Handling Extra Long Chapters in Atticus

Atticus works best when your individual chapters are 8,000 words or fewer, approximately. We’re constantly updating to help speed this up, but for the time being, here’s a helpful strategy for splitting your chapters without them looking like they’re split when you export.

If your manuscript is already in Atticus:

1. Find a convenient point in a long chapter, somewhere around the 7 – 8 k words point where there is a paragraph that ends at the very bottom of a page.
2. Place your cursor after the very last character and press the Split Chapter button from the toolbar
3. The chapter will break into a new one with SPLIT at the end of the title. Click the three dots beside the title in the left navigation panel and choose Convert to > Custom
   • this will remove the chapter heading space, and start your text at the very top of the page. It will also make sure it’s not included in the TOC.
4. Click those same three dots again and uncheck Numbered
   • this will tell Atticus it’s not actually a new chapter and make sure the numbering continues in order on the next proper chapter
5. Repeat as necessary

In Word, before Importing to Atticus

1. Find a convenient point in a long chapter, somewhere around the 7 – 8 k words point where there would be a logical scene break
2. Press CTRL ENTER to set a page break
3. Repeat as necessary

Once imported into Atticus

1. Find each split chapter (that doesn’t have a chapter title) and give them a relevant title, such as Chapter 1 SPLIT, et
2. Click the three dots beside the title in the left navigation panel and choose Convert to > Custom
   • this will remove the chapter heading space, and start your text at the very top of the page. It will also make sure it’s not included in the TOC.
3. Click those same three dots again and uncheck Numbered
   • this will tell Atticus it’s not actually a new chapter and make sure the numbering continues in order on the next proper chapter
4. Repeat as necessary