Having a style sheet for your book helps to keep spelling and punctuation consistent throughout. It usually includes a section for each letter of the alphabet, and a space for notes at the bottom. It’s easy to create one while you’re writing your book, and you’ll be able to use it for your book’s website, marketing materials, and everything else you’ll be producing as an author. Below is a template to get you started.
Writing your back cover copy
Back cover copy is the text that goes on your book’s back cover. Everyone judges a book by its cover (you know that!), and your front cover only gets a few seconds to grab a reader’s interest. However, once a reader picks up your book and flips to the back cover, this is your big chance to sell that book. You need to convince that reader to buy using compelling back cover copy.
[Read more…]
Our 10-year adventure in self publishing
Self publishing is an adventure, especially when sharing the ride with a coauthor! Having a coauthor means having someone to depend on, someone to finish what you cannot, someone to push you along, and someone to come up with fresh ideas. And we think our collaboration has truly been ideal. We recently realized that it’s been ten years for us, so we decided to commemorate the anniversary with an online conversation.
InDesign book template by Book Design Made Simple
What exactly is an InDesign book template? It’s a blank InDesign document that has all the background work done for you. When you open a template, you’ll see an untitled document that’s already set up with InDesign preferences, trim size, margins, and styles.
Our InDesign book template is a companion to Book Design Made Simple, the only book that guides you through every step of designing your own book using Adobe InDesign. We believe that anyone can learn to craft a well designed book, and now we’ve created an InDesign book template to get you started more quickly. [Read more…]
Self-publishing and book marketing: A success story
In this post we feature a self-published author, Joel Rubano, who has found remarkable success through book marketing. Not only is his book selling well, but he’s made an interesting career shift, too. We hope you find encouragement and inspiration from his story, no matter what your own book project looks like. Here is Joel’s account: [Read more…]
Crop marks and other printer’s marks
Crop marks and other printer’s marks appear in the PDFs you send to the printer. In Book Design Made Simple, we mention crop marks exactly once and never define what they are, so we think it’s about time that we did so.
Simply put, crop marks are chop marks—they indicate where the printer will chop around the edges of the stack of printed pages to make them the correct size, and a nice, neat package for binding. [Read more…]
Advanced live index features in InDesign
InDesign’s live index includes some great advanced features: you can add italics to the index, add bold page numbers for illustrations, and even create a live index across several documents using InDesign’s Book feature.
Be sure to first read our earlier blog post, Create a live index in InDesign, to learn the basics of creating a live index. [Read more…]
Create a live index in InDesign
It’s easy to create a live index for your book in InDesign, and there’s a major benefit to doing so: If you move any of your text, the index markers stay with the text and the index automatically updates!
In Book Design Made Simple, we explain how to create paragraph styles for indexes, how to import an index from Word, and how to typeset an index. Here, we’ll explain the simplest way to create a live index in InDesign.
[Read more…]
Book endpapers: A gallery of ideas
Book endpapers (also called endsheets) are probably the least noticed part of a hardcover book. But the endpapers are literally what hold the pages and the cover together. And they can add value to your book if you use them well.
If you’re publishing a paperback, take a look at the examples in this article for ideas anyway; you’ll find that the same principles can apply. [Read more…]
Writing in InDesign: Why and how
Back when Fiona started Book Design Made Simple, she decided that writing in InDesign would be easiest. (After all, it was her native habitat.) And now one of our readers has admitted to doing the same. So we thought we’d explore the various reasons why anyone would want to write in a layout program. For us it worked perfectly. How about you? [Read more…]
- 1
- 2
- 3
- …
- 8
- Next Page »
