Book Design Made Simple

You can do it yourself.

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Book Design


Book design showing hardcover book with colorsBelow you'll find links to all the information about book design that’s available on our website, book, videos, and blog.

Get started with Part I of Book Design Made Simple, where you’ll learn how to lease and install Adobe InDesign, create a document, and import your manuscript from Word. Download Part I for free by subscribing to our blog—simply use the form below.

Excerpts from Book Design Made Simple

  • Basic principles of good design: what are they?
  • Front matter — what to include in the front of your book
  • Back matter — what to include in the back of your book
  • Running heads — what to include in your novel or nonfiction book
  • Typeface vs font: what’s the difference?
  • Book trim size: how to choose the right trim size
  • Book binding: many options beyond softcover and hardcover

 

Video tutorials

  • Typesetting a poetry book
  • Centering poems in text
  • Using columns to change your layout

 

Blog posts

Below are all the blog posts in the Book Design category, starting with the most recent post.

Designing a cookbook

January 11, 2016 By Glenna Collett 5 Comments

­­Typical cookbook photoIn Book Design Made Simple, we mention cookbooks a few times but never sit you down and explain in detail how to go about designing one. Once you’ve had some experience with designing and laying out other books, you’ll see at once that you’ll need to apply some extra effort to make a good-looking, readable cookbook. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Book Page Design Tagged With: text frames, typesetting

Is your image high enough resolution for printing?

August 26, 2015 By Fiona Raven 14 Comments

Is my image high-res enough for printing?How can you determine whether an image file is high enough resolution to use in your book? That’s a question I get asked all the time! Images should be at least 300 ppi (pixels per inch) at the size they’ll be printed at— and that’s where most people need help. How do you figure out the size of an image, and whether or not it’s suitable for printing? [Read more…]

Filed Under: Book Page Design Tagged With: book printing, images, Photoshop

Preparing a screenshot for print

March 19, 2015 By Glenna Collett Leave a Comment

Sample InDesign screenshotHave you ever tried to add an image on your screen to your printed materials? And noticed that it looked terrible in print—all blurry and pixelated? We had the same problem! Our book has a lot of screen shots in it. We mean a LOT. We use them mostly to show you InDesign dialog boxes—each view of the screen saves many words. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Book Page Design Tagged With: images

Is book design REALLY simple?

July 11, 2014 By Glenna Collett Leave a Comment

open book with strong colors to indicate good book designIf you are a book designer reading this, you have probably just put a huge question mark at the end of our book title, Book Design Made Simple. “There’s nothing simple about it!” you say, and I have to admit that I agree with you. Especially when typesetting and page layout are added into the mix with book cover design elements. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Book Cover Design

Design your book and get it to press with confidence—even if it’s your first book!

May 13, 2014 By Fiona Raven

Book Design Made Simple, 2nd Edition, 5 medals!
Do you want to create your book cover and/or pages yourself using Adobe InDesign? Well, now you can! Follow easy step-by-step instructions to create your own book design and typeset your pages. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Book Design

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Recent Posts

  • Writing your back cover copy September 11, 2023
  • Our 10-year adventure in self publishing July 10, 2023
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