Here's where things get complicated. I'm going to type my instructions out slower. That is your queue to read them slower. Take your time and make sure you do Every. Single. Step. I'm totally serious. If you mess up a step, it could be weeks, nay months, before you get it all sorted out. I'm not even kidding. Well, I'm kidding a little bit. You can always ALWAYS go back to Step One and get rid of all the section breaks and start over. But, you don't want to do that, so don't skip any steps!

Okay. Deep breath. Aaannnddd...

Oh oh oh! One more thing. If you already have been through these steps a couple of times, you might not need all of the extra information. In that case, you will find a condensed set of instructions without all the details at the end of this guide. Aaannnddd... here we go.

1. Place your cursor at the very top of your document. Control + the Home key on your keyboard will jump you up there. (Sound familiar? It was the first step in Step One above!)

2. Open the Headers and Footers. You can do this a number of different ways. You can double click near the top of the page above all the text. Or you can right click in the Header area and choose Edit Header. Or you can go to the Insert tab, click on the Header button and choose Edit Header.

Whatever you do, DON'T use the gallery options. By that, I mean DON'T choose the Insert tab, click on the Header button, and choose one of those little built-in picture options in the list. That does something quirky and can cause problems during conversion for digital copy.

Notice, when you are in your Header, there will be some clues about which Header you are in. (When you are in your Footers, this works the same way!) The clue you should be seeing right now, is text stating "Header" in a blue box under the header area.

If it says anything different than that very specific text, then a check box for either "Different First Page" OR "Different Odd & Even Pages is checked in the ribbon above. Neither of those check boxes should be checked in this first section, and the Headers and Footers should all be free of text. You can scroll through your document at this point and confirm there's no text in the Headers and Footers, and if there is, delete it.

If you scrolled around in your document, you need to return to the first page in your document. You can't use Control + the Home button here like you could before – that only takes you to the beginning of the Header in which your cursor is currently sitting. You have to use the scroll bar. (Thanks, Microsoft.)

3. Check the box for "Different First Page." This option is saying, "Whatever I have in the Header of this section, make the first page different."

If there is text in it, hide it. If there is no text in it, allow me to type one thing in the header of the first page and something totally different in all the other pages of this section. Some people like to call this "Suppressing the first page header," and I think that is perfectly fine as long as you also understand that you can have text in both the first page of the header and in all the subsequent pages of the header. (Don't give up on me yet! It's like learning Algebra. I remember crying while doing my homework, but by college, I was tutoring students in the Pythagorean Theorem and solving story problems. Story problems! But I digress.)

Did you notice that our little blue clue changed from "Header" to "First Page Header?" If you scroll down, you will find the next page only says "Header" again. Get used to noticing those blue boxes. They have important information, especially when you are trying to figure out where things went wrong when your Headers and Footers are misbehaving.

Side note. I know we aren't putting any text in our Headers and Footers for our front matter (cover, table of contents, etc.), but by setting up our different First Page, we are prepping for Section 2, which is where our story begins. Literally. Our story begins on Page 1 of Chapter 1 and usually that's where we start numbering our pages.

4. Close the Header. You can use the "Close the Header and Footer button" in the ribbon or just double click somewhere on your document below the Header area.

Word is a little weird. Rather than putting you on the page that you just double clicked on, it returns you to the page where your cursor was when you first went into the Headers and Footers. This can be a little disconcerting (okay, annoying!) to be dumped in some strange place when you aren't expecting it.

5. Scroll down to the first page of your first chapter and put your cursor before the first text on that page. It may be your chapter title or chapter number, or it might be the first sentence of your story. We're going to start sectioning your document.

Since our Headers are going to change from the first section (where our front matter is) to include Book Title and Author Name, and our Footers are going to get some page numbering, we need a special type of break. Not just a Page Break, but a Section Break. If you skipped all that blabbity blah blah text up before Step One, you might want to go back and read it quick. I'll wait here.

6. Select the Page Layout tab.

7. Choose the Breaks button.

8. Select the "Next Page" option in the Section Breaks group. How are you doing so far? I bet you haven't even broken a sweat yet. Don't worry. "Same as Previous' is coming. Same as Previous is like the playground bully from grade school. It's always showing up, even coming back after you tell the playground teacher.

9. Open the Header. Remember, you can get back into the Header by double-clicking at the top of the page.

Notice there are two blue boxes with text under our Header now. One says "Header – Section 2 –" and the other says "Same as Previous." Just so we're clear, Same as Previous means, "Make sure my Header looks just like the header in the section before this one." In this case, we are going to want to put your book title and author name in this section, which, you may remember, starts where Chapter 1 begins. (Section 1 is your front matter, Section 2 is Chapter 1.) Since we don't want any text in our Headers in Section 1, but we do in Section 2, we need to turn off that Same as Previous.

10. Click "Link to Previous" in the ribbon. It will be highlighted when it is turned on, and we want to turn that highlight off. When you turn it off, the "Same as Previous" box under the Header disappears. Oh, don't worry. That playground bully will be back in no time.

Now, you may think this is the perfect time to type in some header text, but I'm proposing that we get a few more things in place before we start adding text of any sort. So don't type in your book title or author name just yet.

11. Check the box for "Different Odd & Even Pages." This option will allow you to put your book title on all the odd numbered pages and your author name (or chapter title) on all the even numbered paged.

12. Scroll to the Footer that is on the first page of Chapter 1. Notice the blue clue says "First Page Footer – Section 2 –." We aren't going to do anything on this page, but I want to make sure you get your bearings and are on the same page as me.

13. Scroll to and insert your cursor in the Footer that is on the second page of Chapter 1. Notice the blue clue here is labeled, "Odd Page Footer – Section 2 –" AND that rascally Same as Previous is on. Turn him off!

14. Insert a Page Number by selecting the Page Number button in the ribbon. You can't just type the number 2 there and think Word will automatically continue numbering your pages 3, 4, 5, etc. Word only knows to do that automatic numbering if you put in a Page Number code.

15. Select "Bottom of Page." Notice all the options! Let's keep it simple, shall we?

16. Choose "Plain Number 2." Now, you don't have to pick the plain old centered number option, but stick with me until you're satisfied you get how these Footer page numbering thingies work.

You should see you now have a number in your footer. That number is actually secret code. You can tell it's secret code, because when you click on it, it gets a gray box behind it. All secret codes in Word do that. If you have ever inserted Table of Contents, you may have seen that same gray colored box around all the text. The gray box doesn't print. That's part of the magic in the secret code.

17. Format the Page Number. Highlight your page number and format it however you would like it to look. You may like Bold numbers or some special font. Now's the time to format it how you like.

"But wait!" you exclaim. "That's not the right page number!"

You are absolutely right! Word thinks we want to number our document from the very first page of the book, rather than the first page of the chapter, and we need to tell Word what we prefer.

18. Right click on the number code and choose Format Page Numbers. (Or find the option in the ribbon under the Page Number button.)

19. Click the "Start at" radio button. Word makes another assumption here and figures you want to start the numbering in this section, and sets the number to 1. "But we're on page 2," you think. And you're right again! When you return to the footer, you will see the page number is correct.

20. Click Ok. See?! Page 2 says 2, doesn't it?! If it doesn't, then perhaps you were in the "First Page Footer – Section 2 –" instead of in the Second Page Footer. Don't hit undo! Instead, go back into the footers and correct them. Cut the page code from the First Page Footer and put it in the Second Page Footer.

21. Remove the extra hard return. In your excitement over having inserted secret code in your footer, you may not have noticed that Microsoft threw in an extra hard return. If you don't have Show/Hide turned on, you can press Control + the End key and see the cursor is blinking on the line below the page number. Hit your backspace key to get rid of it.

22. Close the Footer. You can use the "Close the Header and Footer button" in the ribbon or just double click somewhere on your document below the Header area.

Let's scroll through the document and make surewe're all seeing the same thing. Starting at the top of your document, youshould have no text in any of the headers or footers of your front matter(title page, table of contents, dedication, etc.). You should not see a pagenumber on Page 1 of Chapter 1, but you should see page numbering on every page fromPage 2 to the end of your document. If your document looks like what I justdescribed, give a big "WHOOP WHOOP" and pat yourself on the back. Youare doing an awesome job! Keep up the good work!