Readers of paper books have come to expect that a new chapter begins on a new page, even if that means blank white space at the bottom of the page where the last chapter ended. As all of us live in an era where paper books still are part of our education and recreation, we want to emulate this nonverbal signal to readers when designing ebooks.

Accomplishing this is easy when developing an ebook in MS Word. Simply place a page break between the end of a chapter and the start of a new chapter.

To do that, in your ebook manuscript, place the curser one line below the last line at the end of a chapter. In the ribbon at the top of the document, click Insert. On the left side in the Pages section of the ribbon, click Page Break. When you do this, the curser will jump to the top of the next page in your document. You can delete any extra lines up to the top of that next page, but if you keep deleting onto the page where you were, you risk deleting the page break. Save the file, and you’re good to go.

The result is that wherever the last page ended, white space will appear below on it the ereader or app where the ebook is being viewed. The next page starts in the ebook at the top of the next screen that the reader toggles to.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past decade, I’ve helped more than 300 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the 7 Minutes a Day… writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.