortable. Luckily, with Styles, we can make instant changes, so Word 2007 can improve on the template and what you see is what you get.

5. Finish Line

One of the most obvious problems is that the text doesn’t always reach the same point on a page. Go into the main body text’s Style and into the Paragraph options. Switch off Widows/ Orphan control and see the result.

6. Vice Verso

Take great care reading the template. Here, each chapter begins on a left (verso) page, even if it means the previous right (recto) one was empty. But because of how the template is structured, they look the other way around.

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Bad home movies? Shudder! They can be longer than many prison sentences, home to multimedia’s worst excesses and, all too often, guaranteed to leave you trying to slit your wrists with a Pringle.

However, with Windows Vista, you have no excuse for such nonsense. None. We’re going to war on bad home movies. Right now!

The good news is that with Movie Maker you immediately avoid the biggest trap. It’s a simple editor that focuses on the important things.

Not only don’t you need hundreds of transitions, effects, and other flashy tools, you’re usually better off without them. It’s not for nothing that the average director’s favourite transition is the humble cut.

Editing in action

Let’s step through a holiday video. Don’t worry about the mouse clicks yet; that’s the easy part. Raw footage is where every project starts. The cardinal rule is: shoot everything you can, then throw out almost as much. A ruthless editor is a good editor.

Exactly what to keep will depend on your subject matter and intended audience, but you’ll never go wrong by treating it as a professional project, rather than doing things you know are wrong.

One thing I always do when starting a new project is to sit down and list everything that annoys me in similar things I’ve seen, and then avoid doing them even if they seem like a great idea at the time.

Here, let’s look at the classic roller-coaster shot. On my list, the number one ‘gotcha’ is the first-person shakycam as someone, usually my father, desperately tries to keep the camcorder to his face.

It never works. Ignoring the blurring of the world, and the sick-making bouncing of the camera on every twist and turn, you’ll never be able to emulate the experience of being on that ride. So what do you do? You film it anyway. The problem isn’t the footage; it’s the execution. You also film the exterior of the ride, and everything else you’re going to cut. Then get the shears.

First of all, the establishing shot. That should be easy enough – especially if the family is there, waving and looking nervously at the ride’s biggest lunch-launching moment. Next, cut – a simple cut, nothing fancy – to the first-person camera, as the rollercoaster car pulls out of the station.

Our list tells us that we don’t want to stick with this too much, so now, we cut to another external shot of the coaster pulling away towards the big loop. Obviously, it’s not your car. That doesn’t matter. As it plummets, snap cut again to the fi rst-person camera, showing a family member’s screaming reaction. Cut back to the external.

If you’ve got a good bit of first-person camera of a drop, or a turn, or a particular bit of scenery, slip it in. Finally, cut to the family waddling uncertainly out of the gates, and closer up shots of reactions; cries of “Again!” or “Never again!”

It’s a simple editing job. One transition (Cut) and one editing tool (Trim). However, when you play the video, nobody will care about the technology behind it, just the result. And believe it or not, that’s the big secret of editing. Simplicity always wins out over glitz, and less really is more.

Of course, there is scope to play around with the more complicated effects as well. If you’re building a montage of photos, picking a transition to go between them can look good. Even then, though, the keep-it simple mantra applies. A page-curl may look good, but a page-curl followed by a barwipe, followed by a dissolve, followed by a shatter is guaranteed to look tacky.

Always try to stick to one effect, one editing style, one (rough) length for your individual segments, and the whole thing will flow. It may seem like overkill for a family video, but when you’ve got the tools to do better, why settle for less?

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