Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hello and welcome
to my course on designing books using
Adobe InDesign. My name is Rebecca and I'm a writer as well as a
freelance book designer. While there are many great
tools out there that we can use to create
print book interiors. Nothing is going
to be as precise and professional
as Adobe InDesign. It's the industry
standard software. In this course, I'm
going to teach you all that you need to
know to either format your own manuscript or to gain the skill to
offer to clients. My method for designing book interiors is
fairly straightforward. We're going to start
with some setup steps and then design your
first book chapter. We'll use that as the
basis for the rest of the chapters and then we will create the front
and back matter. I'll show you how to combine these individual sections into a book with the
correct orientation and page numbers for publishing. Finally, we'll export the book a few different ways
so that you can see your options
for the end result. While Adobe InDesign may be
a complex piece of software, it isn't hard to build a
great looking book with it. Even if you're new to
using design software, you should be able to follow my step-by-step
instructions. Feel free to design
along with me and pause the video to follow the
steps with your own screen. By the end of this course, you'll not only have
a finished book interior file that
you can publish, but also a new
skillset that you can use again or market the clients. If that sounds good,
then let's get started.
2. Picking Trim Size and Margins: In order to start designing
our book in InDesign, there's three things
that we're going to do in this first lesson. First, I'll show you how I have the manuscript document setup in just another word processor. Secondly, we will
look at getting the trim size and
page measurements. And third, we'll set up the
basic document in InDesign. First of all, the book that
I'm went to work with, just as our sample here is Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen. I've put that manuscript here in just a pages document.
You can use anything. This is just to
keep the manuscript organized and odds are good. If you've written your
own book, then you have your manuscript in another
piece of software. That's totally fine. Just make sure that you have
all the content organized, edited, and ready to go. I tell this to all my book design clients that
it is much more time-consuming to fix edits in a book once
it's been typeset, then to fix it when you still have the manuscript version. Of course, you can go in
and make little changes, but it does get a
little bit frustrating. I would highly recommend that you have your main script as clean and edited as needed
before you get started. You'll also see here
that I've included a little bit of front
matter just at the top. This is just to
make things easier when I'm designing
the front matter. So I've included the
text for the title page, copyright statement and
a dedication as well. We'll use these later
on in the process. Because this is just an example. I've only included the first
five chapters of the book, but of course you'd want to have your whole manuscript in whatever word processor
you are using. I've also not done any
fancy formatting here. This is just the body texts. I reformatted it here as body just to remove any formatting. I'm going to do things
like indentations and paragraph spacing in the
actual InDesign document. I prefer to work with
as clean a manuscript best possible at this stage. By clean, I just mean
in terms of formatting, but also in terms of editing is Amazon's help page for SAT
trim size, bleed, and margin. I'm going to be basing
only measurements and numbers and things for
publishing on Amazon. But these are generally going
to be the same no matter what publisher or printing
house you're using. However, you would want
to double-check that. You can also find a link to this particular page
in the course handout, but also you can
find it simply by Googling set trim size, bleed margins on kVp or just going through
the Help Topics. This page is
important because it will help us figure
out what size we need our book to me and also what size we need
emergence to be. So I'm going to
scroll down here. Now there are two
ways that you can set up your interior book design. You could do it with
bleed or without bleed. Bleed basically
means a little bit of extra room around the book to help accommodate any
full-page graphics or images. If you have a picture that goes all the way to
the edge of your book, such as this example here where the picture
goes to the edge, then you'd want to use
bleed in your setup. For most books, you
don't actually need to include bleed because
the whitespace around the edges is
going to be consistent and we're going to be designing
a book without bleed. However, if you do
need to add it, it's only a little
extra space and we'll look at those numbers
right down below. So first we're going
to look at trim sizes. I'm going to click on
this to expand it here. And this is a list of
the different trim sizes that Amazon offers. They also can do some
non-standard trim sizes, but these are for most of them. We're going to be
creating a book that is six by nine inches, which is a pretty
standard paperback size. And these are the
measurements for it without bleed and simply the
six by nine inches. If you are going to add bleed, then you are going to
want to add 1.25 to the width and 0.25
to the height. But again, we're going
to be going with these straight numbers
for our example, six by nine is gonna
be the first number that I write down
here on a notepad, just to keep in mind for when
we'd set it up in InDesign, scrolling down, we get a really helpful graphic
that can help you visualize margins if this is
an unfamiliar term for you, as you can see here, the box in the middle is the
texts safe zone, so that's where your
content is going to go. But the space around
is going to help create that visual barrier
on the edge of your page. It's also going to help make
sure that none of your text is cut off or too
close to the edge. The semi dashed
line around here, the one on the inside is the regular trim size and the extra little space
is the bleed size. If you are going to have images or anything that goes
to the edge of your page. You want to add 0.125
inches to the three sides, not the gutters side. The gutter side is basically
the center of your book and the pages on the left
and right side will have a different margin in
many measurements. On the gutter side, this is what goes down into the spine so you don't
want your texts running into it so it's hard
to read or you have to crack the spine to
see all the words. But as we are doing
a nosebleed book, we're just going to scroll
down to look at this target, but emergence now the outside margins
and keep in mind these are all minimums are all going to be pretty much
the same no matter what, but the inside
margin will change based on how thick your book is. The way to visualize
this is that with a book that is glue bound, if you have a lot of pages, it's going to be a
little bit harder to crack to open up to see
the inside of the book. Whereas if there's only a
couple of pages, 24250, it's pretty easy to open that
fully to see the inside, you're going to have
a bigger G2 emerging minimum with a
bigger book example. I'm just going to go with
the middle option of 301500 pages. And these are our
measurements here again, this is with bleed
here on this end. So we're going with these two, which means our
inside gutter margin has to be a minimum of 0.65 inches and all
the other margins, the other three sides
of the rectangle have to be 0.25 inches minimum. Now the thing about
these measurements is, as I've said many times,
they're just minimum's. When you actually put them in. It might actually
look a little bit on the Texas too close to
the edge of the page. My favorite solution to this, so that you can
really visualize how your margins are laid
out is to grab a book off your bookshelf
that is very similar sized or the same size as
the one you are creating. Then take a ruler and
actually physically measure the whitespace between the words and the edge of the page. This can be a lot clearer than
just looking at numbers or even just the image
on the screen to understand what that whitespace really looks like
when it's printed. And when I talked about
the text on the page, I'm just talking about
the body text here, not the headers and the footers. We've talked about
those separately. I've done this in the example that I pulled actually has a 0.75 margin on all
these sides of the top, the side and the
bottom from the text. And I'm actually going to extend that same margin to
the gutter as well, because I find it
is a bit easier to design when everything
is centered on the page rather than
having a separate margin on the gutter side
that is larger. Of course, you can certainly
do that if you want to push your texts even
further from the spine. Consider the numbers here on this page or on this chart to be the minimums and you can
adjust them accordingly. I'm going to jot down on paper that we're going to do a six by nine book with a 0.75
inch margin on all sides. And then we'll open
that up in InDesign.
3. Setting Up Your Document and First Chapter: I have InDesign
open here and I'm going to click on new file. And this is where we can set
the details of our design. First, I'm going to change
the units to inches. And so that's where
we're working in. This is going to
switch to six by nine is actually this
isn't working a lot, so it kind of automatically
work to that. But you would want to change
this to fit your book size, the orientation, and we want
it to be portrait mode. And I'm going to start with three pages just to get started. The example that I'm using, Pride and Prejudice has
very short chapters. So three pages is actually
probably enough per chapter, at least for this
specific trim size. But in any case, three is
a good place to start. Then we want Facing
pages checked because we wanted left and right
pages at the same time. Then we can scroll
down here to margins. And you want this little link
to you broken if you are going to be doing different
margins on the gutter side, but in this case
they're all the same. So we will click
it to be the same. And I'm going to
change this to 0.75, since that was the
number identified as being a great margin based on my measuring of
a physical book. Since we're not doing
any bleed in our book, we can leave this section alone. I'll hit Create. And
here we have our book, the guides here, the
purplish pink lines are going to be the
indicators of where we want. All of our body texts
would be contained. Now for reference,
you may remember that the outside minimum was 0.25. So if you wanted to see that visualized here just so you
know we're not to run off. You can add an extra
guides by clicking on the page and then going
into this ruler bar here, I'm just going to click
and drag down from it. And it's bringing this
blue line that I can place at the 0.25 marker
which is right there. Now that indicates that is where I don't want to put
anything above that. I wasn't going to anyways because this is a
book with a bleed, but that's how you can do it. You can do it on the
other side as well. And drag to add a vertical
guideline as well. Which doing the math
backwards, we 0.75. That's sort of where
those guides will be. You don't have to use them. Sometimes it can just be
helpful if you're worried about going over the
edge of the margins. Now I'll just zoom out
here so you can see that because we put three pages, we have three setup
and ready to go. There's a couple of things
we're going to have to add. We need to add a
header and footer. We need to add the title of the chapter on
the very first page, and we need to add
our text boxes where the actual texts of
the chapter we'll go. I'm going to start
off with the footer because all of the pages on every chapter will have a footer which includes
the page number. Of course you can
skip that and put the page number in
the header as well, but I'll do it this
way just so you can see it on the
top and bottom. Let's start by zooming
into the first page and I'm going to
scroll down to the bottom to see where
we're working. I'm going to put
the actual text of the chapter within
these margins here. So imagine this is where the words are going
to be ending. I don't want the page number to be right flush against it. I wanted to have a
little bit of room maybe halfway between the bottom margin here and
the actual end of the page. Again, this is where I could
grab one of those rulers and put it right
above here to 8.75, which would indicate the
minimum space required. So as long as the page number is between this
line and this line, it will be within the
printing boundaries. I'm going to grab
the text box tool right here on the menu, and I'm going to grab the corner to the other
corner and create a box. It's about the rather
exactly the same width as the margins inside. To add the page number
you're going to go up to Type, which is cut-off. Sorry, my screenshare is
cut off a little bit, but it is just in
the time I knew the type menu go down to insert special character markers
and current page number. That's putting number one there. Now you have the
option of aligning this to be in the
center of the page, which you do just like that. And this is because we lined up these two text boxes will have it in the center of the actual texts so it
will look proper. But another option is to put this page number on the
corner opposite of the spine, the bottom right corner
of this particular page. The way to do that to ensure that you're not
going in and having to manually flip it back and forth is to use these two
paragraph tools right here. And in fact, we are going
to be using this one, which is called a line
away from the spine. So when I click on
this, it's going to pop it right over to this side because the spine on the first
page here is on the left. I'm also going to change
the size of this font. Size ten is what I'm going to use as a body font size as well. Typical book size for the text is going to
be between size 1012. My personal preference
is a little bit on the smaller side
to go with ten, but that will depend
on the font that you choose and also
what the style of look you're creating as if it's a very small book versus
a larger paperback. You may prefer to have
a slightly larger font in a bigger book just to
make it easier to read. So the only thing left
to do with the footer is to adjust how
high up it goes. Right now it is basically touching the bottom
of this text box. I don't like how
that looks because it needs a little bit
of room to breathe. So I'm just going
to drag this down. I'm actually going to sit
it on top of this line, which was our
minimum margin line. I'm going to zoom out so we
can see all the pages here. So that is their page number. We want to have it on
all our pages, whoever. So I'm going to click on this box and I'm
going to copy it. Command C on a Mac. And scroll down to these pages. Now before I paste it, I'm going to go and add in that same margin line
just for reference, which was at 8.75. It will do it on
this page as well. Just so I know where to put it. So I've pasted this textbox, I'm going to drag
and drop it along that margin line and it's
centered on the page as well. I'll do the same thing
for the next page here. There we go. You're not going to have to do this for every single page. You only have to
do this one time and this is the time we're doing it for the first three pages
of your chapter after that, we're going to be
just duplicating these pages so you
don't have to worry about doing this
over and over again. Now at this point, all three of our pages have page
numbers and you'll see that they've actually
automatically updated to reflect
what page they are. So our footer is complete. Now we can work on the header. Since this page here is the
first one of our chapter, the first page of
a chapter doesn't typically have a header. It actually starts
on the second page. We're gonna get
started down here. I'm going to start by doing the same thing with the margins. I'm going to grab this and put a 0.25 margin on both pages. First, sorry, It's more of a guideline than
emerging really. I've put these two guidelines
here that are at the 0.25 margin market and
that's the minimum margin. But if I put the text box there, it's actually going to put
the title of the book, which is what I'm going
to put as the header. Little bit too high up. So I'm actually going
to move this margin down probably to about 0.375. That is there we are. Now to make things easy, I'm going to just copy and paste the same box that I
used for the footer. I will put that snug up against the guideline that I created
here above the text box. I will do that again for
the other side as well. You can see you could
put the page number up there if you wanted to. That's totally up to you. But I'm going to put the title
of the book there instead. That's a pretty common practice. I'm just going to
double-click here, erase the two, so that's erasing the automatic
patient number. And I'm just going
to write the title, Pride and Prejudice. Going to select that. And I'm going to put
it in small caps because that's sort of a
nice style for headers. I will copy that. Double-click on the
other page and paste the same thing as using
the same alignment. It's going to keep it away from the spine so that when
you open the book, this is quite literally
how it's going to look. And if you ever want to preview how your page is
looking with UDL, these guides, simple two-step to see it as just a
blank white page. First you just turn
off the guides right there on these side menu. And then if you want to go up to view in the top menu and
click overprint preview. It'll erase the blocks around. So you can see that this is what our page is looking like. All it needs right now
is your body text. I'm just going to turn
those guides back on and scroll up
to the first page. The first page of
every chapter is a little bit different than
all the rest of the pages because you want your
texts to start about halfway or maybe
three-quarters up the page rather than at the
very top because you want room for the chapter
title or chapter number. To make this visually simple, I'm going to grab a
guide and drag it down. I'm gonna put it at half way
through the page which is 4.5 inches because this
is a nine inch tall book. Now I'm going to use
the text box and I'm going to add a
chapter title first. I'll just create a box here
and write chapter one. The sample I'm working with, Pride and Prejudice doesn't
have chapter names. I will select that. Center it. In terms of formatting for chapter
titles, you can be creative. You can use decorative fonts
here It's really up to you. I'm going to keep
it pretty simple. I'm just going to
use the small caps and I'm going to
increase it to size 14. So I'll have to do now. I'm just going to select that. And I'm going to use
the pink line there, an alignment from the center. And I'll put it
right about there. You could also add
graphics, images, illustrations, little,
the dividers or doodles. You've a lot of flexibility
with the beginning of your chapters titles and you
can also be creative here. Now we're ready to
move on and add the text boxes for
your manuscript. We're going to grab the text box and start with this page. The text is going to go between this middle line and
these margins right here. I'm just going to click
in the corner where they meet and drag and drop
a box right there. You can see it's kind of
auto locking because it's hitting the emergence. For now. We're just gonna leave that just like that and
scroll down to the next page where I will
do the same right here. So because this page
starts at the top, I'm simply going to trace
this box for emergencies are I will do the same
on this page as well. So now we have textboxes. You can't see them at all,
but there is textboxes there. We're going to go up to the top. Click on this. You can
see the box is here. I'm going to hop into that
manuscript file that I had in pages and just copy
the text for chapter one. As you can see
here, the text for chapter one is not very long. Like I said, Jane Austen, shepherds are pretty short. But if your chapter was a lot
longer than you're going to need more than three pages
just to fill it out. Before you paste anything in, you can go over to the Pages tab here on your InDesign document. Select the two pages that are the regular body pages and just duplicate that as many
times if you need. I find this is easiest to do before you paste in your text. You can't obviously anticipate exactly how many pages
you're going to need, but you can maybe
guess an eyeball it. We've created that many pages. I'm gonna scroll up to
the very first page with the first text box. Double-click in there
and I'm going to command V to paste my text. Now we see the manuscript
has gone in there. However, it has not yet
gone to these two pages. And we see a little red icon right here that
indicates there's overflow text and this box has more to show, but
nowhere to put it. To fix that very simply, we are going to connect
all these boxes so that the pages
know how to flow. I'm going to grab my
cursor right here. I've selected this box. I'm going to click on
the little red icon and I get a cursor. It looks like this. It's got a little
preview of text in it. I'm going to scroll down
and click in this box. And then I will
do the same here, click in that box and it's
just telling it where to flow. If I had more pages, it would do the same
thing. Same process. Now because I only have three pages worth of
texts for chapter one, I don't need all
these extra pages and I will delete them. However, if you had
this happened and then let's just add in another
version of that same chapter. And we see that we don't have enough pages and
there's overflow. It's very simple how
to proceed from here. All we're going to do
is select these two in the Pages tab again and
hit Duplicate spread. You'll see that it does put the same text on the
following pages, but it's not linked
in the same way. So I'm just going to
double-click Command a to select all of
it and delete it. And now all I have to do is
I'm going to grab the cursor, click on the little
red Overflow button and put the text down here. It will fill it in for you
and this is still overflowed, but that's enough
for an example, if you do run out of pages, you just have to clean
out the duplicates. So at this point we have
our text and our chapter, we have our titles, we have
our headers and footers. We just need to format
this interior texts. So I'll work from up here
when a double-click and command all to select all
the text in all the boxes. We'll go over to
the Properties tab. We're gonna do a little
bit of formatting. The first thing I'm going to
do is modify the text size. I'll change it to 11.
I think actually that probably looks good constraint
how big this book is. If I was doing a
paperback of this as maybe I would pick more like
a five by eight inch book, but six by nine is
also very nice. You can also change the
font at this point. That is completely up to you how you want to
style your book. The next thing we're
going to want to do is focus on the paragraph indents. So typically you're going to see the first line of every
paragraph is indented, and that is very helpful
visually for me, the ability to do that, we just select all that text, go down to the
paragraph section here. And the second option is
first-line left indent. You see when I click
that it starts to push all the first lines in. My preference is to,
It's 8.375 indent. You might have your own
preference about that, but that's kind of, I
think fairly standard. I'm also going to
change the alignment of the text right now
it's all aligned left, so all the text is
pushed to the left. I'm going to click on justify with last
line aligned left. So what this does is it makes
sure that the text goes from this line all
the way to this line. There is no jagged edges in terms of where the
page ends here. Now if I zoom in, you can
see that the way that it automatically
compensates for that is to add some hyphens. Typically you don't
want to use hyphens. They're not really the common
practice and book design. In order to turn that
off, you just click on this little button that
says hyphenate here. When I click on that,
it turns it off and it will adjust the
spacing between all the words to compensate
for that lack of hyphenation. And as you can see
here, when I deselect, everything is looking
pretty tidy and quite like a professionally
designed book. The only thing left to
do for this chapter is to work on the
first paragraph. The first paragraph
of your body text is typically going to be a
little bit different. I'm going to show you
a couple of steps to improve the way that
this chapter begins. First, I'll just highlight
this first paragraph. It's obviously just a single
sentence in this case. I'm going to remove that
indentation from the beginning, just put it back down to 0. And I'm going to select
the first five words. So these are some short words. I will use the
small caps feature, that sort of common practice in the beginning of the chapter. And then I'm going
to add a Drop Cap. A drop cap is just where
the first letter of the first paragraph of the chapter is larger than
the rest of the text. So I'm just going to
highlight the I in it and scroll down to the
paragraph settings again. Right here is where you have
drop cap number of lines. So right now it's 0 because
there is no drop cap. One, it doesn't really show up, but U2 is two lines worth and
three is three lines worth. You can see how big we made that i and I'm usually going to leave it at 32 or three is usually what it
picked for Drop Caps. So there you go. That is your first
chapter formatted and ready to move on
to the next step, which is to create the
rest of the body chapters. From here I can show you
what this looks like. We turn off all the guides
and the overprint preview. These pages are
looking very tidy and vary within the
margins as well, so these would
print very nicely. What I'm going to do
next is saved this file, this design file
in a new folder on my desktop just called Pride
and Prejudice book interior. I'll say this as Chapter one. And then in the next
lesson I will show you how I create
additional chapters based off of this and how we compile that into a
book in InDesign.
4. Creating Subsequent Chapters: In this lesson, we're going to create the rest of
the chapters for our book interior and then compile them into a
book in InDesign. I've got open here the
document where I've saved, or rather the folder where I've saved Chapter One of our book. Sometimes you'll also see
these files in your folders from InDesign when you have
to file working in open, it's just a temporary
thing to keep the file memory so you
can ignore that for now. I have chapter one. All I'm gonna do to
make Chapter two is just duplicate that file. This is a method of creating the chapters for
your interior that doesn't rely on using master pages or anything
like that in InDesign, which can be a little bit confusing when you're
getting started. So this is just a
more straightforward, very simple way to
create your book files. I'm just going to rename
this as Chapter two. Then I will open it in InDesign. So this is technically
our chapter to file, even though it says Chapter one. So let's turn back on the guides and the
overprint preview. And then we can
change this to be Chapter two so we don't
get confused anymore. Now, what we're gonna
do essentially is just delete all this text
and paste in the new one. But if you just did
that straightaway, what it would do is take the
formatting right here of the first paragraph with
the Drop Caps and this, and it would apply this
to all your paragraphs. It would be very messy and
I've made that mistake before. Before you delete that, it just go in and select that first paragraph
and erase it, and move that up
to the beginning. Now I can, I know that seems like a sort
of invisible fix, but if I just select all
the text and hit Delete, now I'm going to go into my working document
with the manuscript, grab chapter to very quickly. I remember that chapter two
is a little bit longer. So before we do anything else, and we'll grab these two pages
and duplicate the spread. You'll just do it two times
extra just to be safe. I'm going to scroll up here. We're back at the first
text box and I will paste. You can see Chapter two pasted
in the proper formatting. It looks great. Everything is aligned just as it was before. And actually
that was wrong. This chapter isn't extra pages, but we can just delete
those, no problem. Now the only thing to do because everything has
automatically set itself up is just to readjust this first paragraph
so it fits her style. I will zoom in, select this text and do the three steps that we did
before, which is number one, remove the indent number to select the first five words
and put them as small caps. Number three is the first letter and increase the
drop cap to three. There we are. Now this
chapter is already formatted, which was really
fast and quite easy. One thing you'll notice is that our page numbers still say 123. That's not an issue that will update once we compile the book. So don't worry about
that right now. You can leave that as is. I'm going to save this chapter and then off-screen
very quickly, I will just do the rest of the chapters that I'm
doing for my sample, which I'm only doing the
first five of the book. I'll do those and then I will show you how to
compile the book.
5. Compile Your Book and Design Front Matter: Now that we've got our chapters
for our book compiled, and you'll see here
I have chapters one through five of my demo created. It's time to create the
actual book file in InDesign. To do this, I'm just
going to open up InDesign here and go up to File, which I know is cut off, but you can see go to New
and then book right there. This will open up a new file within the same working folder. So this is just my pride
and Prejudice book interior folder would've just call it Pride and Prejudice, since this is the
name of the book, what this is going to do
is create a virtual folder where all the chapters and sections of the book
are gonna be contained. And then we'll export
from that file so that everything within the
book is put into one PDF. I'm just going to hit Save here. And it will open up this
little tab where we can see this is technically
our book folder or rather, you can almost
imagine that this is the front and back
cover that are holding all the
insights together. So we've got to put
all that interior content into this file. To start, we're going to click
on the plus sign and then select our first five chapters. Sometimes it does put
them in out-of-order, so I'm just going
to reorder those. There we go. Now you can see that all our chapters are
here in the book. If you didn't want
to do a forward and a end where you could also
just export this point, but you can see that the pages have remembered
themselves accordingly. Right now. Chapter one is page
one, dash three, chapter two is 46, etcetera. And if you open up the file, I can just double-click
to open that one right from this book file, you can see the corners,
the page numbers have updated accordingly. So this is why you don't
have to worry about page numbers when
you're doing the individual chapters in this way. You'll also see that
this chapter starts with the first page on
the left-hand side versus the right side
like chapter one, because we set up all
the margins correctly. Everything is on
the proper side. And this I'm going
to look good no matter whether it's on
the right or the left. At this point, all your
chapters should be done. So the only thing left to do is the front and back of matter. We're going to create
some front matter and start with the title page. I'm just going to drag and drop this book tab right over here and store it right
there so I can click on it again if
I want to see it. Rather than starting
from scratch, I'm going to go back to
that folder and I'm just going to duplicate
chapter one again. I'm going to rename it
front front matter. Then I'll open it
up in InDesign. So again, we're in
the front matter one, make sure that you are
looking to see which value are working in before
you renovate everything. I've made that mistake before
and having to go back and recreate pages that
you've deleted backs and we're in the
front matter one, so we don't need to have
all this body texts. So first thing I'm going to start deleting certain things. What I'm going to leave in is the headers and the footers, just because there
are certain pages in the front matter that
might want those. So in this case, I will delete the body text, turn the guides back on, and I'll leave these
two pages as they are, but I'll start off
with this one and I'll delete the footer
on the first page. The first page of my book in this case is going to
be the title page. I grabbed a little notepad here. I just want to go
over the different sections in the front matter. This can vary. Of course, you can pick, put whatever you like in
the front of your book. And a good way to get
inspiration is to browse through other books and see
how they've organized it. But there are some general principles for
your front matter. And that's what we're
gonna do here is just a very basic version. The first page will
be the title page. The second page on the back of that will be the copyright page. The page facing that is
going to be our dedication. The page after
that's going to be blank on the backside
of that one, then it will be the
title of contents. Then another blank
page depending on how many pages the type
of contents takes. And finally, this one
is extremely optional. You can do an introduction and I'll format one of
those in here as well, just using some
placeholder text. So this is what we're
going to create in this front matter document. Let's start with the title page. Title page is going
to be very simple. It's just going to have the name of the book name of the author. If you have a publisher house or you're in publishing brand, you can put that usually
in the bottom of the page. The title and the author name
usually go in the middle. So we'll start with just
Pride and Prejudice. I'm going to make this
text box a little bit bigger because you can
see I have overflow text. And I'm going to
select it all and just make it a little
bit more prominent. Put it at 26 there. It will put that up there. I'm going to copy and paste. It just went on to do too
much more formatting. And I'm going to
write by Jane Austin. I'll make that a
little bit smaller. I'm just going to leave
the title page like this. You can do whatever
you like with it. Some people prefer to
put a graphic here. Some people want
to do big word art and make it quite prominent. I would say just keep
in mind the margins. Make sure that you're
staying within them so that you're not having
anything overflow. But the sky's the limit with how you want to
design this page. Next, I'm just going
to add some pages in because the ones down here
have these placeholders. I'm saving these because when I do the introduction section, I would want to have
these little pieces. So we're just going
to go and add in. Some pages. Now I've got two blank pages right
after the title page. We're going to start with
the copyright statement. Copyright statements
usually are on the left-hand side of the
book, no matter what. So you should find some backpage to add a two in the front. I'm putting my find
the title page. It's going to be at the
bottom of the page as well. So I will just drag a little
box for the textbooks. They're in the
manuscript document. I had put the text and
wanted my copyright page, so I will grab that. And then I will paste that
copy with text right there. That's what it looks like. I'm just going to do some
brief formatting very much in the same vein of
how we format it detects for the
book, the body text. So I'm just going to
go to Properties. I will select the
justified alignment and then I will turn
off the hyphenation. And I'm going to reduce
the text down to size ten. Now, depending on
what you want to put in your copyright statement, this could be a lot larger. It could fill the page. You can put the ISBN, you can put websites or email addresses to
contact the publisher. You can put more information about the way to
catalog this book. Some books even
have like a one or two sentence synopsis here. It's really up to you. But again, look at other
books for examples of how you might want to structure this
page at the very minimum, this line right here,
copyright symbol, name of the author, the year is being published,
all rights reserved. That's the very bare minimum
of a copyright page. This extra sentence right here, which you can find, I'll put in the page, the handout for the course, but you can also find
many examples of copyright statements
online. Should you like? I just want to push
this to the bottom of the page so I will grab this and just shrink this text box so that it is closer to the bottom. Copyright page is done. The next page I wanted to
design was the dedication. Dedication pages are
very straightforward. I'm just going to create
a little text box here and then grab the text from my manuscript document
and paste it in. So there is my
little dedication. I will select it
again, formatting, I will change it to size ten
licks the rest of the book. And I will center it
rather than justify it, and we'll just
properly center it. And a lot of pages with
dedications are in italics. So this particular font isn't actually have metallics,
not all of them do. That is something
worth checking. Minion Pro is the default on my InDesign
when I open it up, but check and see if
your font has italics, if that is important
to your book. I'm being a little bit casual
with my alignment here, but generally these statements are about three-quarters
up the page. I'm just eyeballing it. That looks about correct. If you want to get very
mathematical with guides and everything to measure it where everything fits you can. But for these sections, I find that they
don't typically have that consistency in terms of everything lining
up the same way, especially when
things are hitting the three-quarter
mark like this. So I just usually go just
by what looks correct. That is our dedication page. I'm going to add in
another two pages. Let's check and see what
was next on our list here. So education blank
intentional contents. The blank page here.
The purpose of this is to make sure that
the alignment is correct. Tables of contents don't typically start on
the left-hand side, usually started on the right. We're going to leave
this page blank just to keep everything
spaced out correctly. The table of contents, we will start right here. I'm going to start with a
little text box that just will contain the words
table of contents for however you'd like to phrase that you could just
call it contents or index or whatever makes
sense for your book. I will center that and
I'll do some small caps. Again, you can create
your own style. Here is the structure
of this book is what really matters in terms of making it
look professional, but the style in which you use, that's really up to you. The way that I like
to very quickly sort out Table of Contents is to grab a text box and
just write chapter one, chapter two, chapter three, etc. And in order to space
them out a little bit, I will just select this text
over here to character. And then there is
this section here for the spacing between
renounce at 14 points. I will just increase that
a little bit just to give them some breathing room because there's not
that many chapters. Of course, this would
be according to how many chapters you
have on your list. Then I will copy and paste
this to create a second box, line it up with this one and
just shrink it a little bit. It will select all the
text here and erase it. And then I will go and put in the according numbers so
that one starts on page one. For now I'll just put 2345. But I can grab this
little book right here. And it's gonna tell me what
page everyone starts on soap. It starts on chapter
that starts on page for this on-page 71114. We can put that away there. I will just make this a
little bit smaller so it's snug and then I
can grab these two together and center it that way. When I do the overprint
preview so you can see how it looks
with the boxes. This is how it looks. You can always choose to
do little dots in-between. But I think that most typically you'll see the chapter
name whitespace, and then the numbers. If you have a ton of chapters, you're going to want
to do a couple of pages formatted like this. A secondary page wouldn't have table of
contents at the top. It would be moved up a little
bit without the title. So the next part of
our front matter is going to be the introduction. So we see we have
these templates here. I'm going to just add one page after the one we just
worked on to bump it over. So now we have that
white page spacing it. So our table of contents is
on this page, a blank page, and then this will
be the front page for our introduction. The introduction is
very similar format wise to your chapters. In fact, you can
actually copy and paste the styles from your
chapter to do this. First thing, I'm just going to delete the header on this page. We don't need it to say that
like the first chapter, you don't want to have a
header on the beginning. Then I just opened up one
of the chapters here, HMP or five open. I'm just going to
select these two boxes, title and the first text box, copy it and head back
over to front matter. And I'm just going
to click on the page I want and then paste it. I will drag and drop it, locks into the frame there. I will change this text
to say introduction. It could also be forward or whatever else you want
to start your book with. I just grabbed some
placeholder text to be the introduction. So we're going to clear out this box the same way we
did the other chapters. Remember to delete the
first paragraph first. And then we can select all
of it and delete that. And then we can paste in. I just grabbed the
Lorem Ipsum texts. That's pretty standard texts
that was just a placeholder. As you can see, this is a text that actually
came with formatting. I'm just going to remove the paragraph spaces
in-between these ones, then it's a matter of doing
the same thing that you did with the other chapters. Select the first paragraph, remove the indentation
as the drop cap. Select the first five words
and add the small caps. You can see there is a red icon here means there's
overflow texts, so we'll just scroll down. We already have this
with the footer, with the page number
and the title. So we'll just add
a textbox again and then full span
of the page here. Let's go back up, select this box and click
on the little. I'm going to grab the cursor, click on this link them were still some
paragraph lines there. There we go. That is how you would figure out the introduction
for your book. In this case, I would change this header to just
say introduction because that's the that's the section that
gets representing. And then down here we have the page number currently
says eight. Now that's not correct.
For a introduction, we typically don't want
to have 123 numbering. We want to have Roman numerals and typically in lowercase font, we also wanted to
start on page one, is being page one right
here and end here and then have that not impact the page numbers on
our chapters here. In order to modify
the page enumeration, we're going to go
up to pages and click on this little
hamburger menu on the side. Go down to numbering
and section options. And we're going to
just put the style as the Roman numerals. We're also going to pick
start page numbering at one so that the first page number of this document is starts at number one rather
than number seven here. We'll do that. Hit, Okay. And we see
it says i and then III, which is the Roman numeral
for R2 On this page. At this point, our front
matter is designed. So all you need to
do is just think logically about how
this last page of the front matter is
going to flow into the first page of
your first chapter. In this case, chapter one, page one would show
up right here, which you may be okay with next to the introduction and page. Or you might prefer to add
some blanket pages in-between, just make sure that you are aware of where your
front matter is ending because you
want chapter one to start on the right-hand
side of the page. So as long as that is the case, you are welcome to
save this file. And I'm gonna save it. And once get to stage, we will add it to the book file. Front matter is right there. So I will drag and drop
it up to the front here. Once I've done that,
you'll notice that the numbering is sort of
thrown off here because it is suddenly thinks that the front matter
is the first chapter. So in order to fix
these page numbers, we're going to click on the
little hamburger menu here. Go down to Document
Numbering Options. This is a very familiar tab
and we want to just click on Start page numbering at one. Notice that I've clicked
on the first chapter here as the one before I clicked
on the menu, hit Okay. And it's going to tabulate all the chapters so that they are numbered
correctly again. And now we have the
book compiled with the front matter chapters
one through five, and there's just the
background or to take care of. In the next lesson, we'll
design the back matter and then we'll be ready
to export this book.
6. Design Back Matter: Now that we've formatted our chapters are front matter
and compelled the book. The last thing to do is to create the back
matter of your book. I'm just going to go and create
a new document for that. But if you want to replicate
the styles you already used, you can just create
a duplicate file of the front matter
or chapter and do the same thing basically
that we did for the front matter in
terms of reusing a file. But I'm just going to
create a new one here in InDesign just to keep it fresh. Move that two inches. Everything else is still the same as last time you set it up. And I'll hit Create. We have just a plain blank page and then two more after that. In terms of what to put
in the back matter, it can be really up to you, but there are a few
standard things About the Author section is pretty common
and that's where you're going to be able
to put a short bio about you or whoever
the book author is. Perhaps social media links or a website or e-mail
address to contact them. And usually a small photo, often in black and white to match the rest
of the interior. You can also add in an acknowledgement section where you can thank people
who contributed to the project or supported
the author along the way, again, very free form, but that is a common
section there. And the other section that
we're going to look at is an also bisection, which is where you
list other titles published by the author
and where to find them. Let's create those in InDesign. Let's start with the
About the Author page. This is going to be very
simple and I'm going to just drag a guide from
the top to market, the halfway point of the page, just like I did for the
front page of the chapters. This will just help
create some division where I can put the text box. I will put the text
box right here. I'll also add another
text box above to say about the author. Highlighting it. I'll do the same
formatting that we did for most other
titles in this book, which are centering it and using small caps and increasing
the font to 14. I'll just grab this box
here and make sure it is lined up to center. Then here you can put
whatever sentences you want to about the author. Here I just made up some
biographical information for our friend Jane Austin. I'm just going to grab
these two pieces of social media content
and center them there. For this text, I will do much
like our book formatting, which is to justify the text. And I will remove the hyphen by clicking on the
hyphen button. There we go. So now the only thing to add to this page is a
small author photo. I found a photo of our friend Jane here it's rather large, so we'll just zoom out. Indesign is a little tricky
with resizing photos. It's easy to miss this. So if you just grab the
corner and shrink it, it cuts off the picture. So I'm just going to go down
two buttons while I resize. This one is Command and what is shift command is going
to grab both the PBOC, the photo, and the box it's in, and shift is going to
keep the dimensions. So I will do both of those
and then I can shrink this and decides
is appropriately. So I will just resize
it to something that fits her book and then I
will drag it to the center. There we go. I think those commands
are going to be a command and shift on a PC, but you may want to
double-check those again are looking for a black and white
photo here so that the printing doesn't mess
up with a color image. That's how we styled the
About the Author page. Next we want to do and
acknowledgments page. So I'm going to just grab
these two text-boxes. I'm gonna leave the photo. We don't need to see Jane again. And I will scroll down
to the next page, click on it and paste. It will place that as well. I will do that a
second time because this is going to be
are also by page. This one could be
acknowledgments. There we go. I will just write, I like to think. You can imagine the
rest of the text there. I will align this over there. And you can do the
same formatting as the rest of the
book for this page. This page we can do
also by Jane Austin. Then we would want
to list the titles. So let me think of
a few of her books. All right, so there's
three examples of other books by Jane Austin. It's up to you how
to format this. If you have a website
where you will be able to go to find your other books. You can put that
they're commonly, we'll see something
along the lines of like find these titles on Amazon or in fine
bookstores, stores near you. Something that makes sense. You can also add in the cover image of these
books that virtually well, especially if you only have one, maybe two titles as other books, grayscale version of the cover would be really
impactful here as well. You can choose
whether you want to keep the same alignment, keep them at the halfway mark, like the EBIT, the author, this page works
best that way with the texturing halfway across the page because there's
an image to incorporate. But these do look a
little bit farther down, so you may want to
highlight them, drag them up a little bit. Again, this is just
using kind of eyeballing it to see where you think
the pages look best. That's pretty much it
for the back matter. Again, be creative. The back matter is where you
can really promote stuff. You might want to include sample from another book
that you've written. You could do a promotion, sign up to your mailing list, offers and any, any sort
of thing like that. This is quite a blank canvas
at the end of your book. Now that we're done
here, I'm just going to save this file. We'll save it as end matter
in that same folder. And I will go, I see the
book actually closed. So all we have to do
to find that again is open and loose open the Pride
and Prejudice book file, and sometimes it disappears. So I'm just going into window and it's right down
here at the bottom. Private prejudice. There it is. We're just going to
add in that end matter file right at the end. That looks great. There is an
exclamation point here that happens when you it says document modified
outside of book. It doesn't mean
anything's wrong. It just may mean that
you need to open it up and save it again
for it to go away. So now we are almost
done with our book. One thing you need to check
now is that we need to have your book have an
even number of pages. This is just because every
sheet of paper has a front and back and therefore needs to be an even number of
pages in your book. We can see that we
end on a 19 here, that's the last page and
that's not going to work. We need to have 20 because
this last document is the matter
chapter or section. I already have that open here, so we'll just go to pages
and I'm just going to add a single blank
page to the back. And that's all there is to it. I will just save that. Now our book is
basically compiled. Now we have our books sorted and organized in the
book section here. We're going to wrap
up this lesson and in the next one I'll show you
how to do a preflight check and then export your
book ready to be uploaded to Amazon or wherever
else you're publishing.
7. Preflight and Exporting: Now that we have designed
all of your chapters, your front matter and
your back matter, and compile them in a
book file on InDesign, it's time to get
ready to export it. The first thing we're going
to do is a preflight check. And all that means
is that InDesign is going to run a check
through all the pages of your document to make
sure that they all work properly and we'll
export correctly. To do that, we just find this little window
here with our book. Click on the little
hamburger menu and click on pre-flight book. We're going to do entire book
and click on pre-flight. This was a really short books. We didn't take long. It might take a minute or two
if you have a longer book, but we got a green
light on all of them. If there was an issue, you would just want to
double-click to open the document and see what
it's flagged as an issue. Typically that's going to
be items that are over the margins or that are
sort of half on the page, or things that are misaligned. It shouldn't be
anything that is too difficult to figure
out her fixed. Another, we've got
the green light, we're ready to export our book. So I'm just going to
select all the items in the book just with
Shift and click it, click on the
hamburger menu again. And we have right
here some options for getting your book
printed or exported. Package book for print is
going to be an option that will export your book with
a lot of data with it. It basically packages
it so that someone else could take it and open
up your InDesign files. That is an option if you're
working with a printer who wants those complex files. But if you're using a print on demand service like
Amazon anchored spark, Barnes and Noble,
or drafted digital, any of those printers, you
don't need to do that. You just want a PDF
version of your book. Down here we have export book to PDF and expert book to ePub. Epub makes an e-book. Indesign is not my favorite
platform to create e-books. I like to use other platforms
like Atticus, vellum, or even just Google Docs
to create my ebooks because I find there's more
flexibility in terms of that. Indesign is great for
designing paperbacks, however you can, and I'm
gonna show you how it looks. Print book is also
an option to print through Adobe's
printing services. That's not something that I've ever used, so I
can't speak to that. I'm going to do both
of these export book to PDF and to ePub. So let's do PDF first. I'm just saving it as
Pride and Prejudice demo here in the
same book folder. Now when it comes to
all of these settings, typically the default
are gonna be just fine. High-quality print is
what I usually pick. Occasionally if you're uploading to income Spark because
they will be looking for usually the Z1A 2001 is what Ingram
Spark is looking for, but just checks the instruction manual that
comes with whatever platform you're working
with and it will tell you what version of
PDF to work with. For kVp, I usually use high-quality print
and that works fine. These are just
different versions of the PDF format that includes different
amounts of data at, but all the design inside kVp seems to be fine with
a really simple PDF. But other printers like the more complex versions,
that's all that is. Otherwise you can
just click on Export. Now also I'm going to
generate the ePub. I'll call it the same file. You get to pick between ePub, fixed layout and flowable. I'm going to do both
just so you can see, we'll do this one
is fixed and fixed. Just hitting okay on that. I've exported and this is
the PDF version of the book. So we'll zoom out just
so you can see it. We start with our
entitled page, page one, and then we have our
copyright dedication. This is a blank page as
a spacer title page, table of contents,
spacer introduction. And then Chapter one. This is a good time to
check and make sure that all your page numbers
look correct. Check that the headers are
looking the way you want to. Remember that this is
going to be right, left, right, left is
the order of your book. That should be automated so you shouldn't have to
worry about that and just check and make sure
that all the formatting looks the way you want it to. We can scoot down through this, down to the back and we have
the last page of our book. Then we have about the
author, then our friend Jane. Acknowledgements about Jane, but also by and
then a blank page. From my perspective, this
is looking really great. I don't see any errors with it. This could be also if you're designing this
for somebody else, this is a good point
when you could send this for revisions or
approval to salient. Here's the interior design, check it for any final typo
is that kind of thing. At this point, you can
probably tell why I said it. Was it annoying if you have typos that you find after
you done on this process, because then you
have to open the individual chapter, hunted down, change it, and then go through the preflight and
export all over again. Of course you can do it
is not exactly difficult, it is just time-consuming. If you have someone that you're working with or
you find yourself many errors that were missed
at this stage of the game. So this PDF looks ready to upload two kVp or
another platform. Of course I'm not
going to, since it was just a demo and only
has five chapters, which could definitely
disappoint some viewers. Now let's take a look at those
e-books that we generated. The first one I have here
is the fixed layout. The fixed layer, which
is the better one. Fixed basically means that
it is taking what you did on the page and
reproducing this as an e-book. You can see we have,
it looks pretty much the same as the paperback. Now it's a little bit difficult depending on the reader
people are using because it may not agree
with their e-reader. But in general, I opened this in the Apple Books
app on my desktop. And it looks pretty good. So if you're going to do the e-book directly
out of InDesign, then I would recommend
going with the fixed layout because if you go
with the flowable, see, oops, this is
what it turns into. So it removes all the
formatting and it basically makes
it all a chaotic. All our front matters
here in one place. The reason that I don't
use either of these as the e-books from my books is because even though
this looks good, I want my readers to be
able to change the size of the font according to
their visual preference. This fixed version really
locks in all this formatting. So the book kind of just
is how it looks here. You can't, it's not dynamic in the way
that many E-books are. You can't change the
width, the pages look. It does work in terms of we can open on a computer
pretty beautifully. But in terms of mobile devices, you may find that this
is not the best e-book, and of course I don't
recommend using reflow out of InDesign unless you
were doing no front matter, in which case it
probably would be fine. So with that being done, we have reached the
end of the course. I hope this was helpful in
helping you get started with InDesign to create a book
in a really simple way. It doesn't mess with too many of InDesign is complex features, but it creates a really nice, efficient book that looks quite professional
in my opinion. If you have any
questions or there are issues I didn't cover
in this tutorial, please feel free
to leave them in the comments for the course and I will add the reply
to them in the comments. Or if they're big enough, I will add them on as video
add-ons to this course. Indesign is a really big, complex piece of software. And even though I've
been using it for years in a
professional capacity, there are still things
that happen every now and then that I find a little
confusing or surprising. So I'm very happy to
help you if any troubles arise based around what
we did in this tutorial.
8. Setting Up Your Cover: In this last lesson, we're going to quickly go
over some notes on designing covers to go with
the book interiors that we've just created. An important thing to note
is that your book cover is a separate file
from the interior that we've designed together. Whether you publish on
Amazon or with Ingram Spark, you need to upload
two separate files. One is the book interior and when that
includes the front, back and spine, if your cover as one large single graphic. For most printers,
this is going to be delivered as a PDF file. Now while it's
definitely possible to design your
cover in InDesign, it's actually not my
preferred method. I designed my covers using
Adobe Illustrator because it allows me to create more
graphically complex designs. In this lesson, I'm going
to show you how to set up your cover document in either
of these software options. Note that I also recommend
designing covers in Canva if you want a
simpler design tool. And I have another course on
that if you're interested. I'm not going to go
through a full tutorial on designing cover artwork because designing
marketable book covers is a very
large separate topic. But let's take a look
at how you can set up your cover documents
and go from there. We're going to get our
dimensions for our cover from KPPs print cover,
calculator and templates. This is a website that you can find on Amazon's help pages. I will also link it in the
handout for the course. This is a relatively new
thing that Amazon design, which has been immensely
helpful before you had to calculate all of these
numbers yourself. But now we can use this
little form and it will give us the dimensions and a
template for our cover. We'll be able to use these
same covered dimensions for all the different
platforms as well. First, we have to pick
our binding type, hardcover or paperback. You may want to
do both versions, in which case you
want to download separate templates
because the hardcover requires a much larger template to wrap around the
edges of the binding. For now, let's do a
paperback template. For example, the anterior, you're going to pick
what kind of color or black and white you're going
to print your book in. This matters because
the paper weight that they use is
slightly different and that can vary microscopically impact the width of
the spine of the book. Our template is going to be
black and white paper type. You can pick cream or
white paper again, very slight difference
in the weight of them. Let's pick cream
for this example, patron direction is going
to be left to right. This is the case for
almost all English books, I believe measurement
units, It's up to you. I prefer to work in
inches and the trim size, this is going to be
the size of your book. So if you picked a custom size click here and you
can fill it in. Otherwise we can pick
from this list and our book was a six
by nine inch book. The page count is
going to determine the width of your spine. So if there's a lot of pages, the spine is going
to be thicker. If it's just a few,
it'll be narrower. So here we can enter
it and let's just say 200 pages as our guests. And we just click on
Calculate dimensions. And this is basically what your book cover
needs to look like. We just need to take these
dimensions and put this into whatever design tool we're using at this point of view,
we're using something else. You can these numbers. Typically you'll want the
full cover measurement, which is the size of the cover plus a
little bit of bleed. These are the two
numbers that we're gonna take into InDesign and Illustrator to create the
templates for the cover design. At this point, I'm
also going to click on Download Template right
down here in the bottom. We're going to use this for aligning all the
margins and the spine. This download as a zip
folder and when you open it, you will find a PNG version and a PDF version of
the cover template. I'm gonna be using the PNG
version as a guide for us. Now, if opened up
InDesign again, I'm going to click on
New File and we're going to set up our
file for our cover. First, I'm going to change
the measurements into inches. And then here for the
width and height, we're going to type in those
two numbers that we got. The Amazon template. In this case, the width was 12.75 and the height was 9.25. Now we'll just change some
of these settings slightly. The orientation is
fine as landscape, but we don't need facing pages. We are just making
one single page. We'll change this to one. In terms of the margins. We're going to make
them all the same. So I'll click that on link. And the margin is
going to be 0.125. And again, you'll see this in the information Amazon
generated on that page. For this cover, we
don't need any bleeds, so I'm just going to erase
all of these members. There we go. So now I will hit Create. This is the cover image. So I'll zoom out a little bit. You can see it is basically
one big rectangle. And on the right-hand side is going to be your front cover. In the middle is your spine, and on the left is
your back cover, obviously right now it just
looks like one big block, which is why we're
going to add in some guidelines to work with. To do this, I'm going
to use the PNG version of the cover template that we just downloaded from Amazon. And I'm going to drag and
drop it into the design. I'll place it in
the full width of the screen and it should lock
because it's very precise. There we go. This is what the template
looks like and you can see more visually where
the spine is placed. Now because we set the margin
already the outside margin, this line that follows
the exterior of the cover is already
set on the template. You can see it if I
just drag that away, that lens already set there. But we still need these
interior lines for the spine so we know
where that starts. And you can also add an
additional marker along the pink. So you know, we're not to put any content because you don't want anything
too close to the edge, like the text so
that it gets cut off or too close to the
edge when printing. So to do that, I'm just going to zoom in on the
design a little bit. We'll start with a spine here. And I will go over
to the ruler on the side and just drag, and it's going to
drag a guideline and I can drop this
anywhere I like. I'm just going to
line it up with this. You could also do
this like very much. Erotically by calculating out where you went to the lines. But I find that
doing it this way is precise enough since you're just using them as guidelines. That's all the lines
for the spine. And if I move this, you can see there are the lines
in blue there. You can also change the color of these guidelines if you like, by going to the
property section, just click on the
guideline you want to change and then you can go in and click Guide Options
and change the color. Because do it
purple if you want, but you have to go
in and do it to every single guideline
that you bring in. Now other guidelines I could
add is along this red line here that shows the margin
and bleed area of the book. So I'm just going to
do the same thing, grab this and drop it on the line and I'll do
it for all four sides. Down here on the
template, you'll see that this is where the
barcode is going to go. You can insert your own
barcode if you like. If you have a barcode graphic
to insert, otherwise, Amazon or other platforms will insert their
own barcode for you. And this is where Amazon's
auto barcode goes. You don't want to put anything
important behind this. Otherwise it'll be covered
obviously by the barcode. So you can either just keep that in mind when
you're designing or you can add additional
guidelines to mark off the boundaries of the barcode box so that
you know where it is once you've removed
the template below, I'm zooming out here to
look at the overall design. And this is now
full of guidelines. So at this point you
can go ahead and delete the layer with
the template we dragged in and recognize that the
guidelines here are all teal, so they might be
hard for you to see, but they are marked
out where the boxes for the barcode and then
all the lines on the side. So at this point you
can start dragging in your content for
your book design. You can put text here. You can drag and drop
images wherever you like. The reason I don't use InDesign
is because I like to do much more complicated
designs for my pictures. Of course, you could also
design the images in Illustrator and then compile
it here in InDesign. The choice is up to you. But if you ever do get confused about how things are
supposed to be laid out, you can always drag and
drop that template back in and just make sure that everything is
positioned correctly. One note about the spine. If you're wondering
which direction the text goes because you obviously
rotating the text to fit in this horizontal
or vertical space. The text here at the
bottom says spine width. It's the same direction
that this text is going. So it makes sure
that the text is, if you were to lay the
book flat on a table, the tax would still be legible
if the book was face up. When you're done designing
your cover here, all you're gonna do is go to File Export and then
export as a PDF. Much like the interior, Amazon is pretty good with
a high-quality print PDF, but Ingram spark may prefer a different kind of PDF format. They do explain all that in
there uploading guidelines. Now I'll show you how I set up the same file in
Adobe Illustrator. I'll just click on New
File and we'll set it up in very much the same
way that we did before. We're going to do a landscape
orientation and an inches, we're going to set it up at
12.75 wide and 9.25 high. Now this doesn't
give you the option to set the margins here now. So we'll do that shortly. I'm just going to
hit Create. And here is our cover image. Obviously it looks a lot like
the other one we just did. Right now the rulers
aren't showing up, so I'm just going to go up
to view in the top menu, go to rulers, show rulers. And there they popped up. At this point I'm going to grab that exact same PNG template
that we use to off of kVp. And I'm going to insert it here. You'll see that it shows up
as the right size because we measured correctly and entering
the correct dimensions. And we're gonna do just like we did the last time and zoom in. I'm going to drag and
drop those guidelines in. Just go to the
ruler, pull it down. And we're just gonna have
to do the extra line here that isn't automatically added the way he wasn't InDesign. I'll just go and
do all these lines quickly just to show you. Now we have all our guides set on our book
and you can start designing a couple of tips for working with Illustrator
for this purpose, instead of deleting the template
like we did in InDesign, you can actually keep it here. I'm just going to go to Layers, open up layer one and you
see that this is where all my guides and my
template are located. I can just turn the
guide on and off the template by
clicking this here. And that way I can
better visualize that all the content is in the
right sections of the book. If the guides are not dark
enough or you want to just double-check with the
barcode or anything like that. Another good tip if
you're going to do this, I'm just going to click
on the template itself. Could have properties
and we're going to change the opacity to about 50%. That way anything
underneath will show up and you can fiddle
with it better that way. At this point, you can
create your design, you can make whatever kind
of word art you want to do. I find illustrator
does let you do a lot more complex edits to the text and making it look
3D or with different shadows, It's a lot easier to create dynamic book covers with
this tool over InDesign, in my opinion, when you're
finished designing, you want to export
this as a PDF. To do that, you're going
to just go up to file. And again, I know it's cut off. Instead of going to export, just go to Save As. And it will give you the option to just save it to your computer as and just drop down
here to find PDF. If you use the export feature, it may not trim it
to the right size. It may add the full art board, which can have images
spilling off the edge. If you include a lot of
graphic assets that do that, that is how you set up
your design files for covers in either
InDesign or Illustrator. And when you're
done and you have a finished PDF along with the finished PDF of your book interior that you
already created in InDesign, you have all the
files you need to upload to Amazon, Ingram, spark, Barnes and Noble drafted digital or whatever other
platform you're using. Now a note if you
are going to be publishing on angered spark, they do offer their
own template that is customized to
every single book. You have to go in and use their template generator
tool and include your ISBN number when you
are creating that template, they will email you an InDesign template
that you open there. And it will have a
box where you need to put the content of
your book cover. I don't recommend designing
right on this template, I would recommend
creating the book cover, exporting it as a PNG or even
a PDF and then dragging and dropping it into
those bounding boxes so that it is formatted. They like it, but
you have still done all the work in a
separate document. This is what an inner
spark template looks like. This is from another
project I've done. And you can see that it comes
with a lot of text on it. You don't want to
touch any of this and they've already set
their own boundaries on it. This is the box where
your covers going to go. So I recommend that
you just drag and drop your cover that's
already finished into this box here to fit these parameters and
then export this as a PDF as a whole
and then upload it to their platform as
a class assignment, of course, I could say
that you could just create a book using
our tutorial, but that is a big project, I would say as the
very first assignment, just try and create
the first page or the first three pages
of your first chapter. That's where you get to do a lot of the technical setup to ensure that you follow the
instructions of this class. But also you get to be
really creative in terms of your font and your
design choices there. I'd love to see your work. Please do upload a screenshot
of what your first book, a couple of pages look
like if you'd like to. And if you enjoyed this class, please do consider
leaving me a review. I would love to
hear your feedback and I read all my reviews. I really appreciate them. I also have lots of
other classes on writing, publishing,
and e-commerce. So if you're interested, do
consider checking those out. I also have a class out on creating your very
first poetry book, which would work
really seamlessly with this tutorial if you
are looking to publish something in the poetry genre or something similar that
wasn't quite a full novel. So with that being
said, thank you so much for watching
this course. Happy creating and good
luck with your projects.
Rebecca Wilson, Artist and Illustrator
