How to Format a Children's Book in InDesign

1. Introduction: You may be looking to format and type set your own children's book as either a budget friendly option or just to take back creative control. And I am here to help. Formatting a children's book can be broken down into five main parts. Setting up your document, importing and placing the illustrations. Placing and styling the text, and exporting your formatted book. I'm going to take you all the way from choosing the right trim, size, and resolution, to showing you the right export settings for the major print on demand platforms. So your book is ready for publication. Hi there. My name is Vivian Reese, and I'm an author and a freelance book designer. I have formatted hundreds of books and children's books are by far my favorite. I love seeing the cute little illustrations and the fun text, and being a part of putting it all together. This course is all about helping you do it yourself to format a professional looking children's book. In, in design, I've broken everything down to the beginner level. So even if you've never used in design before, I promise you you will not get lost. In fact, I think it's going to give you the confidence to be able to format all of your future children's books. I'll be explaining resolution, RGB versus CMYK Bleed PDF standards. I'm going to take you step by step through formatting and type setting a real children's book my own, including where to find commercial fonts. There's a bonus resources PDF with cheat sheet do list that you'll be able to download and keep forever so you can use them again and again. There is a lot packed into this course, but I love to teach every Youtube channel with writing tips, by the way, and I truly think that anyone can do this course. Thank you for watching and I will see you on the other side. 2. Tech & Key Terms for Designing a Children's Book: Hi there. My name is Vivian Reese and I am so excited that you're here. We're going to jump in and cover some key terms and some technical specifications so you don't get lost during this course. All of these items are in the resources PDF, so make sure you download that for quick reference during the course. First up, I'm running in design on a Mac. For the most part, everything will be the same between a Mac and a Windows computer. Minus the command control and function Alt keys for shortcuts we'll be using in design CC for this course. And I'm currently running Adobe in design 2023. Right now, the workspace that I use in love will be available in the downloads and we'll be using that during this tutorial. Don't worry, I'll walk you through how to load that into your design program. And set everything up to look exactly like my screen design requires 8 gigabytes of Ram. But the more the merrier, If you ever experience any lagging while moving through your document, make sure to jump to the speed up in design video. And I'll give you some pointers on how to avoid that. For maximum efficiency, I'll be using some keyword shortcuts, but I'll have those displayed on the screen, as well as saying them out loud so you know exactly what we're doing. Let's jump into some key terms. Pod is print on demand. We're starting with this one because I'm going to use this phrase a lot in the coming definitions. Pod companies are ones like Amazon Print, Ingram, Spark, Lulu Barnes, and Noble. Your books are printed as needed or on demand at these companies. These are the main companies that independent authors use. Trim Size. Your trim size is the final size of your printed book. The most common size for self published children's books is 8.5 by 8.5 but eight by ten is also a really common size. Hopefully, this is something you've already discussed with your illustrator, because the size of your illustrations needs to match this. If you haven't commissioned your illustrations or started illustrating yourself, make sure you decide what trim size you want to use before. This isn't something that you should leave up to your illustrator. Trust me, I've had to resize many, many illustrations because this was not done properly spread. A spread is the left hand page and the right hand page that falls next to it. All left hand hand pages are even numbered and all right hand pages are odd numbered. This is true in all books, not just children's books. In design will automatically display your book like this so that your first page is not a spread, it's a single page. And all even numbered pages have the odd numbered page right beside it. They're not actually connected. But in design, displays it like this just to easily visualize what the book will look like when it's printed and when it's laying open. Illustrations can either be full spread, meaning they cover both the left and the right hand pages or single page. Most likely the text for that illustration will fall on the opposite page with either a blank or a textured background bleed. This is a 0.125 in strip that's an eighth of an inch that goes around the outside edges of each page and that's going to be trimmed from your book once it's printed. The purpose is to ensure that your illustrations go all the way to the edge of the page. Most companies require bleed to be added to the three outside edges of each page. You don't typically add it to the spine edge, but a couple want bleed on all sides. I've highlighted what settings you need for each POD company in the resources PDF, but an example of adding bleed to an 812 X812 trim size. Each page is 8.5 by 8.5 The spread, which is both pages, is going to be 17 by 8.5 That's 17 " wide by 8.5 " tall. For this course, we're going to be adding bleed to all outside edges, which is what KDP print and Ingram Spark want. They're the biggest POD companies most people go through, so that's what we'll be using for this course. We need bleed on all of these edges. This might not be to scale, but the width around our pages is 0.125 " adding 0.125 " to all outside edges means our width becomes 17 plus 0.125 plus 0.125 which is 17.25 Our height becomes 8.5 plus 0.125 on plus 0.125 which is 8.75 Our final illustration size for spreads in inches is 17.25 by 8.75 You may need to do this math yourself on whatever trim size you're using. If you're using a platform that needs bleed on all edges, you'll add an additional 0.25 to your width for an 8.2 0.2 single page illustration. Each illustration needs to be the width which is 8.5 plus 0.125 which is 8.625 And the height needs to be 8.5 plus 0.125 plus 0.125 which is 8.75 So your total is 8.625 by 8.75 All of this information is, so you'll know what resolution your illustrations need to be, which is up next resolution. Your resolution is your trim size plus your bleed times the PPI, which is pixels per inch that you want your book to be. Basically, this is the dimensions in pixels of your image. All POD companies want at least 300 PPI, or 300 pixels for every inch in your illustration. The more pixels, the higher the quality of your image. Most digital assets are only 72 PPI, which is extremely pixelated for a printed book. But I have seen illustrations provided at this PPI because the illustrator did not know this. Back to our eight on a two by 8.5 example. For a full spread illustration, our width is going to be 17.25 ". And we're going to multiply that by 300, which is the PPI that we want. So in this case, our width is going to be 5,175 pixels for our height. We had 8.75 ". We're going to multiply that by 300 PPI, which comes to 2,625 pixels. So your illustrations need to be 5,175 by 2,625 pixels. For a single page illustration, our width is 8.625 ". And we're going to multiply that by 300 PPI, which comes to 2,587.5 pixels. Our height, again is 8.75 multiplied by 300 is 2625. For a single page illustration, our dimensions need to be 2,587.5 by 2,625 I hope I didn't lose you there. I'll go over how to make sure your illustrations are the right resolution in the final review video towards the end of this course. They have to be close to this though. And remember, you may have to do your own calculations. If your trim size is not 8.5 by 8.2 margins. You may be thinking, I already know what margins are, but we're going to be figuring out what margin size we need for our book. And again, we'll be looking at the two most popular POD companies, which is KP Print and Ingram Spark. You can refer to the cheat sheet for the links to each one of these. I've included links rather than a table here breaking down the margin requirements. Since either company could change their requirements one day, so it's good to periodically check their websites. Right now, KP Print wants margins of 0.25 " on all outside edges and 0.375 " on the inner edge. Ingram Spark just says 0.5 " on all page edges. For this course we're going to make sure our file complies with both at the same time. That way we can upload this PDF for both paperback for K DP and Hard back through Ingram Spark. We can do this as long as we're using the same trim size for both companies. We're going to go with the margin requirements from Ingram Spark because we know that that's also going to satisfy KPP's requirements. So again, that's 0.5 " on all edges, typesetting, this is font selection, placement effects, et cetera. This is anything to do with the text. Formatting is making sure that the illustrations and the elements in the illustration are in the right places and that they meet the publisher requirements. Typesetting is just adding the text and the styling to your text. Cmyk versus RGB, These are called color ******. Anything on a screen, on your phone, on your laptop, uses the RGB color space, which is red, green, blue. It actually uses a lot more colors, and images usually look more vibrant in this color space. Cmyk, which is cyan, magenta, yellow and black is the color space that printers are able to use. It covers a smaller area compared to RGB. And if you've ever changed the cartridges on a full color printer, you're familiar with the fore CMYK cartridges. Since printers only print in CMYK, your book will be exported in the CMYK color space. Your illustrations may be in RGB. So just know that some of that vibrancy may be lost in the conversion from one to the other. If you notice your illustrations aren't as vibrant when you export them to a PDF, then that's why linked images in design, all of your images will be linked from the file in your project folder to design. In design composites your illustrations so that they're not stored directly within design. When you place an illustration in design, it looks at the file in your project folder and displays it for you in design. If you move a file that's linked to that specific folder to another folder on your computer, the link will break in design and you'll need to re link that file. This is also why if you ever send your end design file to someone else or to another computer, your illustrations won't load unless you include that file that has all of your linked illustrations. This can seem like a hassle right now, but it makes it so much easier when you make changes to your linked files without having to redo the placement in your file each and every time. So if you change anything about the image in Photoshop, for example, you just have to refresh the link and it loads the new illustration with all of your changes. I hope I didn't lose you too much with some of those explanations. Absolutely. Rewatch this if you need to, or refer to your resources, PDF when you're ready to move forward. I will see you in the next video where we'll look at some examples of some children's books. 3. Formatting Examples - Getting Inspiration from Published Books: We're going to look at some examples of typical layouts and some typography customs. If there is a book that you love that you want to reference, you can feel free to do so. You can get some books from your child's bookshelf or go to the library, or you can use the Look Inside feature on Amazon and you can see the interior of most children's books. They pretty much all have a look inside feature. So you can see at least a few pages to see how things, We're not copying anything here, we're just seeing what's standard. I have four different examples, we might not look at all four. I also do have an author copy of the book that I'm formatting for this course, so we can take like a brief flip through really quickly. I show you how to do these patterned pages right here and set up every single page in here. What text to put on the copyright page. I've had too much coffee, by the way. I'm shaking a little bit as is typical. But I show you how to do, how to format, how to add these little shaded backgrounds. I don't know if you can see, I'm going to hold it up just a little bit, but there's like a texture to the pages, so it's not just white behind the text. And I'll show you how to do that. Like a brief little quick flip through of what's in this book. And like I said, I'm going to show you how to do all those pages. So the first one you can see some of these are well loved by my daughter. Yeah, they've probably seen better days. Let me move these. We're going to look at layout. We're going to look at typography. The font choice for Peppa Pig obviously is a brand, It's on brand for the actual TV show. They didn't choose another font for their book, they just use their Peppa Pig Ft layout wise. Sometimes you'll see this in children's books and you can decide to do this. This is not the layout that we're going to be using for this course, but this is the title page. Some children's books will include the copyright information on the title page, but you can see it squishes things up a little bit. This is not my preferred method, but the perk to doing this is that the first page that a child flips is the story. It immediately starts on the page right after your title page. This is an option you can include and copyright information on one page, so you don't need to have any additional pages before you jump into the story. Now these illustrations are full spread. You can see this one, It's not quite going to the bottom of the page, but there's a solid background behind all of the text on pretty much every single page that you flip through. It's always a solid background. They don't have anything going on too much. Actually, I would have made this white font because it blends a little too much with the background right here. But you can see it's justified. All the text is left justified and they actually indented. That's not something that you see too frequently in children's books, but it just depends matter of preference, just flipping through and seeing if I notice anything else. But these illustrations go all the way to the edge of the page. So this was printed with bleed. I do show you in the course how to do something like this if you don't have any space on your illustration to add like any blank space or there's too much going on in the background. I show you how to add some additional space like this flipping through. These are single page illustrations, They're not one big illustration that goes across both pages. Yeah, most of the text stands out really well from the background. Yeah, this is our first at the end. I guess we need to look at layout wise. This is the last story page on the left. And then they have this hard page. I guess they expect you to tear this out, which is just a recipe. They don't have any front matter, any back matter really like dedication or about the author or contact or anything like that. But this is the first example. Next up, a popular book which has also been well loved by my daughter is Where The Wild Things Are. This one, see it has some extra pages in the beginning. When you're self publishing, you have to pay for every page. I think with KDP, 24 pages is actually the same price as 28 pages. You can check to see if there's really going to be a difference because you can include additional cute pages. I would say like this because it's not needed, but it's just for styling purposes. They have an award that they won. This is the pattern page, like I show you. We're going to add our own pattern page. Ours isn't exactly full spread though, because no matter what children's book, nonfiction fiction, the first page is always a right hand page. That confuses some people. Especially how Adobe and most PDF reader open a PDF. If you have two pages, the first page is always going to be on the left. That's not actually how books are printed. The first page is always on the right. All right. Hand pages are odd, all left hand pages are even. The pattern page and then a blank page. So it has the little title page right here. Actually, that's not even a page. This one has quite a few extra pages in the beginning. This is the title page and it has copyright information down at the bottom as well. I picked this book because it's single page illustrations, but it also has, if I flip through, it has some that are like semi full spread. Of course, I didn't immediately find one. They bleed over this sine and I show you how to do that in the course. I know there's one just like the Peppa Pig example. This one is full spread. It took me a minute to find. Okay, we're going to look at font. This is a bold font, and it's a Sapan. Whatever font you choose for your children's book, you want it to be easy to read. I have an example. This one has more styling to it. It's not actually, this one's a Sat. The stroke is not the same for every line, so it looks handwritten. Even with this one, you want it to be easy to read. You want little kids to be able to recognize the letters like the right here. Or the L might be a little more difficult for little kids to put it together. That, that is an L because it's got so much styling to it, that's something to think about. Obviously, kids are smart, they'll pick up on it, but this one is a bold Saraf font. I like to use Saraf or San Sera fonts for the text throughout the book. All of these are left justified. All these text blocks, these have the layout of illustration on one side, text on the other side. There's no background to the text, it's easy to read, stands out. This is interesting that they let this slide or let this go, but there's a lot more space on the top than on the bottom right here. I would have center, see it's centered right here, but it's not in the other ones. If you flip this page, actually, now that we've got this, yeah, so they use the same, like you can see distance right here. It's like they kept this layout of the text and put it right here. But I would have centered it even though the text would have jumped down. When you flip the page like this, I think visually it would have looked better if it was centered, which, this isn't to critique anybody's formatting. But I'm just trying to show you just some general things to look out for when you're formatting your own book. I show you how to do this as well, bleed the illustration over the spine but still leave room for text. I think I already mentioned that. All right, let's go to the, so we can see the layout. They don't end with an illustration on the last spread, which is actually not typical. Usually there's an illustration on the last spread and then it goes right into the pattern pages. This is the layout that we're going to do because there's a few different layout options. But we're going to have a pattern page right here. Sometimes if you don't have pattern pages like this whole sheet right here. So we're going to have the title page and then the copyright on the back side, which is common, it's not required in the publishing world, but this is a typical layout. And then next to it's going to be our dedication. Not all children's books have dedications. The next page behind that is going to be our story is going to start. And then at the end on this one, this is the last story page. Then directly behind, that's going to be in about the author page with the pattern that we have at the beginning. Then this is a 28 page book. My PDF file only has 27 pages because KDP is going to automatically add a blank page at the end because they want a blank page for their barcode. If you submit 28 pages, even if your last page is blank, sometimes they'll add four more pages. So that's kind of something to look out for because your page numbers have to be divisible by four. So I avoided having additional blank pages because they'll just be white pages. I avoided that by submitting a file that had 27 pages. Kdp requires a minimum of 24 pages, so you can't submit just 23 pages. You do have to submit 24 pages, even if you left the page 24 as a blank sheet. I can't confirm if they're going to add those blank pages at the end or not. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. I've had some clients say that they do, some say that they don't. It just depends, that's the layout that we're going to use for this course. But let's just look really quickly through this one. It has the title page and another introductory page. This is also left justified. There's not any paragraph spacing, it's all equal spacing between the lines. This one bleeds to the edge of the page. The illustration goes off the edge of the page. But most of them in this book, actually, they don't go to the edge of the page, your children's book, it might have to fall within the margins, but if your children's book just has images in the center of the page that don't go to the edge of the page, you don't have to add bleed to your file. This one obviously has full spread bleed images that go all the way to the edge. Again, it's a sera font, so it's easy to read. The font size is obviously larger than in a fiction book or non fiction book. I have a little reference to for the layout that we're going to be using, just a little diagram in the resources PDF. Then, as I said in the previous video, I also have some font choices laid out in the resources PDF that you can check out so you don't spend too much time looking for a font. 4. File Handling Basics for Your Book Project: Let's talk about file handling, which is always important, but especially so when you're working in design. As I mentioned in the basics video, when you place an image in design, that image is not placed directly in your design file, which is right here in design will reference the file with that specific name in that specific folder or the directory, in this case, I have them placed in illustrations. And what you see in design is a preview or an aggregate of what the file looks like as a finished product. If you go into the Links panel in design, you'll be able to see every image or graphic that's placed in your project. If you end up moving an image from one folder to another, if I move this image and go back into end design, you'll notice that there is a missing icon. Let's find it. Yeah, you'll need to update that link to the new location, or in my case, I'm just going to move it back to where it originally was and then in design automatically found it. Actually, it still looks a little blurry because I don't have. Let's change that really quick. High quality, that's something that we'll talk about further on in the course. This is really helpful if you end up modifying the original image in your project folder. I changed, I updated this image right here. Maybe your illustrator gave you an updated illustration. If the name stays the same and it's in the exact same project folder, you can double click this yellow icon right here. It'll take a second. That's a broken link icon, and it updates the image to the latest version without having to manually replace that image in your design file every single time you make a change. So it's really helpful, it's just a quick little click. As long as the name stays the same and it's in the same folder location, it's really easy to replace. So for that reason, we need to keep all of our assets, our images, graphics, illustrations, in one project folder on our computer. You can have these in multiple places, but it's just best if everything's in a neat little folder altogether. Our end design file will also be saved in this folder. Mine is just called Children's Book right now. This is my finished project. Of course, I'm going to take you through the steps in this course to get to this point. So for the purposes of this course, I'm going to go ahead and make a new folder and we're going to start from scratch. I just named mine course Project. In this folder, I'm going to create another one called Illustrations. Another one called other assets. Another one. This is like my exports. I always call this deliverables because I do a lot of this work for clients. You can call it exports, final files, whatever you want. You may not need another assets folder. You may only have illustrations that you're putting in, but I have some extra things. It's here just in case I like to save my file. In this main course project, my end design file, so they all live in one happy house. Let's move all of our illustrations into this folder. I'm going to copy mine. It's best to put all of your assets into your project folders before you import them into design, before you place them in design, so you won't have to later update those links when your files move. 5. Creating Your Project File in InDesign: It's time to get our end design file set up so that we can take a look around. Before we dive into formatting your book, you've already got a little sneak preview of what it looks like when your project is open. But this is what end design looks like when you first open it. Yours might have a little dialog box that pops up right here. Mind shows recent folders but once you close a little pop ups, this is the main page. We're going to head up to new file right here. This is going to open our new document window. Depending on how long you've been using this program, you may not have anything under this recent tab. As you can see, I use it quite a bit, but that's okay because we're going to build your file together. Name your document up at the top here. I'm going to call this course book that's not spelled right. Next, let's set our width and our height. The example I'm using in this course is for an 828.2 children's book. You're going to enter your single page dimensions here, not your spread. So this is your trim size. We're going to select facing pages. It's not really going to matter in our case, but we just leave it checked. It's checked automatically. We're just going to have one page for now. We'll add them as needed. We're not going to worry about columns, and we've already figured out the margins that we're going to use. So let's enter that as 0.5 " all the way around. Since this is based off a document that I've already used it, they already all say 0.5 ", but we're going to keep that how it is. If you're uploading your book to KDP, you can use 0.25 " here. But again, this course is going to be how people most commonly upload their children's books, which is paper back through KDP and hard back through Ingram Spark. So we want to comply with both KDP and Ingram Spark has a 0.5 in margin requirement. So that's what we're going with. Remember we need to add bleed to all outside edges but not the inside edge which is the spine edge. So we're going to add 0.125 " to all of these. We're going to toggle this lock feature off and then change the inside one back down to zero. We're not doing anything with Slug. Everything's ready to go, so let's click Create. This view can be a little intimidating if you've never used in design before. This is a layout that in design defaults to, it's the essentials workspace. We're going to first set up the workspace that I've included in the resources file for this course because we're going to want easy access to some commonly used features. This is the essentials View book. Editing is the one that I use which may look a little more intimidating. But trust me, it's nice to have some of these features in an easy to access place. Let's go ahead and I'll walk you through how to set up this workspace. 6. Adding a WorkSpace to InDesign: After you download the workspace file from the resource library, you'll need to load it into your end design program. I'm just going to go ahead and press copy right now or command C. And then we need to put it in the directory for our end design program, not just our file on a Mac. What we're going to do, I already have it typed out right here. We're going to put this little tilda forward slash library, forward slash preferences. And it's going to pull up this folder right here. Double click. You may have some other folders. In this case, I only have one. We want the Adobe and design one and the latest version. Then down here we have workspaces. Mine is already in here, but this is where you're going to paste it. I'm switching this back to essentials, because this is what you're going to see. But we're going to go ahead and save our file because the workspace may not load immediately. You may have to totally shut down or close down in design and then reopen it. I'm just going to save mine under the course project folder and I'm going to save it in the main folder. I'm not going to put it in any of these sub folders because I always like my design file to be in the main folder. Now let's go ahead and do in design for a Mac. You may have to right click and press quit. Now we're going to open in design back up. Your file should be down here. If it's not, you can go back into your course folder and open it there. Now you should be able to click up here and book editing should be one of the options. If for whatever reason that little things not right there, you can always go to Window Workspace and select it there. Again, this view can seem a little intimidating. I'm not going to walk you through each one of these ahead of time. We'll just use each property as we need them, and we likely won't use every one of them in this course. This is just the view that I am most comfortable with. I have customized this over years of formatting and these are the things that I use the most. If you can't get this book editing work space to work, if you just don't know what folder to put it in or what have you. I recommend going to the Essentials Classic, because likely yours opens in this Essentials and it just doesn't have the same layout. There's just not much, it's very stripped back. I recommend going to Essentials Classic. If it loads, it looks very similar to mine, then say I want to, let's do paragraph type. If I have something over here and you just don't have it over there, you can always click this and you can drag it and that little blue icon will appear. Or a little blue shading. And now it's docked there. So you can have easy access without going up to window type and tables paragraph. I promise that soon enough this is not going to look intimidating at all to you. And you're going to be able to navigate through end design like a pro by the end of this course. 7. Important Guidelines and Navigation Inside InDesign: When your file opens, it's going to default to the first page. Let me just go over really quickly, This square in the center of your white page is the margin line. This is not going to print. So let's go up to view. Screen mode, pre view, and you can see what your book is going to look like once it's printed. There's not any guidelines. You bleed extends past this page but you can't see it because this is what it's going to look like when it's printed, that bleed line is cut off. Let's go back to display normal. And you can see our bleed line is back and we have our margin line. Those are our little guides. I should tell you how I'm moving through this really quick. You can click and drag the bars down here and if we close this panel, you can see the one on the right or what I like to use is hold command. And then I'm going to use my scroll wheel and I can move to the left and the right. Then if you want to move up and down, you just release the command key. And then to zoom, press option on a Mac and you can zoom in and out with your scroll wheel. If you don't want to use any keyboard shortcuts, you can come down here or right here. And then if you want to zoom in and out down here, you can click on this zoom tool. And then you can click and then move your mouse left or right, and it'll zoom in or out. Or if you have a laptop, you can use your Trackpad. You can't see it, but I'm using my Trackpad right now. And you can use the trackpad without having your zoom tool selected. 8. Set Up the Book Pages Inside InDesign: Before we bring in any illustrations or text, we're going to set up our document to make things move faster. So that when we do in our illustrations and any text, it's going to go really quickly. Let's work on where the images will go first. Unlike a program like Word, your image is going to sit within something called a frame. You can adjust the size and the position of the frame without adjusting the actual image, or you can adjust them together. Let's take a picture frame. Our example book is going to have a mix of full spread illustrations and single page illustrations. This way I can show you how to handle either case. If yours full spread or all single page, you'll know what to do. Let's go to our pages work space and we're going to add four pages here. 1234 with a little plus icon. Right now, these are going to be pages. You see how this is numbered. Pages 2, 34.5 of our story. Okay? For this example, pages 2 and 3 are going to be full spread, meaning my illustration is going to go across both of these pages. This is the left page. Let me zoom out. Move you over. We're going to zoom all the way out. This is the left page and this is the right page. And this is true throughout the book. Your first page is always going to be on your right hand side. And then it's going to be left page, right page, left page, right page. My first one is going to be full spread and then my next one is only going to be a single page illustration. I'm going to have text on one side illustration on the other. The layout of your book is going to depend on what you decided with your illustrator. You may have all single page illustrations all spread or you may have a mix. Just keep in mind as you're formatting your project that you may need to move your frames differently than mine to suit your book. If you're following along as I'm going, I'm going to zoom back in. And I'm going to close this for now. So we just have a little more space to see on the left over here, we're going to click this square with a cross through it. This is the Rectangle frame tool. This is our little picture frame for pages 2 and 3. Since this is a full spread, we're going to make the frame take up both pages, so make sure to include bleed which is off the page. So we're going to click and drag, and we're going to drag it, whoop, all the way over to the other corner. Now we have a frame for our illustration to live in. Let's scroll down to pages 4 and 5. I'm going to add a frame to the left page. You may choose to have the illustration on the right. And if that's what you prefer, just add the frame to the right side. Click and drag where's the center? Okay, this is good. I can show you what happens when it doesn't toggle as you want or it doesn't end up being in the right position. So I'm going to release then. Right now if you click this, it's just going to make another box. You're not going to be able to adjust your box, I'm just going to control Z to get rid of those things. And I'm going to zoom in so I can show you if this isn't sitting where you want it to, you have to go back up here to your selection tool, press V. Then now you have the little left and right arrows so that you can adjust this and it will snap to your center line a little better sometimes than the rectangle frame tool. Okay, so before we move on to adding as many pages as we need because we're essentially going to copy and paste this layout. We're going to run into an issue if we have illustrations that need to go all the way to the edge of the page which remember is why we added bleed. All right, let me import one of my images so I can show you. We're going to use this one which is actually not an image that I'm using in this book but just for examples purpose. You can see that my image, it's scaled way too big in design automatically did so sometimes when you bring in your illustrations, if you don't fix what we're going to fix, your image is going to be too big or too small for this little picture frame that we have. So we want our illustrations to automatically scale to fit this frame proportionally, so we don't have to tinker too much down the road. We will still need to tinker a little bit and fine tune our illustrations and things, but this allows us to start in a good place every time. So let's change those so our images are automatically sized to fill the frame. And when I click this right here, you can actually see these orange lines. That's where my illustration is. If I click out of that, this is showing where my frame is. And when I click in here, you can see where my actual image, how big my image is outside of that frame. So I'm going to delete this picture. So we need our selection tool toggled on select our frame. Go to object fitting. All of these are going to be grade out because there's not an image in this frame yet. Go to frame Fitting options, and we're going to select fill Frame Proportionally Click Okay. It doesn't look like it did anything. I'm going to bring in my picture again and you can now see that it fills the page, It goes off into the bleed as much as it can while still making it as small as possible to fill the picture. So if I click this right here, now I can see the edges of my image which go past the frame still, but only in the height. The width of the page is now the exact same width as my frame. The height is just smaller. Yours may be the opposite. Your width may extend just a little bit, and your height may be the exact same as your frame. So I'm going to delete this picture. We're going to do the same thing with this frame up here. Object frame fitting, fill frame, proportionally click. Okay. Down here on the opposite page of my single page illustrations. I'm going to want a solid color over here. I'm going to start with this. I'm not going to use any for my book, but I'm going to show you how to do it in case this is what you want. For your book, you can choose to keep this background white. And if you want to do that, then you can skip this step. But I want to show you the option of adding a background color to your text. So to do that we're going to add a rectangle instead of a frame, so it's right below the frame tool. Click. And we're going to click and drag it so it covers the entire page including bleed up here, right in the middle. We're going to click, you can see, I don't think it snapped to the center, but we'll fix that, Make sure it covers the entire page. We're going to zoom in a little bit. We're going to go back to our selection tool, then move it so it's right in the middle. Zoom back out. Now we want to fill this with something. Come up here. This is our fill color. Right now it's transparent. That's what this line means. We're going to double click that. We can choose a color here. I'm going to go with this is CMYK, by the way. Let's do a light purple click, okay? And then you can lower this transparency up here. Right now it's at 100% If you click this, you can bring this down. I'm actually going to select this. I'm going to go with 20% It's nice and light. Now that our picture frames in the text background is squared away, let's add our text boxes to make importing our text easier. Let's go to our full spread layout and select our text tool, it's right here. Type tool. I call it text tool. Text boxes work much like our picture frames. So it's a box that will contain your text. Sometimes your text may spill out of that frame. But we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. So we're going to click and drag. Don't just click, because it's actually this little circle icon right now. Thinks that we want to fill this entire frame with text, which is not what we want to do. So if we just click, you see up here, it thinks now I want to type in this entire frame, but I don't want to. So we're going to click and drag where we want our text to go. Right now, we don't know exactly where we want it to go, but we just want to have a text frame somewhere on this spread and we can move it around as needed. And I'll show you what to do later if you end up needing more than one text frame per spread. Right now, we're going to start with one. When we put a text box on our page, it's going to default to be paragraph and character settings in our design preferences, which right now is Minion Pro size 12. Yours might be a little different than mine, but we want each text box to start off looking the same. Then we can tweak each page as needed. But we want to make it easy to change the font of the entire book if we need to. So to do that, we're going to use paragraph styles right here. If this isn't right here, you can always go to window style paragraph styles. We're going to click this plus icon down at the bottom to create a new style double click the title and we're going to name it Body. We're not going to actually worry about any of these styling just yet, we're just going to click okay. The important thing is our text right here. And this little text box has the paragraph style body. If this isn't selected, it might be on this one. Make sure it's on body. Now when we style our text later, we'll just be able to update this body paragraph style to match it. And then it will update throughout the book every paragraph that has this body style assigned to it. So we're going to press Escape with this paragraph style selected. We're going to scroll down. Our text is going to fall on this side over here. Let's select this. Go back to our text tool. Click and drag. We might have to select body again. Then we're looks like it's mostly aligned, but we're going to align this text box to be in the center of our page. I'm going to open this align panel again. You can go up to window object and layout a line. We're going to make sure this is set to page and we're going to center it horizontally and vertically, close that. For my example, this is the page pattern, for the most part that I'm going to follow for my book. I'm going to have a full spread and then I'm going to have a single page. Instead of adding all of our pages and then copy and pasting each one of these, we can actually select these pages. Right click Duplicate Spreads. At end of document, we're going to do the same thing. Page two to page nine, Duplicate. We now have 17 pages. Right now, we're going to select ten through 17. Do that again. Right now we have one more page than what we need, but we're going to worry about that later. There's other ways to duplicate these pages, but this is the most beginner friendly, and it only takes a few seconds to do so. Now that we have the story pages set, I'm also going to add some frames to our title page. Let's scroll up, double click First page. We're going to add two more pages after this, so this is going to be our title page. Add two more pages. This is going to be our copyright page, and this will be our dedication page. So instead of drawing new frames on these, I'm going to scroll down and I'm going to select this image frame. I'm going to press control C where you can write, click select, copy. Go back up to the top and I'm going to paste it on this one. Control V or command V, I'm used to saying control, and I'm going to reposition it so that covers this whole page. I'm going to do the same on our dedication page. I might end up using one on the copyright page over here, but we shall see. Then we're going to have text frames on all three. Once again, I'm just going to scroll down, select this text frame, copy it. I'm going to write, click select, Paste in place that puts it in the same location that you copied it from. I'm going to move over just a little bit. We're going to paste one over here. Reposition it, who we're running out of space. Move over right in the middle, and we're going to come up here to our first page, paste in place. We're going to end up using more than one text box for this page because we're going to have our title most likely. And then our attributes written, illustrated by on this page. We're just going to leave it like this down. We have everything in our file set up and we are ready to start bringing in our illustrations and our text. 9. Adding Illustrations to the Image Frames: Now it's time to bring in our illustrations. First, let's make sure we've saved our project. I just did a second ago, but I'm terrible at saving my project, so make sure you're constantly saving. Let's go into our illustrations folder. We're going to start dropping in our images. I prefer, and I recommend you number your illustrations so that they are in order by name. In this case, I didn't use anything like image or illustration or anything like that, I just use numbers. And you want to do this alpha numerically. You want to include a zero. If you go into double digits like I do, I have a page ten down here. You're going to want to put a zero in front of it. This is because when you import things into end design, it's going to automatically sort alpha numerically. If I just had a one here and not a 01, it's going to place this image first. It's just easier if you number it this way. I'll show you how to scroll through them if you don't do that. And then you can select which image you want to place first. My files are all set, so I'm just going to go ahead and select all of them. You can place Photoshop files, by the way, if you want to. Most of these are images, but I do have a Photoshop file, I'm going to click, drag it in here. And you're going to have to select your end design program. Again, I don't want to place my first image right here. I want to place my first spread. You can see there's a little preview image if you didn't rename your files, or if the first one that pops up isn't what you want to place first, you can use your arrow keys on your keyboard left and right to scroll through which image you want to place. Mine's in order. So I'm going to scroll out just a little bit so I can show you. You're going to click in the top left hand corner of your frame. Click and it automatically fills it. So I'm going to scroll through, place my next image. Remember, since we set everything up to automatically resize to fill the frame, everything is just placing beautifully. I'm going to go through, by the way, if you want to scroll down to the next page on a Mac, you can press Function option and the down key. I'm doing that because my scroll wheel is broken on my mouse. That's why sometimes it jumps a little erratically. I forgot that I organized my pages a little differently. My illustrations, I changed them. I'm breaking my pattern right now. I'm going to skip this spread because I want my next one to be full spread. And then the pattern resumes, sorry, that's a little deviation, but this just shows you, you can change things and move them around as you please. So you can select the first page, shift the other page that you want to delete. And press this little trash can icon down here. And it's going to delete these pages. It's going to say that it has objects in it, But that's okay. Just go ahead and delete it. There you have it. Your book is already starting to take shape. It always looks really nice. Once you have your illustrations, I'm just going to scroll all the way back up to the top. If you notice that your illustrations don't look high res, if you scroll in, don't panic. It looks blurry. Go up to view display performance, and if you select high quality design is going to render it as high quality now. So you can see that it's not blurry. I made that mistake early on when I first started working on children's books. Think why doesn't this look good? That's because design allows you to select which type of display you want to use so that your computer is not slowing down trying to process each image as you move through the file. We're going to keep it at typical display just to help in design work as efficiently as possible. You can take this opportunity to scroll back out, go through and make any image adjustments that you think you're going to need. You might not know what you need right now, but you can just select each one and make sure, oh, this is a good example, is the spine. This is where the spine is going to be. Right here. Right now, my fox is falling right in the spine. He's going to get cut off. You're not going to be able to see him. I actually adjusted this illustration so that I can move him all the way over here so that he's out of the spine and he's not going to be cut off anymore. I'm just selecting the actual image inside of the frame by clicking on this little hand icon right here to make sure that everything is sitting where it's supposed to be. Bunny looks good. Our mice looks so cute. Actually, I might move this one over just a little bit because that one is too close to the spine. That should be good for now, that one's perfect. If for whatever reason you decide to change, say I didn't want this to be full spread, I want it to be a single page illustration. You can make sure your selection tool is toggled on. You can select your frame and adjust it so that it only shows the part of the illustration that you wanted to show. Maybe I wanted these animals showing and not the other one so I could have more room for text. And then you can also select your image in here and you can move it and adjust it within that frame. That's not something that I want to do, but I just wanted to show you that you can adjust your frames. Let me scroll up to one. To this one. I know that I'm actually going to end up resizing this image to be smaller because I'm going to put text up at the top right here if you already know that ahead of time you can make some adjustments right now if you want to, I'm going to hold shift, and when you hold shift it scales things proportionally. I'm going to select, I'm actually select my image. If I move it like this, you can see that it's not scaling proportionally. So I have to press Shift. I'm going to scale it down just a little bit so I have some more room for my text. There you go. My frame is still filling the entire page, but my image is now smaller within that frame. You may want two illustrations on a single spread or a single page to resize your frame and your image At the same time. On a Mac, you're going to hold shift in command or shift in control on a PC and you're going to resize it as you need. Then now you can add another illustration, just as an example. I'm going to show you what that looks like. I'm going to add one of my butterflies just to show you base. Then I can this one down to as needed, so you can have more than one illustration on a page or spread. That's just how we set it up in the beginning to be one per spread. I'm going to change this back to how it was and we're good to go. Don't worry, we'll be fine tuning as we go along. But for now, we have all of our illustrations placed where they need to be. 10. Adding the Story Text to the Text Frames: Importing the illustrations was pretty straightforward since we can just drag and drop our pictures in the text. Can be a little trickier sometimes to keep this tutorial as beginner friendly as we can. I'm not going to thread my boxes together. If you're familiar with end design, there's a way that you can link all your text boxes together so that your text is essentially on one string, but showing up on different pages, you can break it across different pages. This can save time if you know what you're doing, but it can be a headache if you're just starting out. We're going to leave these as individual text boxes that are not linked and we're going to manually add our text to the corresponding pages. I prefer this. Anyway, this is the method that I use, even though I'm very familiar with reading text boxes, it's just a little easier to adjust things. If you change the sizing of the text, you don't have things bleeding where they're not supposed to. Things just behave a little more predictably. So the first thing we're going to do is import our text. I'm actually going to import it on the dedication page up here or the copyright page, just so it's out of the way and so I can clearly see it. So I just double collect my page two up here to jump to our copyright page. And now we can just click and drag our file into Word. I'm going to click in this top where the margins are, right here, and it's going to automatically resize to fill the margins. We are going to delete this text box. This is just here temporarily so we can copy and paste our text in. You may have gotten a missing fonts warning that popped up. Just press skip. We're not going to worry about replacing any of our fonts just yet. You're still able to place it in your file, so just press Skip and then place it on your page. If you have italicized or bolded text that you want to keep, I don't, but we're going to use an example here. Let's italicize this part italic. This is a character setting, it's not a paragraph setting. My paragraph is styled one way, but you can individually customize how certain characters look. Character settings, anything that's italicized or bolded is going to be a character setting. Let me show you what this does. If I select body, it actually kept at this time, but sometimes it doesn't. And you can see if I click on this text right here, This plus icon means that there's some deviation from your paragraph style which you don't typically want. If I say to clear the overrides and to make it apply the paragraph style to the entire paragraph, you can see that it got rid of my italics. Let me undo that. We need to create a character style. I'm going to come over here. I always have my characters and my objects, my paragraphs altogether on one menu. If that's not open, you can go to window style character styles. We're going to add a character style, I'm going to call it italic. You want to reset this to base because a lot of times it adds extra information that we don't need. Then under basic character formats, under font style, we're going to select italic, We're going to type it in. We're not worried about size, font, family, or anything. We want all of that stuff to be the same as the paragraph style. We just want this particular setting to be applied to our italicized text. Say this is also italicized. You can select the word and apply the character style, or we can find and replace. We're going to press Command or go to Edit, find, Change what we're looking for. We're not going to type anything into these two boxes because we're not looking for specific text. We're looking for anything under basic character formats that is italics. That's what we're looking for. Then we're going to change any text that has the character setting. We're going to apply the character style. And then I'm going to click change all two replacements made, which I know I have two chunks of text that have character setting. It doesn't look like it did anything, but if you click on this now it has the character style italic applied. And then if I apply my paragraph style, a peer body, it's going to take a second to load. You can see now it's not deviating from the paragraph style because that has a character style. So you can do the exact same thing for any bolded font that you have. A quick note, if you have text that's bolded and metallicized, you can't layer character styles on top of each other. You can only have one character style, Say this is semi bold italic. You have to create a separate character style that has semi bold italic. I'm going to undo all of that because I actually don't have anything that's metalized in my book. And then this part is a little redundant, but you're going to select all of your text and cut it and paste it where you want it to go throughout your book. I know this is the text for the first spread. It doesn't look good, you can't see it. But we're not going to worry about that right now. We're going to style it later. Again, there is a faster way to do this, but this is just the most beginner friendly method. I'm just going to go through, I'm going to speed this up a little bit. This portion of the video a little bit, paste. I'm using keyboard shortcuts, select command X, then whoops, double clicking where I want it to go. All right, so I have all of my text placed on the spread that it's going to go on, and don't forget up here, we still have this textbox even though it looks like there's nothing in it. We want to delete that textbox. So just go ahead and select that textbox and press delete. So it's looking a little closer to a finished book. We've got our illustrations and our text imported. We're not going to worry about front matter right now, our title page dedication. If you have that information already, you can add it. Of course. So I'm just going to type in mine. I already know mine. I'm going to add my copyright information later and I'm going to add my title page information later as well. I just realized that my text lost the paragraph style. That may happen, that's because it kept the paragraph style that was in my Word document. If that happens to you, not to worry. We're going to control F. Again, we're not looking for italics and we're not going to apply italics. We're pretty much looking at all text. Our find format is going to be blank. It's going to be everything. We're going to change it, we're going to apply body. Let me move this out of the way then. This is mind is automatically selecting the story which is just your individual text frame. We're going to select the entire document, change all 11 replacements made, and now everything is back to having the body text. I should have showed you how to avoid that, but there you go. Before I move on to the next section, I just realized that I forgot to add the other half of my illustration. I have a butterfly, P and G. That's going to go on top of all of my illustrations. And I'm just going to show you what that looks like, adding an illustration on top of another illustration. This is the one that goes on this page. When I click, actually, if I zoom in, it didn't size appropriately, but we'll change that later. I'm not going to use these colored boxes right here, but if I click in here, it's actually going to layer my butterfly into the colored box. Now my image has a fill which makes it look like it's faded a little bit. So we don't want to do that for those pages. I'm just going to click off to the side. And then I'll move that over in just a minute. So I know I'm not going to use color behind my text. So I'm just going to go ahead and delete these and then I'm going to move my butterflies over. Okay, Now, everything look out it's supposed to do. 11. Tips for Font Selection and Where to Find Commercial Fonts: Disclaimer. I am not a lawyer and any commercial rights advice you here in this course should be verified with your own research. I'll give you the basics and I don't foresee any of these laws changing in the near future, but do your due diligence and verify. Let's go over a quick commercial rights lesson concerning fonts. This also goes for any images you use online, but those aren't as straightforward, and I'm assuming that you've hired an illustrator to create your images anyway. You cannot simply find acute free font on line. Download it to your computer and use it in your children's book. You need to verify that that font is free for commercial use. Meaning if you are using it in a product or service that you intend to sell, you need a commercial license for it. A lot of free fonts require you to pay for commercial usage rights. They're free for personal use, but not always for something that you intend to sell. In summary, just because you found a free download link for a font does not mean that you can legally use it in your book. An artist created that font and you purchasing the license is how they make money off of their art. I'm going to go for three different places that you can get fonts. One is included with your Creative Cloud subscription with Adobe. The second is great for sourcing commercially free fonts. And the third is a great website that you can use to purchase commercial fonts through. They have so many options with so many glyphs and special characters, it's amazing. First up, there are some tried and true fonts that you can use with in design. And since Adobe fonts is included in your creative cloud subscription, you don't need to worry about any commercial rights issues. Let's go to Fonts.adobe.com They have some that they always highlight down here, and you may like how these look. You can kind of just browse through and see which ones you like. If you use a font and enable it from Adobe fonts, you have legal rights to use it commercially, so you don't have to worry about that. If you know the name of the font that you want to use, you can type it right here. I usually just browse for fonts, so I'm going to collect browse all fonts you can search on the left, clean. These are some tags that they may have. I always, this is a cute font, but you want it to be easy to read for a little kid that's not an a, a style for an, that a kid typically sees. The rest of the letters look pretty clean. This one looks good. It's got some unique styling, but it's still pretty easy to read. Some of these may be better for like your title page, if you're doing that yourself, if your illustrator didn't give you a title page. But on the left here, this is what I usually click. Sands, Seraph, and scroll through some of these. I'll include a couple of different fonts that you can use of course, or some good ones to consider in the resources PDF. The handwritten ones can be cute for title pages or if you want to emphasize a certain word in your book with a unique font, you can just scroll through and pick which fonts you want. Also, there's a little camera icon right here. If you have an image, let me see if I can find one. This is actually, we'll see what it does with this. You can upload an image here that has font in it. Adobe will, it singled out this text right here. I'm just going to click Next Step and make sure that looks pretty good. It's going to try to find fonts that are similar to that. Obviously, it's not going to have the color that's applied here, but it's going to try to find similar fonts. If you have an image or something where you like the font and the background, the text stands out a good amount from the background. It'll do its best to try to find a similar font which is nice, that is, Adobe fonts. When you add font right here, it should automatically load within a minute. Usually in your end design program. So then you can change to that font. You don't have to close end design and reload it or anything like that. You just click Add Font here. And as long as you're signed in, it'll add it to your end design. The next one we're going to look at is Google Fonts. Fonts.google.com It works much the same as Adobe fonts. When you find a font that you're interested in, you can download it. Which Roboto? Most computers already have Roboto. You can download the entire family or you can select which ones you want to download. This looks very intimidating, but just click Download All whichever ones you have selected, it will download that for you. Go back to Google Fonts, you select the category that you want. They've got some really cute ones that you can use for children's books or like handwritten font. This is actually a font that I already have downloaded. If you go down to about and license, you can make sure it's licensed under open license. You can use them in your products and projects, print or digital, commercial or otherwise. They always include this. This isn't legal advice. Please consider consulting a lawyer to see full license for all details. They all include that. Nobody wants to be responsible. But when you download this, it's going to download usually as a zip file and you can open that. The one I always let me show you an example here because I always have so many. This is the one that I used in my book. I didn't want this font style right here. Sometimes there's two different fonts. This was actually from Creative Fabric, but you're just going to double click the OTF file. Sometimes there's a TTF file, and on a Mac, you can just click Install. Since I already have this, it wants me to replace it, but I already have it installed. Windows is pretty much the same. You just double click it, it's going to automatically install. It may take a minute or two to load it in your end design file, but then you should be good to go. Last up is my favorite place for any specialized or custom fonts. If I want a font that has glyphs or special characters in it, creative fabric is my favorite place to go. I have the monthly subscription, which you can see up here. They have different pricing options. You can purchase things like one time, so you don't have to use the monthly version. And you can find really cheap ones like $1 for commercial rights for a font. Creative Fabrica has everything, they have all kinds of things. Even if you want to use it outside of your book, it's just a good, if you're making any digital products or things like that, it is an excellent resource. We're just going to look at some San Sera fonts on here. They have all kinds of cute fonts. There's not really a great way to search by tags or different things like that, but one of my favorite things to do is if I have something like a book about S, you can just type in B. And then on the left right here, you can select fonts. It'll show you some cute fonts that may fit the theme of your book, that you can use, maybe for your title page or for words that you want to add emphasis to. That's something I like to do. Or my book has a forest in it, so I might type in forest and go to fonts. There's like little bunnies and stuff in this one. That's like a fun thing to look for since all of these are included. If I just click in, sometimes there's a little preview down here that you can change the preview text that you want to see, but you just download it. If you don't have the subscription like I do, it may say something like purchase. It'll have a price listed here. The prices range, They can be like $1 or they can go up to 15, $20 But you would just download it like the other ones and open up the zipped file and install the font. It can seem overwhelming to go through some of these font choices. And trust me, I have spent so much of my life looking for just the perfect font. So I've compiled some choices for you in the resources PDF. Feel free to use any of those if you don't feel like searching through thousands of fonts. These are some of them that I've used or some of them that I think would be good for a children's book. Once you have your fonts chosen, activate them in Adobe fonts or download the file if it's something that you're purchasing elsewhere and install it. Design should show these fonts almost immediately if you ever have any issue and the font is just not showing up automatically. Completely close down in design. Make sure you save your file first and then open the program back up and it should load. Let's move on to changing our fonts in design now. 12. Add Styling to the Text Throughout Your Book: Since I added the butterflies after I have my text boxes in the layers panel over here, you can see that my butterfly is sitting on top of my text box. When I try to select my text box, it's actually selecting the butterfly. There's two things that you can do. You can lock it by clicking this right here. Now, I can't move that butterfly. It actually moved my illustration when I just did that, I can't even select my butterfly. And this little lock icon shows that our butterfly is locked. And that's why we can't select it. Or you can click and drag it below your text box, So it's right here. If you don't want to accidentally move anything, you can lock them. I don't normally do that, but I'm just going to go through and move my butterflies below my text layer. I do things a little out of order. I hope that doesn't bother you for this course, but it's just kind of how I've always done things. I style my illustrated pages first, my story pages, and then I go back and I do the front matter. And if there is any back matter like in about the author or anything which I don't have, I do that at the end too. We're going to go back up to our first story page. I'm going to zoom in quite a bit so we can see we're going to double click in here. And I'm going to select all, just hit command A or control A. You can apply the font that you are going to want to use. A lot of times I have a top two choices of fonts that I want to use. I haven't narrowed it down to one, sometimes I have three. I'll use a different font on a few different pages just to test it out and see which one I like best. I have already done that though, and I know which font I'm going to use. The font that I'm going to use is called Golden Book. I'm going to use bold. I got it from Creative Fabrica, which is linked in your Resources folder. Just remember, you want your font to be easy to read. You don't want it to have too many embellishments or to have anything that's disrupting letter recognition. Because it's a children's book, it's for early readers. You don't want to waste all your money on your illustrations and the time it takes to format the book for publication. Only for the text to be difficult to read once it's printed. I know some fonts can look really cute or really pretty. But it's best in children's books to keep things simple, especially for the story text. You can get creative with your title page, but for the text throughout the story, you want it to be easy to read. So you can adjust your text sizing as well. I've experimented already. And I know I want it to be about 25, which looks really big. Like this. I recommend at least a size 14 font for children's books, and then you can go up as high as you want in font size. It really depends on how much room you have around your illustrations or on your page, you may see there are some hyphenated words here. We absolutely do not want that. So I'm going to control all. If you go down here, you can do your paragraph settings and we don't want that hyphenated, we don't want any hyphenations in children's books. And you can mess around with your paragraph settings here as well. I have a manual line break right here. I'm going to get rid of that because I want to be able to set the paragraph spacing so that it's not a full line. I'm going to use 0.1 875. You can also do things like center your text. These are also in up here over on the right. I'm going to change mine to be centered. I'm going to hide this background image, these images so you can actually see my text really quick. You see that this sentence right here is not really balanced. There's only two words down here. The text is centered, but there's some lines that are longer than the others that little straggler down at the end. To fix that, we can go to paragraph right here. And again you can go up to window type and tables paragraph. We're going to click this little settings icon and you can balance ragged lines. That automatically adjusts the text on each line so that there's not any that are significantly bigger or smaller than the others. You can choose your font color as well. I'm going to select a double click on your fill right here. You can change it to whatever you want. If you have a color that you want to use from your illustration, let's bring that back. You can use your little eye dropper. Let's see, You have to click and drag it. Click this and drag it. And you can select a color from your illustration if you want to. I'm not going to do that. I'm going to leave mine as black. You're going to want to stand out against the background. Right now, mine doesn't. And you're like, why do you have it set to black? Then I'm going to show you how, with our more advanced text styling, how to make it still legible if there's a bunch of stuff going on in the background, because this happens frequently. A lot of times illustrators don't leave blank space for your text and that's okay. There's some workarounds. This is going to be how most of our text is styled throughout the book, but you may have an example of a darker page where you want to use white font and I'm going to show you how to do that, because that's definitely something that happens in my book. I have this pretty much styled how I want it to be. Now you can see up here, we've deviated from our original paragraph styling, but we can write Click. And we can redefine it so that our paragraph style body now has all of these settings that we just made. Click redefine style. It doesn't look like it did anything on this page. But if we scroll out and go to our next spread, I'm going to press Function option down to go to our next spread. You can see our text now has the new body paragraph styling. I'm going to control Z, so you can see it applied to this specific page. Let's go down. You can see this is what it looks like before. I'm going to redo that. So you can see now our paragraph styling has changed throughout the book, easy since I have manual line breaks right here, I'm going to need to delete those. And you can see this little red box right here means that I have text outside of my text box. Remember this is like your picture frame. This is your text frame. It's possible for your text to go outside of the frame, and that just means you need to adjust the sizing of your frame or the size of your font to fit within that frame. But we'll make those changes as we go. This is a great starting place for your font styling. Depending on how what your book looks like, you may not need to make hardly any other changes to your font. We'll definitely be going over fine tuning your text and placement in the next section. Something I prefer in all of my children's books is to keep the font size roughly the same throughout the book. I don't really want really small text on one page and really big text on another page, unless I'm doing it intentionally or if I want to add emphasis to a word or page here and there. Again, if you need any inspiration on fonts or styling or just how things are laid out on a book, just go to your bookshelf or your toddler's bookshelf, in my case, and pick out some children's books and just flip through and see what they did, see what colors they chose. It's always good to get inspiration from books that are already published that a professional has already formatted. So now that we have our basic styling complete, we can move on to our more advanced styling. 13. Advanced Text Styling Techniques: Now we're going to get into the more advanced text styling options. We are going to use this page right here, I actually want this text right here, control X. I'm going to cut that out of this text box because I'm going to add another text box over here. And we're going to style this to be text on an we're just going to place this text over here for now, just so I have it on this page. We're going to move it a little bit. The easiest way to do this is to create a line. First, I'm going to make this a little smaller so it's not in the way. Select your line tool, over here, you're going to click approximately where you want your Arc text to be. You'll notice this isn't a level. If you press your Shift key, it's going to automatically make it level. You want it at least as wide as your text. This is going to be on two lines. I'm going to be duplicating this arc, but I'll show you how to do that in just mit release. I'm going to zoom in a little bit. We're going to add a stroke to this line. Just press the up arrow on this just so we can see it for now. I'm going to zoom in a little bit more. Now we need to go to our Pin tool. Go to Add anchor point we want to add. You can see right here, it looks really small. There's a little blue dot, that's the midpoint of this line. I'm just going to click that. It doesn't look like it did anything, but it added a point right there. If we go to our Direct Selection tool, we can click that little point right there. We can move this. The easiest way to do this, you can move it with your mouse. But I like to use the up and down arrows on my keyboard, just so I don't accidentally grab anything else. Let me zoom out again so you can see. Then you're like, that's not an arc. I'm going to show you how to make it smooth, get it about where you want it. We're going to grab the pen tool again. You're going to hold down option or Alt. And we're going to click that point and we're going to drag. We're going to click and drag option, click and drag. And you can see there's a light blue outline showing where the arc is going to be. Now when you release your mouse, now you have a beautiful curved line. If we just undo that really quick holding option key, you can also make this a little wavy line instead of nice curve. If I release this, you can see it's got a little wave to it. You can customize this however you want. We're going to stick with our little okay. Now we need to add our text. Go to your text tool. Right click it and select Type on a path tool. This little icon is the default icon. You have to make sure it changes to a plus icon because otherwise you might not have it selected even if it's in the area. You might just make a new text box that's not on the path or the curve plus icon. Click and now you have your text right here. But you can copy and paste this. But since mine's short, I'm just going to write it out. Mama and baby, dear, I'm going to control a to select all, go to my paragraph styles and select body. I'm going to make that smaller again. Now we have this on a curved line. We're going to take off this stroke because we don't actually want to see this line. We just wanted to use it as a guide for our text. We can remove that stroke. Now we have our first line of text on a curved line to get our second line. Unfortunately, you can't just press Enter and type, because you can see now I have overset text. It's not on this one line, but we can duplicate this. I'm going to hold option. You can see this switches to two cursors on top of each other. This means it's going to copy. If you hold down option click and drag it makes a copy. Or you can just C control copy, paste. I'm going to double click in here. Nibbling on Tender Grass period. Then we can press our up arrow and we can hold shift to move it a little faster to get it where we want it. I want to select both of these. I want these to be centered. You can go to a line, make sure this is set to page center. I'm going to zoom out. I can delete this one now. We're going to move it up a little bit. Remember you want it within this margin line so you can get it as close as you want. I'm going to select my picture and scale it down just a little bit more. Maybe about like that. That's how you do a little curved text. Let's go back to our type tool because I want to show you what may happen to you. Sometimes it does, sometimes it does not. I'm going to bring back the stroke really quick so I can show you what may happen to you, because this doesn't always behave like it should. I'm going to click this. You see how my cursor changed and drag it in Word, because yours may automatically do this. Sometimes depending on what your shape looks like, it may not set your text beginning and end points to be the full width of whatever line you're using. If yours automatically looks like this, you can adjust these end points and starting points all the way to the beginning and all the way to the end if you want your text to be centered or you can adjust it if you want these offset. Let me zoom out just a little bit. You can also make your line wider. Maybe if your text goes outside this line and your line is not big enough, I'm going to hold option and adjust this size. And you can see when you hold option, it keeps your line centered and it adjusts the left and the right, I'm going to release. You can see it didn't adjust this line. I can move that all the way over. In my case, I have enough room for my text, but if your text went outside of that, that's how you make your line bigger. Once again, we're going to get rid of the stroke on our path and we have cute little arc text. Okay, so we're going to work with this page right here. For this next example, I'm going to move my text over here. As you can see, it doesn't look like it's standing out, It's blending into the background. No matter if I change this to white, it's still not going to stand out. One thing that you can do if you don't really have enough space on your illustration or any blank space without any texture behind it. What you can do to make your text stand out is you can add a drop shadow to it. So you can add a shadow behind it. But how we're going to use it is a little different than your typical drop shadow. Press escape or go to your selection tool, make sure your frame is selected. And we're going to go up here to drop shadow. I forgot, since we have this on typical display, it looks very pixelated. So let's press cancel. Go to View Display High Quality. Hopefully my computer doesn't start taking off here into outer space. And open up your drop shadow. And you can see now it looks a little cleaner. It's not pixilated, since my text is black. In this example, I want to change this to white. It's set to multiply, which means when I changed it to white, you can't actually see it anymore. So I'm going to change this to screen. I don't want there to be any distance between the drop shadow and my text. So I'm going to reduce my distance to zero. And I'm going to increase the size quite a bit. And the spread, you can see the white around it just a little bit more. And we can play around with this. Let me move this, I'm just going to play around with a little bit. Let's set this to 55. I think that looks pretty good. I'm going to keep the opacity at 75% and we can increase it if we need to or decrease it throughout. I think that looks pretty good now, it's easier to read. And you can change this color back up here, drop shadow, you can change to whatever color you want. You just might have to play around with the blending modes to make sure that you can actually see it. Another thing that you can do to your text is adjust the height, placement of individual letters, or of an entire word. We're going to go up here to baseline shift. Then you can play around with these numbers. You can move the entire word altogether. I'm going to select these three letters, because I want this to go up. We'll try two for now and see what that looks like. Oops, I selected my paragraph 22. Then we can increase this text size just a little bit. You'll notice that increase the space between these two lines, but not these two lines. We can either increase the distance between these two lines or we can decrease the distance between these two. Since I don't want this line butting up against this top line right here, I'm going to actually increase the distance between these two. I want to select this line and press the up arrow to move it down just a little bit. It visually has the same spacing. I like to do this sometimes if the big, or the word gigantic, you can make those bigger. Or you can whisper, you can make it smaller. Say I want to make this text bigger. I want to make it significantly bigger so you can see what I'm talking about. Our text bled out, but that's okay. In design, automatically has all of your text stay on the same bottom line down here. If you want to baseline shift this so that your text is maybe centered on that line, you can do that. I don't actually want to do that. We're going to take this back to our paragraph style, reset everything. There aren't too many ways that you can add texture to your text in design without doing the image overlay that we talked about before. The other ways that you can go about adding texture are not beginner friendly, they're not straightforward. But one of the ways that you can do it is to add an inner glow to your textbox. We're going to go to our Select tool, make sure our frame is selected, go up to our effects and go to inner glow 0. Text almost disappeared. You can leave this as white, but we're going to add some noise to this. These are like little dots, little speckles on our text. I'm going to set the noise to 50% Let's see what that looks like. Yeah, very noisy. We're going to reduce the opacity to 20% Take it down. I'm going to press okay, so you can see what it looks like. I'm going to zoom in. Gives it this little pixelated texture, fuzzy look to it. It does affect the contrast in this particular page between the background and your text, if you applied it to this page. Let's do the same thing, so you can see what it looks like, inner glow Noise 15. Reduce this to 20. Okay, I'm going to undo that and redo it so you can see a cheat to add just a little bit of texture. I won't be doing that here, but I just wanted to show you how to do that. I'm actually going to go back down here. I want to get rid of, I want to get rid of the inner glow on this one. You can just uncheck that. Now it goes back to before click Okay. Just like with paragraph styles, you can apply styles to objects. This text frame an object, The text inside of it is not an object, but the frame is an object. I want to copy this white background. Instead of manually going through the steps of adding it to each text box, we can just add it with a click of a button. We're going to add an object style double click it and I'm going to call this white background. And make sure when you go down to Drop Shadow that your settings are all right here. Click Okay. It didn't do anything to this one. I'm but now when I click this one and apply white background to it, you can see that I don't have to go through all those steps. It automatically adds it. It looks brighter here because there's a white background right there. But if we scroll down, we can just quickly add it. And we don't have to worry about manually adding it every time I am going to create a white background one. And then if I scroll all the way down here, I have some pages with dark backgrounds. I'm going to change to be white, and I'm going to change the background to be dark. For these two pages, I'm going to end up having a dark background as well. Then if you decide that you don't want that or you want to get rid of it, you can just go back up to your object style and select none. 14. Advanced Image Styling Techniques: There's a couple things that we can do with our illustrations that can add some nice finishing touches. I just want to show you some tips and tricks before I actually get into how I'm going to format this book. But let's just do some quick advanced styling for our illustrations. First one we're going to talk about is if your illustration is mostly full spread, but not quite, this may have been decided in your illustration phase or you may opt to do this if there's no clear spot for where you want your text to go. I'm actually going to go up because I know which one is it. I have a this is a good example. Right here is pretty much the only clear place that I have to add text. There's a lot going on here and down here, just different textures and things. Okay, remember this line down the middle is where our spine is. So we're going to have our, our illustration take up maybe about 50% of the left side of our page. So that we can have our text in this nice little white blank space over here. We're going to select our frame, and we're going to reduce it to about the halfway mark. It should snap to the halfway mark, but for now, that looks nice how that is. I am going to move the butterfly up a little bit, and then we can put text above and below this little line. Now we have this nice little space over here. We can adjust our text box. Dup, dup, dup. Make sure it's still within the margins. I'm going to delete that space. Delete this space. Like I said, there's space over here so we can still utilize this. Maybe I clicked on my keyboard. I'm showing you live how I make some of these adjustments. I'm going to add another text box down here. And we're going to change this to be white so we can see it. I'm going to end up adding a dark background. It sticks out a little bit more. That looks pretty legible. Let's go back over here. I know I moved my butterfly, but we're going to move it back down. This is very trial and error, but I wanted to show you real time what it looks like to format a book because you just have to play around with things. Sometimes I'm going to make that smaller, then an easy way instead of adding another textbox here, I'm just going to press Enter until my text is below butterfly line. We have space down here. I think that looks pretty good. Instead of having this harsh line right here, we can have that harsh line actually that looks better. Moved over to the image. Or we can add a directional feather. I want the feather to be applied on the left edge of my frame. If I increase this, you can see it adds a nice little gradient. It fades into my illustration. You can set that how to whatever number you like. You can also do the same, maybe on a different page. Let's see if you wanted to do the directional feather on the bottom. You can add a space down here. And add your directional feather along the bottom edge so that you have space down here for text. Some illustrators don't always include a title page illustration unless you specifically ask them to. But one of the things you can do if you don't have a title page is you can bring an element from one of your finished illustrations into your title page. I'm up on page one, my title page, I'm going to use a circle here at, this is my text box, and I don't have any images here. I'm going to hide these for now, just so they're not in the way I want my little image that I have here to be placed within a circle. I'm going to right click my rectangle tool and click the ellipse tool. I'm going to click, and you can see that this isn't a perfect circle. But if you hold Shift, it's now a perfect circle. And if you hold option, it is now going to scale from the center. We can change the size of this in a little bit and I'm going to go to a line. I'm going to center this on my page, just for now. Yeah, we'll center it now. You can bring in the illustration that you want to use, that you want to take this from. Let's go with the bunny bunny's cute. I'm just going to click it in here for now. And you're like, whoa, that's not what I want. We're going to control or command X, keep frigging. I'm on a Mac, we're going to write, click, select, Paste Into. This particular illustration is very large. When you click it, you can see it's much bigger than our little circle. Whoops. I'm going to just drag, let's find the bunny. Where's the bunny? There it is, Cut. I'm going to scale this down just a little bit. I'm going to hold Shift and Alt. So that, just kidding. I'm going to select our picture shift, make it smaller. And then I'm just going to use my arrow keys here to move the bunny cut. Okay, then you can apply a directional father. Let's just do a basic feather because we're not really doing it from a direction. It's going to be all the way around. I'm going to increase this feather just a little bit. It fades. Now if we go up to preview, because we see this little circle, which we need to make sure you don't have any stroke right here, unless that's what you want, but it's a little distracting to see that line there. We're going to go up to screen mode preview. And it's going to get rid of all of that. Look, you have a cute little bunny. You can have your title above it. Author, illustrated by all of that information. It's a little hack to come up with a title page in case you don't have one. This next one is a mix between text and image styling. One of the things that you can do is you can wrap your text around an object in an image. You can't really force this one every image, but you can look for opportunities to use it, if you like, how it looks. I have some clients that do not like how it looks, but we're going to use it on our little bear page. What you want to look for is something near where your text is already going to go. In this case, we have the line of where our butterfly is. I am going to move my butterfly just a little bit. So I have a little more space for my text. I want this to wrap around it naturally. Already looks like it's doing that. But we can have it follow the path. We have overset text here. We actually have a lot more texts that we need to account for. Unfortunately, you can't just select the, select your picture and go to text wrap. Sometimes this works. Usually it does not because the edge of your text, even if you detect edges, it won't detect your image. I think in this case, it's detecting the butterfly. If I increase that, you can see it picked up a little bit of the line. This will sometimes work for you in my case because this dotted line is not being picked up. I can't use this. But what you can do is you can go to your Pin tool, we're going to make a little path. This is not going to have any strokes, so we're not going to be able to see it. And it doesn't have to be exact. I'm just going to follow the line. It doesn't look pretty, It doesn't have to. Then we're going to go around the butterfly. I'm just clicking, not doing anything special. And then close it out. Now we can go back to our selection tool, text wrap around the object shape. It doesn't look like it did too much. We're going to close it and then now we're going to select our text box and increase the width. You can see like before and after. I'm undoing and redoing here. I like how it just curves. I like that curve. I think it looks good. Then you can select your textbox, and when you move it up and down, you can see that still it gets a little close. Let me show you what you can do. This A right here is really close. I want some more space, so I'm going to select that, go to text wrap. Then you can increase this. It actually moved it quite a bit. And the reason it did that for this chunk of text is because all of my text is centered. If I move to left, Aline, it's a little easier to see that space, that distance, you can have all of this left aligned. We can move it back up. As you can see, things change quite a bit when you're just moving your text box around. I will typically, I'm going to set this back to be centered. I'll typically okay, in this preview mode, there it is. I'm trying to find my path, I'm going to take this back down because that's a little too much. But I like to move my text around because you can see it changes it quite a bit just so I can find a happy place, somewhat vertically centered. Let's go back to view just so I can make sure everything is still within my margins. Yeah, that's how you wrap something around an object. Again, this is not going to have any strokes, so you're not going to see it when it's printed, when it looks like this. I'm going to show you. Let's go back to if you have a background color on your text. I'm going to add my back in here real quick. We want our rectangle, our colored rectangle to be below our butterfly. All right. We're going to select our rectangle just to make sure we're not messing with our butterfly anymore. Double like this. It's going to pull the last color that we used our eyedropper tool on go to set this to 20. Now you can see we have our little background color. So back out. I'm trying not to overwhelm you with too many things. Hopefully, I'm not. I would probably wrap this around this butterfly too. But we're going to leave it, the text how it is right now because we're going to add a gradient to our colored background. Actually going to lock my butterfly, because I keep selecting it. We're going to select our rectangle. We're going to go back up to our effects and we're going to select gradient father. You can have this be a linear gradient if you want to. Right now it's coming in from the right side zero degrees. If we said this to 90, it's going to come in from the top. Let's do negative 90 from the bottom. Those look good. You can do it as a radial. Which right now the green is in the center. If we want the green on the outside and the white in the middle, we can flip those, then you can mess with the midpoint. I hope you can see as I'm dragging this that it's making the white bigger. You can drag it the other way, it makes it smaller. But if I remove it and add it, adds a little something extra to your pages. Like I said, I'm not going to use any colored backgrounds for mine. So I'm just going to go ahead and remove that. Our last advanced styling tip is to add a texture to our text background pages instead of the solid background, because right now I just have white. But I want there to be a little something extra. This one requires you to find an image, whether it's paid or free, that you have commercial rights to. Just like with the fonts, you can't pull an image off of Google and use it, just any random image. You'll get in trouble for copyright. My favorite place for free images that you can use commercially is Pexels.com Up here you can do their license agreement and what's allowed. All of these are free to use. Attribution is not required, which means that you like on your copyright page. You don't have to say that you image texture image was sourced from Pexels. It's appreciated but not required. You can modify the photos and videos from Pexels, be creative and edit them as you like. Here's some things that are not allowed. If you come up here and type in paper texture, you can scroll through and select a texture that you like. These are too busy for what I want to use them for, but this one might be good. This one texture is a little big I like this one just something that's going to add some texture, you can reduce the opacity if you want change blending modes so the texture is not going to be as prominent as it is here. This is a good option if your book is based in the ocean. Let's see what this says. You can just play around. You might want to add a texture like this. This one's pretty. If you have dark pages, jungle background, jungle texture, that one might be a little. You could have a dinosaur, a leaf pattern might be cool. A paid option that I use all the time is deposit photos. You do have to pay for these. But look, 100 images, 70% off if you want to use a lot of images for things because you can say, this is something that I was researching for my children's book. I might add end pages with texture. You can select the size that you want and you can purchase It Usually comes out to about $1 per image, but I always use these little multi packs, so I'm going to type in paper texture. See this one comes up with more ones that aren't so aggressive. I guess you can have different burnt edges or antique looks, so there's a lot of nice options here. This is actually what I did with my book. I didn't have those butterflies added originally. I just searched through here and I found different butterfly images and purchased them commercially. So I could put them in my book, which there's not any that are showing up that I used. But you can see there's, I don't know, millions of assets on this website. It is a go to for me. So this is the paper texture that I'm going to end up using. I actually think I got this one from Creative Fabrica, but there's a link in the resources library. So I'm going to go ahead and drop this onto this page. I'm going to add the texture right now and change the settings, And then we're going to move this to another page to make it easier. That was huge. If your illustration ends up being ridiculously big like that, you may want to click and drag. My snap feature is not working that well. It's not snapping. Okay. Now we're going to Hi my texture. See what this looks like? High quality. Yep, it's nice texture. I may want to scale it up just a little bit so you can actually see the texture. Let's switch this back to typical display. Right now, you're probably thinking you can't see anything below it. You can go up here to your effects and click Transparency. I'm going to set this to multiply. Let me click okay. So I can zoom back in. Is it just darkens everything? It's difficult to tell, but it is applying it to the text as well. But since it's a nice, delicate texture, it's not overwhelming, and it doesn't make it difficult to see. Depending on what texture you're using. You may need to reduce the opacity, which you can do right there, or you can try different blending modes and just play around with them and see what you like. This one works perfectly for my usage. I'm going to cut this because we're going to use parent pages. Anything on your parent pages is going to automatically show up on the page in your book that it's applied to. You can see each one of these has a little letter A. That means they all have parent A applied to them. If I double click in here, I'm now on my parent page, which is separate from the actual book. I'm on a paste in place. I did go over adjust that really quick and you can see my multiply setting is still applied and I'm going to duplicate this to the other side. If I go back here, wait, I wasn't on the bear. Where was the owl? I don't know which one I was on. You can see that since a parent is applied to this page, it now has the texture applied as well. Since all of these pages have this texture, is now applied to all pages, not just the ones that have text. If you don't want that, you can say if I want all of these to not have that applied to them, automatically select all your pages or whichever ones you don't want that texture added to apply parent to pages, select none, and you can see it remove the texture. Then now you can click and drag the texture that you want to the page. You can pick and choose which one you want it added to. I think I'm going to add this texture to the entire book. Originally I was just going to do it on Select Pages, but I'm going to add this texture to everything. So I'm going to click my last page, Shift, click my first page, right click, Apply Parent to pages. We want the a parent, this one right here. Let's click the first one. We have that texture applied everywhere. It's not applied to my illustrations. We are going to have to have a texture layer. Let's go back up here, because I do want it to sit on top of my illustrations. I'm going to move these to my texture layer. Let's rename this. We did end up needing it. Sometimes I forget little things. Now you can see that the texture is applied to our illustration as well. 15. Finalizing the Text and Images Throughout Your Story: Now that we've gone through some of the more advanced ways that you can format your book, you should have a lot of the basics at hand. We're going to start at the very top of our title page here and we're going to work toward the end of our book. And I'm going to make final adjustments as I go. I'm going to show you real time, how I move things around and format things just to maybe inspire you and show you some tips and tricks along the way. We don't currently have any texts on our title page. If your illustrator or your cover designer already has a font picked out for your front cover, you can use the same or you can request that they use that font to create a new title page or just like a PNG with the text that you can add it yourself. For this book, I have created a title page in a Photoshop file. I'm going to open this really quick so I can show you what font it is. I have my title page as a Photoshop file, and the reason I did that is so I could add texture to it so it's not just flat. This isn't a Photoshop course, but I just wanted to show you. That's why I have mine saved as a Photoshop file and the text isn't placed directly in my end design file. I'm going to activate my text layer at the bottom right here, just so I can show you. I used cartoon nature. This is a font from Creative Fabrica that is linked in the resources file in case you want to use the same thing. So I'm going to save this and then go back to my end design file so I can bring my title page. I'm just going to place it right here. Actually may make this a little smaller. I'm holding down shift option command to scale, then I could move this little bunny down. I actually went to deposit photos and I found a different picture that I wanted to use. This one right here on my title page. We're going to see what this looks like. It's sitting above everything. My text, which I don't want, I'm going to move it. We're going to get rid of the bunny for now so I can see what this looks like. I want this to be a little big. I think. I'm going to move this towards the bottom so that I have enough room. May move that up a little bit. I'm going to add another text box. This is going to be written and illustrated by Elizabeth. Whoops, Elise. And want this font to be Secret Forest, which again, is one that I got from Creative Fabrica. I'm going to increase the size of that a bit. If you hold shift and press the up or down, it scales it faster. Maybe reduce our line height. I don't know why. Sometimes it just doesn't let you easily. There we go. And then I'm going to zoom in because I want to change the color. I'm going to pick something from our picture down here. It's got to be dark enough that it stands out, but I want it to blend in with the greens. Go to a line and center that on our page. Make sure this still says page. I want to make sure this is also centered. Then I'm going to go up to view screen mode preview, so I can see what this looks like. I think that looks pretty good. Everything looks pretty balanced. I may bring this up just a smidge perfect. All right, let's go back to, I like to switch between preview and normal. Just so I can check to make sure if I make any adjustments in the preview pane that my text is still within the margins and that still looks good option. Down to go to the next page. For copyright page, I have this one. I'm going to use this on both of them. I'm actually going to use half of the illustration bleeding off the edge of one page and the other half on the edge of the other page. Let me show you how to do that. I'm going to reduce this, then move this all the way over so that it's coming off the edge of the page. I can actually maybe about like that. You can see it's in front of our text layer, which might not be a problem right now. But I just want to move it down just in case. Then I'm going to control C, control V, we're going to move this over to this edge, then just slide this on over. I have it bleeding off of both edges of the page. Actually, maybe like that. Okay. I have a frame right here that I did not end up using. I can delete that. I'm going to resize my text. Let's expand this again. This is Body. I'm going to italicize this. Select it. You may notice if you download any fonts from Creative fabric, or it just depends where you get it from. Sometimes there's not italicized font option right here, but you can add a slant right here. I'm just going to slant this a little bit, so it's italicized. Perfect escape. I'm going to position this then for our copyright information. This is just something that I copied and pasted. You can grab it. I'm trying to talk and type at the same time. You can grab it from the resources PDF. It's just a generic copyright information. I'm going to make this text a lot smaller. Well, that's too small. Make it a little bit bigger. I want it to be in line with this. I actually want it to be just a bit smaller. That's pretty good because I don't want too much attention on the copyright page. So I like to make it smaller and I'm going to put this as regular font and not bold. Let's go to our preview. See how I'm actually going to select both of these and move them down. Because I think the dedication looks pretty good. A little farther up, but the copyright looks a little funny, so high. I think that looks good. I might end up reducing the text size throughout my file, but I'm going to put this out 21. I'm going to zoom in because I want to color this to be green. Double click that so I can change the color. We're just going to grab a green color to maybe that one perfect. It's green, but it's not in your face screen. I guess if you want to save this color swatch, you can add CMYK Swatch. Otherwise you may have to use your color picker again to try to find a similar color. We're going to add a Swatch. Click okay, select this text. And if we scroll down here, we just click this once, scroll down, and then our color is saved right here. I'm going to use that again. Perfect. Let's go back to normal double check, everything looks good, and go to the next read. Right now we get into the fun part of actually typesetting everything. Okay, I'm going to cut this text. I'm going to put it in another text box because I want to split it over these two pages. I'm going to hold my option key. Click this text box and drag it release. Then I'm going to replace that text. I'm going to use that white background we had added before. Again, you can add that by going selecting your text box and going to drop shadow. These are the settings that I have used and this is what I have saved as my object style. I'm going to apply the same thing to this one, where I go to view Preview. I'm going to click high display so I can see this text. It stands out, but it still blends in a little too much into the background. I'm going to adjust just this one, this drop shadow so that the capacity maybe we'll try 80% and see how that looks. That looks better, just so it stands out just to smigel. Let's go back to view display Typical, there is a shortcut for that, but I don't usually use the shortcut function option down to go to our next spread For this, I'm actually going to put this font to match this one right here, which is secret forest. Let me go back down. I'm not going to have it on this little curved path. So I'm going to add another text box. Actually, I don't want to press Enter because that marks it as a new paragraph. Let me move it up, that makes it a new paragraph. So we have that paragraph styling right here, that adds space between our paragraphs, like right here. We don't want that, I'm just going to get rid of that. Let's zoom in a little bit. I'm going to change this to that secret forest. May need to adjust this a little bit. I'm going to increase the size as well because I want this to draw the eye maybe. Let's make it about 30. And I'm going to get rid of the period that I have right here. Because this is like a continuation of the previous sentence. So it's not a sentence by itself. I'm just going to take off the period right there. Since it is a continuation, I'm going to make that a lower case A. I want this color to be a color from my dear needs to be dark enough that it stands out from the background. That looks more red than I want it to look. Okay, I just played around with this a whole bunch and that's the color that I chose to use. I'm going to stretch this out just a smidge. And that adjusts the width of each individual letter perfect. Now that we have that set, I'm going to move this up a little bit and I'm going to make our little, our deer image just a little smaller. That was the frame, not the image. I'm going to hold shift option to scale it proportionally because I don't want that stem right there to get in the way. I think that looks good for now. Let's go to preview so we can see. Okay, I think that looks good. We're going to go back to normal and move over here, so I can adjust this. I'm going to increase the width a little bit. A little bit more. Okay, I'm not going to do too much to this page. I think that looks pretty good. I'm just going to center at the center of the page. Switch to preview and double check. I think that looks good. I'm pretty much just going to do this on every single page. It might get a little boring and redundant. Oh, let me go back up here, because I want to create a paragraph style, we're going to call this one animal. I don't want the color, we'll end up changing the color, but I'm just going to keep the text color the same because it might actually be the same for the fox. We're going to put this in a new text box control V. I'm going to get rid of that period again. And click Animal. I think this could be a little bigger. I'm going to increase this font size, just made redefine. Go back up here and make sure it still looks good. I'm going to choose a brighter orange for this page. You can see it's very hard to read that with the background where it is. I'm going to add a white background and it sticks out a lot better. I'm going to move this towards the bottom just a little bit. I think that one looks pretty good. Preview. Okay, let's go to the next spread. Oh, I talked about this earlier but I didn't actually do it. I want to switch, I like to alternate this illustrations on the left. I like to alternate the position of the illustration in the text. Each time I'm actually going to select my squirrel and I'm going to click and drag this page over. It just switched these pages. You may notice that you have to adjust illustration positioning, but I want to keep it like that. I like to switch them back and forth. It's easy to do that if you decide later on you want to change it. Okay, let's inson repeat. I'm going to control X. Delete that part, new textbook. It's going to be animal, this orange color actually works for these first few animals because I wanted to match the color of the animal function. Shift command write and select all of that text. We're just going to duplicate that. I hope I'm not moving too quickly, but I want to show you how I lay things out. But I don't want this to take up too much time, I guess. I don't want you to be here forever. Let's take this piece out because right now I don't have any text on this page. And I want to even it up just a little bit. I think that looks good. Let's add some texts in this illustration and we'll add that white background so it sticks out a little more. I want to make this just a smidge. I don't usually adjust the font size too much as I go, but because the background is so busy, I want to make sure it's visible. And I think I'm going to increase the opacity on this. It's a needle brighter. Okay, I'm going to close that so we can see a little bit better preview. Okay, there's more space down here than there is up here. I'm going to just move things a little bit to even out the spacing. I'm going to select everything just so I can bump everything down. I think that looks perfect. Let's switch to high quality so I can check to make sure this is still, this gets lost a little bit. I don't like where it is. Let's see, I'm going to increase this just a little bit more. Okay, maybe increase the size just a smidge because on this page it does get a little bit lost. I have that. That's much better. Because originally if I zoom in, I had this going across a color change right here. It's light in the background, dark right here. Sometimes visually that can cut off the letters when I move it so it's not falling across that line. It's a little more clear what it says. Let's back to typical. Back to normal. Perfect. All right, next page. This is my book, so I'm changing the text just a smidge. All right, we're going to add our white background here, which doesn't help this situation, but I'm going to make a new dark background to change that to black and multiply move this side of the way. You can see that does a lot of good things. We're going to reduce the opacity just a little bit because that's a little too dark. Actually, I think I'm going to add, might try to use a brown from this page instead of black. I'm just going to try to pull a dark brown color. And we're going to add that to our swatches. I use the eyedropper tool for that over here. We're going to go back in here so I can change this to our brown color. It didn't look like it did much, but let's zoom in to see, yep, it did. And now we can save this at an object style and we can change this to dark background. I can apply it to this one that looks pretty intense. I want this to follow the line of this log right here. So I'm going to press on my pen tool and I'm going to draw a rough line around. You can see it pulled that color that I swatched last time so we can make sure our fill is set to none because we don't want to be able to see that text wrap. You can see I have a little straggler over here. I want all my text to be on the right side and go back to V so I can adjust this over. The bunny has bounced in the air. I want to reduce the line height on this one, which I don't do too much, but I want to make sure the text still stays together. Let's put this on another line. Actually, you can see since these are on separate text boxes that the dark shadow on this one is laying on top of this text. So I'm going to select this text and I'm going to combine these Ops text boxes so we don't have that issue anymore. Then I'm going to delete these extra pages right here. But for KP and Ingram Spark you always need to have 24 pages and your last page has to be blank. You don't want anything to be on your last page, which right now I have a texture on it, I'm going to get rid of that. It doesn't have anything actually, you could see the left and right page of my texture. That happens sometimes. If you wanted to texture on an individual page like this and it was doing it, you can shift command and click and it will actually allow you to select what was on your parent page. Just for this one, it doesn't change your parent page, but it allows you to select it and move things if you want to. But we could just delete it because we don't need that right page. I don't even think it will export. I don't know why design sometimes does that, but I don't want anything on this page. I want it to be blank. You can add like maybe about the author page right here and an end page with a texture. I may end up doing that in the final product, I may add a textured page at the beginning. It would be basically, I would add two pages. Let me just show you what that would look like up at the top. Let me select those and drag them above this. I could add a little texture so that when you first open the book, on the right page is a little patterned texture. And then on the left page next to the title page is another little patterned texture. Down here, I could do the same if I have an about the author and then have texture on the right. Your last page always needs to be blank. The end is a little more tricky to have like a front and back pattern texture, but you could do like about the author and then a little pattern and then this page will be blank and white because that's what Kai Ingram Spark wants. You should always have your final page count be divisible by four just to meet their guidelines. I'm going to delete these for now. But yeah, that's pretty much, we have formatted the entire book. We're going to do a kind of like a final review, look through, check over things, tweak things as needed in the next one. 16. Final Review of Your Book: Okay, I'm all the way back up at the top. As we went along, we switched between the preview mode and the normal mode. But now we're going to switch into presentation mode, which will make things full screen and we can go through our document and see if there's anything else that catches our eye that might need to be adjusted. And this is a great time, by the way, to do one last little proof read and make sure there's no typos in your book. So let's switch into presentation mode. Let's go to View Screen mode. Presentation mode, or the shortcut shift on a Mac. Let's go into presentation mode. Sometimes it'll take a second. You saw it was blurry for just a minute. It'll take a second to load your image. But we can scroll through our pages and I might move my little peanut. I did make some adjustments just now between the last video and this one, but I didn't make too many. Why is my end design full screen? There we go, Shift. Make sure you can still read everything. Actually, this one, I'm going to put this on a new line. I don't know if I had it like that before. I didn't change too much between the last two videos, but I always tweak things quite a bit when I'm working on projects. Doing a quick read through, I might see how much space, if there's any more space that I can move this. Yeah, I can. Well, not too much. I was going to try to maximize the space around the bird, but my margin is in getting in the way. I want to move this down just a little bit. Our I added a little stroke right here. Let me show you how to do that. You can select your text. Right here is the it's the same thing that we use for the line and everything that stroke with. I added a black one. Then if you open your properties, you can adjust the weight of that. You can make it well, you can get rid of it altogether. You can make it bigger or smaller depending on how you want it to look. You can see that made it quite a bit thicker. But I just want to leave it at one point. That's what I wanted. Make sure you don't accidentally adjust your, any of your text like that when you use your shortcuts. Actually yeap. Okay. Perfect. I think everything looks really good. 17. BONUS: Adding Endsheets (Patterned Pages) to Your Book: This is a little bit of a bonus, but I'm going to add some end pages like we talked about last video. I'm going to add that at. Let's add our texture. I wanted to go over the middle, copy, paste all these. Let's go to preview. We have cute little end pages. You could have this one say something like this book belongs to, which I might actually do that. I have just this page. I'm going to copy this, actually, I'm going to just duplicate this whole page at the end of the spread. I'm going to add a page after, because remember I want it, the last page is going to be a blank page which needs to not have any texture. I'm going to put a little about the author on this one here. I'm going to, this book belongs to, I want it to be on a curved line. We're going to do a little curved line trick again. I'm going to do this at the point, move it up, maybe like that, you don't want any film. Then back to this one, our line type. Make sure you get the plus icon and I'm going to see this book belongs to change it to Secret forest. Make it bigger. Let's make this the same color here. And now we're going to do the same thing with the line, but this time we're going to add a stroke so that you can actually see it. I'm going to add a stroke. I don't want it to be brown. Here is where I keeps pulling that brown color. But I want to be maybe that color, I think that's very similar. That's a blue color. So I actually want it to be the same as this one. I'm just going to pull the color right from this one. I want this line to be centered about this down a little bit. Okay, so now we have a little cute page this book belongs to. Let's go back to the end. I don't really have an author image to use here. I'm going to add some text. All right, so I added a little about the author. I'm going to pull the same. I don't have an image just yet. I'll end up adding one later. But I'm going to actually grab this text, copy it, paste in place. I'm going to say about the author. I increase the angle of that curve just a little bit. I'm going to move this up And then move this down so that my little, my author image will go right there. I think I'm going to add this texture over here. And I'm going to show you what I'm going to do to it layers. We have all of our end pages at the bottom, which is what we want. Then I'm going to add a white circle here. It keeps pulling that brown color. I keep forgetting to change it. That's okay. I'm going to feather, the edges of this may have to increase the size of it. Let's pull this below our text again, I think that looks pretty good. Make sure it is centered. I'm going to move about the author and I'm going to decrease the width of this so that I actually want it to text invert that. Now my text is in the middle. I want my balance ragged lines to be on perfect preview. I want this to be up a little bit. I'm going to bump this up. I'm actually going to increase this just to Mitch. I want this to be that same color right here, which I keep. Just need to save. Watch as perfect. Last page is going to be blank. 18. Preflight Check for Errors and Adjusting Image Resolution: Now we're going to check to make sure our images are all still 300 pixels per inch because we've adjusted our illustrations quite a bit here and there. We'll just need to make sure that we don't get an error when we upload, even if the images were 300 PI before we brought them in. This one for example, it goes a little bit off the page. If I perfectly sized it to be 300 PPI and I increased the size of the image in my file, I might no longer have a 300 pixels per inch image. We're going to open our preflight panel right here, or you can go to window output pre flight. I already have this one set to 300 PI. Which DPI and PPI mean the same thing? They don't exactly, but I used to use them interchangeably, that's why it's labeled something different. But we're going to click this little settings icon up here and we're going to click Define Profiles. And we're just going to go ahead and add a new one. And I'm going to call this one Pub Check. You can open these and see what the default, what it's going to check for. This is just good to know just in case you accidentally updated an image and forgot to re link it in your links panel. We can keep this one on if you want to. It's not the main thing that we're concerned about here. Let's open text and see which one font missing overset text. That overset text is just if you have something going outside of your text box, which can be a helpful thing to check for. So we can just leave that one on unresolved caption variable. We don't need that. We're not working with captions. Okay, let's close that. The one that we're really interested in is images and objects. There's two things that we're going to turn on here, but number one is going to be this image resolution. We want this to tell us if we have any images below 300 PP I. We're going to change all of these to 300. Your one bit is already over 300, so we can close that down. Then we're going to click this one as well. Non proportional scaling of placed object. We're going to click that one. Since we've resized things just a bit, we've toggled on and off our little aspect ratio lock. Sometimes this is just to make sure that you didn't accidentally make you didn't scale it outside of the aspect ratio so that it looks a little distorted like too skinny or too wide or anything like that. We're going to leave that one checked too. This one's going to be our pub check to make sure just some general things we can use this engine to check for without manually checking ourselves look like. Okay, then up here under profile, you need to select which one you want it to check. It came up pretty quickly. Sometimes it takes a minute to process down here. Usually there's a little preview of what errors you have. You can open this non proportional scaling. I didn't realize that I had this. Let's see number three. If you have any errors, there's going to be this red thing down here. It's going to be green. If you don't have any errors, then it won't list anything here, of course. Let's see. This says that I scaled it a little vertically. When you click on it, it should select the image. You can see these two numbers don't match, which means accidentally. Let's see. Yeah, it looks like my height was scaled to be a little different, which in this case I don't mind. But if you want them to be the same, I'm just going to copy and paste the larger number because that's likely the one that you were trying to scale actually like that. A little skinnier. That was an accident when I scaled this. I'm going to keep that how it is. Then. My paper texture, apparently I s, which is fine. I'm going to fix it just so I don't keep throwing that error. But it's fine that it was scaled that way. Anyway, we can fix this one as well. Sometimes if you have this clicked on and you try to fix that like I just did, your numbers will keep changing, they'll never be the same. Just make sure that's off. If you're trying to fix those numbers. Actually, I'm going to change this just so I can show you what it looks like when you don't have any errors at all. When you have no errors, nice little green check. And you can see it down here as well. I'm going to scale one of my images outside of 300 PP. I just so I can show you how to fix or work around on how to fix that. Let's just scale this one. And I'm going to scale it proportionally. I'm holding down shift and option just to make it quite a bit bigger. And we'll see the throw an error right there so we can open up our preflight panel image resolution. And now this image it's telling us is no longer 300 PPI. Down here you can see the effective resolution, so after you've scaled it is 277 PPI. This is helpful if you're like, I know my images are all 300 PI. Why is it throwing an error? That's because when you scaled it, now it's actually at 277 PPI. And if you open this info tab as well, it can show you my actual PPI of the image that was pulled into the program was 301 pixels. Per inch. But now that I've scaled it, it's down to 277. So remember we want our images to be already as close or above 300 PPI as possible before we bring them into the program. If we resize things and it's a little off. So the little trick that I'm going to show you on how to fix this is not the best method for resizing your images. The best thing that you can do is go back to your illustrator to get a larger image. Or you can export a larger image from your own drawing program if you're the one that illustrated things. Or you can download a larger image from your stock website. However you originally sourced your image without getting too techy. This method is loses a little bit of quality, it's not going to be noticeable. I recommend only using this if you're trying to, so this one's at 277. I recommend only doing this method if this is like 250 or greater. If this is below 250 PI, I would say go back to your Illustrator or download a larger image or from however you originally sourced your image. So if your image is still over 250 PPI, we can jump into Photoshop to increase the resolution. I'll show you some examples of what this can do to quality if your image is under 250 PPI. This is an design course, but I want you to be able to fix these small things yourself instead of trying to hire someone to fix it for you. That is if there's no way for you to get a larger file from your illustrator. So this is going to be just a quick thing in Photoshop. If you have the Creative Cloud subscription, you should have access to Photoshop. Make sure you have it downloaded, and then you can select your offending image. You can write, Click and select Edit with Photoshop. If you already had design open and then you just downloaded Photoshop, you may have to close design all the way down to see it on this menu. Or you can go back to your illustrations folder and open it there. This one, open Photoshop. Don't panic, if you've never opened Photoshop, yours might actually look a little differently than mine. Sometimes they open. I've never changed my workspace. It's just essential default. But don't worry, because we're not going to use any of this. The only thing we're concerned about is going to image image size. These numbers should look a little familiar to you because it should be how your image was originally sized. Sometimes for whatever reason, the resolution, even if it is 301, yours might say 72, but these numbers will be much larger. For example, if this one says 150, Photoshop just reads it as 150, your height and width numbers may be twice as large, it still ends up being 300 PPI. Sometimes Photoshop does that, sometimes it does. I'm not really sure why, but we're going to go back into end design really quickly. Because something important that we need to know is up here to know what our image was scaled to. Right now it's scaled to be 19 " wide, which is funny because I hit it right on the money. But if we click off and you accidentally select your frame, it's going to show your original numbers, which is not actually the size of your image. If you click back into your image, my width is 19 ", my height is 9.5 ". That's the new scaled height and width. So I'm just going to take this width number right here, 19. You need to make sure this is toggled on so things move proportionally. I'm going to change that to 19. I'd like to set mine to 301 just so I have one PPI of wiggle room here. This is your little preview paint of what it's going to look like. My illustration doesn't have very clean lines. Anyway, it's harder to see how this affects the quality. But there's different resampling methods that you can scroll through and see which one looks better. Some may look a little more blurry. Unfortunately, with this image, you can't really tell a difference, but that's just something to check on yours. But sometimes that does make a small difference in the quality you can scroll through. We're not worried about any of these reduction ones down here. I usually just check these three and see if any of those look better than the automatic one. And click okay. It's going to change the sizing of everything and now you can just go up to file, save, or control, and it will save your file. Since I open the illustration from my illustrations folder, I'm going to need to update this. If you opened it from design this way, it should automatically update. But since I open it from my folder, I'm going to double click that to update. Now my preflight panel shows that I don't have any errors anymore. And that everything, if I click on this and go back into Info, my effective PPI is now over 300 PPI. That's a quick way to fix that. I'm actually going to scale this back down to its original size. This was one of the sheet textures that I was planning on using, but we're going to use this just to show you really quickly what happens if you try to scale things too much. I'm going to just go ahead and select 15. I'm going to try to make this way bigger. And you can see I zoom in, There's a lot of noise. That's what this is called around the picture. Photoshop is with their engine. It's Guess at what color each pixel should be. When you scale it all the way up, it's adding pixels. You can't really see it, obviously, but it's trying to add pixels and fill in those pixels so that it doesn't look pixelated. But what ends up happening is it's just guessing, sometimes it's off, things are a little blurry. This is scaled up quite a bit, but this is just the preview, and it shows you that your lines aren't as sharp anymore. If I go back down to five, even if I zoom in a little bit, this image isn't starting off with the best of quality. But hopefully you can still see that when you scale things up, even if I zoom back out, it affects the quality. This can be more noticeable if you have any text embedded in your image or if you're using very clean lines in your illustration, so they don't have this watercolor effect. Anyway, I hope you can see that. Let's see if I can find another image just to show really quick. Okay, I have this butterfly image as well, which is one of them that I used to create the little butterflies that fly around. If I open this up, it says 72 pixels per inch, and it's at 6 ", which is, it's already a little bit bigger, so it's a little more difficult to show you the difference this makes. But if I change the 300, you can see when I move it, it's loading just a little bit. You can see that it just looks a little blurry. It doesn't look as clean or as clear. Let me open the original image so I can show you really quick. I'm going to try to move this so I can show you. Maybe let's look at the top. I'm resizing this so I can try to show you. It still doesn't look too clear, but you can see the colors right here get a little more muddied when you try to manually resize things like the lines aren't as clear, the colors look a little different. That's because Photoshop is just trying to guess at what color each pixel is supposed to be. It's trying to fill things in. Let's see if we can notice a difference with the head. This picture is even zoomed in and it looks clearer zoomed in than this one does zoomed out. So you can see these colors right here. They're just not as good. The quality right here is very pixelated. It's something that whose actually didn't want to do that. It's something that you might not notice too much on the screen, but when you print it, it can be noticeable if you have any kind of pixelation. You're the author. I know you paid a lot of money for these illustrations and if you did them yourself, I know you spent a lot of time on these illustrations. So it's best to try to limit the resizing and Photoshop this way, which is kind of like a shortcut. It's best to limit that as much as possible. And instead, you should reach out to your illustrator, or you should download larger file sizes so that your image is as clear and as high quality as you can possibly get it. This was a little more of a technical section of this course, but in the next one we're going to jump into prepping our book to export to an epub file. So I will see you over there. 19. Exporting Your Finished Children's Book to an Ebook File (Epub): There's a few different ways, outside of design, that you can convert your print interior file into an E book format. Kdp even has an option like a program that will do that for you, but you can only use that if you're uploading two KDP. You can't use it anywhere else. So we're just going to stick to end design conversion for this course. We're not going to worry about any of the other programs or tools that you can download that are available in other places. Step one is to export your book as an pub file, which seems like that's going to be pretty straightforward. Go to file, export press command E. I'm going to save this in my deliverables file and I'm fantastic. I'm just going to say, oops, we're doing the ebook ebook file. Change your format down here, make sure this is on fixed layout reflowables. If you have text, this allows the viewer or the reader to change text size, font types, and stuff like that. But we're looking for fixed layout, which is basically going to take a picture of each page. Your E book is going to look exactly like your print file fixed layout. Then you want to export all of your pages. Or for example, if I didn't want to export this first page, I could select a range and I could change that. Or if you have a blank page at the end, you can change your range so that you don't include the blank page in your ebook file because you don't need it in your ebook file. Rasterize first page is just means that it's going to take a picture of your first page and use that as your cover. Typically you don't use your cover in your interior file. We're going to choose image for this step, you are going to want to have your book cover image. If that's something that you don't have yet, you're going to have to get that and come back in here to re export your ebook file before it's ready to upload. Because that is something that you need in the meta data. I just selected my ebook image there on navigation TOC, select file name. Your book can throw an error sometimes if K DP doesn't detect that there's a table of contents. Even though with a children's book you don't really have a table of contents because you don't have chapters. So make sure you click file name because that can avoid having an error in the future spread control, we're just going to leave as based on document set up. This means that the person who's viewing your book will view it landscape and will view it spread by spread. It won't be page by page, it'll be spread by spread conversion settings. These can affect your file size. I leave, that says automatic resolution. You can bump up to 300 if you want. A lot of book readers are recommending 300, But you have to pay a delivery charge, which is based on your file size, sometimes 300 PPI. You have a really big book size, you're going to pay more to deliver that to your reader than somebody who has 150 PPI. Something to keep in mind and experiment with. I always just leave it at 150 and I'm going to show you in just a minute. The quality still seems great, I leave this at high. You can choose maximum. But again, it's going to affect your file size. We're not going to worry about anything with CSS or Javascript in metadata. You're going to add your title and your offer. This is stuff that you do need to add here because there's not really an easy way to add it after the fact. If this is going to be your final book file, if you have your cover and all of that stuff already, you need to add this information. You can add the description, it's not needed. Publisher subject. I'm just going to put children's book. Add the description if you want to. But the really important thing is to add your title in your creator and click Okay. Mine's taking just a minute. It may take a minute to, because it's writing PNG, it's converting each spread into an image and creating an Epub file out of that pub is actually a zipped file. It doesn't look zipped, but it's a zipped file that contains all of the coding and images illustrations, meta data. It contains all of that CSS HTML in a zipped folder so that your e book reader will convert all of that information and display it. Sometimes it can strip information that it doesn't think it needs or it doesn't want. I wanted to jump in really quick and explain the zipped file thing. So this is what the file looks like on your computer. It's just pop, it doesn't look like it has much to it. It's actually a zipped folder and there's a way that you can unzip it. This is a program I have in the background that is actually used to edit Epub files. This is all the information on the left that's contained inside of that Epub file. That one file right here actually has all of these separate things inside of it that are zipped inside of it. If I scroll it back to the top, you can see it has all of this HTML. There's a CSS document right here. This is all the information that's on the back end of an Epub file that you don't see, and there's ways to edit a lot of this stuff, but that's not what we're going to talk about in this course. I just wanted to show you that there's actually a lot of files that go into just this one Epub file. So one of the things that we talked about, let's see down here, content is the meta data when you were exporting is to include things like the book title and the name, anything like that. Because this is going to go in your file. It doesn't really look like it goes anywhere. It doesn't just go on the file name. This stuff is actually coded into the book, so it is stuff that you need to include. But I just wanted to show you guys really quickly what this looks like. So let's go back to design. So you don't really get like, oh yeah, export complete, you don't get any message like that. But if you go into, I saved it in my deliverables folder, you now have an ebook file, an Epub file on a Mac. If you double click this, it's going to open in E books, which for a children's book, should not be an issue at all. But I always recommend to open it with Kindle Previewer if you're uploading to KDP. If that's the main platform that you're going to distribute your ebook through. Because every platform ebook reader has different rules and it may not display it the same for a children's book. Again, it should be pretty much the same. But we're going to do it with Kindle previewer just to make sure our Kindle will display it how we want it to. I have a link to download this in the resources PDF. I'm, if you don't have your cover image and you export it without that cover image, your little thumbnail right here, your little preview of your file will not have your book cover. But since I had my book cover already, you can see it looks like a cute little book. See it says it's enhancing the book. So it is actually converting your E book, even though you already exported it as an Epub file, it still has its own internal conversion that it uses. Remember how I said this was step one. This is an example of what can happen in design. Is not able to export certain things correctly. So I'm actually going to report this, basically what this is doing because I have my master pages, I have this applied to every one of my pages as a texture and there's a transparency attached to it. A blending mode right here, Instead of being normal, when a design exports this to an ebook file, it will pretty much just change this to normal. So if I change this to normal, you can see what it does. It's doing that to every one of my pages. Because if I go back in here and scroll through these pages, it just looks like I have those textured pages laying on top. So I'm actually turn that off so you can see another example of what this may look like in case you didn't apply textures to every one of your pages. So we're just going to name this 12 because I'm just showing you when you re export it should save all of your other information in your meta data so you shouldn't have to enter that back in. Okay, so this is our second version, which on first appearances looks the same as the first one. Oh, I don't know why. On Mac sometimes you have to click and drag instead of once the programs already open. It won't always let you open it that way. Now you can see, since I got rid of that texture that had the blending mode, it is now showing my first page as it should. If you go back, you can see your title page, but it always starts with your content page automatically. When you open it up, go to the next page. I'm just clicking this right here, and you can see it looks like a spread. When design converts to an ebook, it has issues with any transparency or effects that you add to text or images. So remember right here I have a directional feather, which I've already, I've lumped them together. Let's see on this oval right here, I have a directional feather. But once it's exported, it's not able to keep that look. Since my P and G of the butterfly is laying on top of my illustration. It's actually going to cover every one of my full spread. If your print version looks like this, then your ebook version will convert really well. Mine. As you can see, it converted differently. This isn't easy to read anymore. It's good to test this, because if you don't have any crazy effects added to texts like right here, you may be good to go right now and you may not have to do anything else. And you may be able to upload this file, but go page by page and make sure that things look okay. I'm trying to see if there's another example of this. One looks pretty rough. They don't normally look this crazy, but I'm going to show you what to do if yours looks like this. Again, it's good to test it because you may not have to do anything special. So if your book is ready to upload, then your book is ready to upload. Yeah. But in my case, there's another step that we have to take a couple extra steps before we have a file that looks like our print file. Let's close this. We're going to go back into our layers. And I'm going to add a layer on top of all of these. And this one's going to be called ebook. And this layer is the only thing when I export my E book. I'm actually going to turn these layers off. And I'm only going to use the information in my book layer to export. So what we're going to do, let me scroll all the way to the bottom to see if I actually have a blank page. I don't have a white a blank page added after page 28 because KDP will automatically add one for me. Ingram Spark will as well. You can't do that if you only have 23 pages. You do. Your file does need to have 24 pages. Just make sure if you have 23 pages of content in your ebook that your last page needs to be blank and there can't be any texture added to it. Mine's good to go. Okay. This time what we're going to do is I'm going to keep this in the deliverables we now let's do course project. We're going to do ebook images. Make a folder with ebook images and I'm just going to call this image. We want to export every spread as a picture. We're going to do all, we're going to leave it as spreads, because if it's as pages, we'll just have to add twice as many pictures, if that makes sense. So we're going to keep it as spreads. I'm going to change that to high. You can set this to whatever your book is being exported at. I'm exporting -150 PI. I'm going to keep the color space the same and click Export. This is going to take a minute, but if I open up, it doesn't like me doing both of these things at one time. You can see it's saving the spreads as images. We're going to let that do its thing. I'm going to open one of these, just so you can see now when I export it myself as a J peg, you can see that it still has all the text effects and everything. My butterfly is not blocking all of my image anymore. We're going to add these illustrations, go back to our layers. I'm going to turn both of these off and make sure my pin is in this layer, so I'm not accidentally adding my illustrations to any other layer. Let's go back to normal view so we can see things a little better. Remember at the beginning of the course, I said if things aren't alphanumeric, if I just select all of these and drag these in, it's not going to be in order. Actually, it is for that, let's see. But it's not in order. We're not going to do that. I can scroll through, but I don't like doing that. I already got that page. I'm going to select up to pay image nine before I get to the double digits right here. And then they'll be in order so it doesn't include bleed when you export like this, that's not going to include bleed. So just go through and add your images again like we did in the beginning, except this time we don't really need image frames because it's already sized to fit these pages because we exported from these pages. This does seem like a silly redundant step. It seems like design should be able to do this for you. And as you can see, Pup check down here. Now we have a bunch of errors because we exported things at 150 PPI. So I'm just going to turn this off so we no longer get this warning. Oop, we don't have to worry about that because for the book we're not worried about 300 PPI. Really only worried about that for the print file. Now we're going to export again. Let's go back to our deliverables folder. I'm just going to call this one V three and make sure you change your format back to fixed play out. Dave, again, it should remember all of your information. You can double check to make sure it did. Let's go back to deliverables. It's good file handling, by the way, to delete these previous copies if you're not going to end up using them, because trust me, in a month, when you come back, you're going to look at these, You're going to be like, wait, which one was the one that I wanted? It's just better not to have duplicates or extras that you have to worry about later. You can see now I have my texture is displaying properly. Go to the next page. Now if you double click, by the way, you can zoom in on text or a portion of the illustration. And you can see even though this is at 150 PPI, it's still pretty clear. It could probably be clearer if it was at 300 PPI, but for me, it's not worth the extra file size to have it for that difference. You can see that's still slanted now. It looks exactly like it does in the print file. All done in design, we don't have to worry about downloading any extra programs or doing anything extra. This file is good to upload. It looks how I wanted to look. Everything exported and converted well. Now that I manually replaced my images, this could be a little clearer. But you can click and zoom down here. Double click, perfect. Now this file is ready to a good to go. Just make sure when you're going back to your print version that you toggle off your ebook layer so that you don't accidentally export all of your ebook images which aren't as high quality as your print files. Then we can turn this back on. Since we have this layer off, it won't check those images anymore. Remember, good file handling. We're going to delete these. I don't accidentally try to upload them. This is ready to upload. 20. Exporting Your Finished Children's Book to a Print PDF File: Our print file exporting is much more straightforward. Make sure you don't have any errors down here in your pre flight. And again, make sure your ebook layer is hidden because we don't want to be exporting that. I'm going to click in another one, so I don't actually add something to that layer. And then we're going to go to file export. I'm going to name this one print file down here, make sure your format is PDF, print save. Then up here under Adobe PDF presets, KDP and Ingram Spark want you to export to this one. Lulu has their own if you're exporting to them, they have their own settings that you have to download. But we're going to use DF One Alpha 2001. That's the main one that all of the POD companies, it should automatically populate all of these things so you shouldn't have to worry about changing too much your compression, it's all going to be over 300 PPI. The important thing that you change here is marks and bleeds. You want to use your document bleed settings because it doesn't automatically tick that, but we want to include that bleed so that our images go off the page. And actually if you don't include this and try to upload the file, you will get an error with Ingram Spark or KDP and they'll tell you your file doesn't have bleed. But it looks like you have images that you want to bleed over the edge of the page. Don't include any marks. Pod companies do not want this. Traditional publishers do, but not POD companies don't include any marks. Everything else will stay the same. Of course, you want all pages. You want to export pages, everything else is good to go. Click Export. And up here you can check the progress. My file is pretty huge because I have Photoshop files in there. I've got a lot of effects. Your file may not take as long as mine to export, but my file is pretty hefty. I have mine set to automatically open the file once it's done exporting to view things as you would like. If this was a print file, you need to go to page display, make sure two page view is toggled on and then show cover page in two page view. This means that your first page will show by itself and then if I go to the next one, it'll show page two on the left, page three on the right. If you don't change that, it's going to change the order of your entire book so you can go through and make sure everything looks good. Actually, I don't know why. Let me go back into my end design file. It's good to prove everything because it looks like there's an issue right here. For some reason it looks like, yeah, at some point this got moved over. It's good to prove things and make sure that everything looks as it should. I'm going to zoom out just a smidge so I can see around the edges. Actually, that was too much. Let's go at 65. Yeah, because I still want to see the edge of the page to make sure I don't have that issue again. Now you can see there's a little white line, KDP may actually give you an error for that too. It's definitely something you want to fix. I'm just going to go through every other page now and make sure it all looks how I wanted to. This one. Again, I changed my file a little bit. When I added the pages, I had to make some adjustments. And that's where this is coming from. If you followed along with me, should not have that. But I thought I fixed all of these. But for this particular issue, the ebook file doesn't include bleed. Actually, you can see that it looks fine in the ebook file but I had to move it over smidge in my print file. Luckily I don't have to redo the ebook file. Perfect. Everything else looks perfect. I can re export that and then my print file is ready to upload. Something I do want to mention, I'm not seeing any light leaks on these pages. Let me zoom in just a little bit and see if I can find some. You may notice some lines on around text that has any effects. This one's not showing. I do have my settings changed a little bit tweaked in Adobe so that it doesn't show those light leaks. But here's an example. If I in, it actually disappeared. You can see this line, and this is actually where my two images join each other. And there's a vertical one, but it's a little harder to see where the pattern falls. A lot of times you may see this around text, you may see like a little white outline around some of your text. It may not even be around the whole text box, It could be around a PNG. I think my PNG's are hiding some of that. My butterfly. I'm not really seeing anymore, which stinks because I would like to show you an example. But you could see it on the pages that I had. Yeah, my text doesn't really have anymore. But you can see this white line right here. You may have it around your text, You may have it around images that have any effects on them. These are called light leaks, and if you zoom in, mine actually disappear. And I think that's just the settings that I have set up, but you can still see it right here. If you continue to zoom in and it still remains like a one pixel width line, it is a light leak and it's not something that is going to print. I wanted to warn you about that because it is something a lot of my clients see and they're like, hey, what are these lines? Why are they here? It's actually a display issue when any PDF reader processes your file. So it's not something that's actually going to print, it's just a display issue when these programs try to digitally read your file. If you want more information about that, there's a link in the resources file. I'm not an expert on exactly why it happens, but if you want any more information, there is a link to check that out. I just wanted to warn you in case you see those and you're like, What is happening? Where are these lines coming from? All right. Now we have both our print file and our book file ready to upload you. Did you formatted your book all by yourself? 21. Troubleshooting: Speeding Up InDesign: Before we move on and wrap this course up, I do want to talk about a couple of things that you can do to speed up your design, or if your program is lagging a little bit, some things that you can do to help it along. Design requires, I think it's eight gigs of Ram to operate, But that doesn't mean that it's going to operate smoothly, That just means that's the minimum that it needs to run. So I think there's four different things I'm going to talk about. Number one is we toggle back and forth between these, but to make sure that your display performance is set to typical. If your program is running a little slowly, it's not keeping up with things. Make sure you didn't accidentally leave this on high quality, you can switch it to typical. Your pictures will be a little more blurry, but again, it helps run more smoothly until you have things placed where you need them to. But if it's running a little slowly, that may be your number one reason why number two is pre flight, which is always on in the background. This one's just on basic. If you have it on 300 PPI, it's going to take a little more juice for it to try to read all of your images. When you move them, add them, add something else, adjust the sizing. Preflight is going to keep checking those files to make sure that you don't have any errors. So you can actually toggle this off so that design is no longer wasting any energy on constantly checking your files. You can just turn it on when you need it and turn it off when you don't need it. Last step in design is you can turn down live screen drawing, which is a live preview of what your image will look like when you resize it. So if you size something up or down or move it, I have, I already have that setting changed, so it doesn't show a preview. It just shows a little outline box of where it's going to go. It doesn't actually show what it looks like when I'm moving that. Let me show you the difference really quick. So if you go up to end design preferences interface right here, you can see this live screen drawing. I have it set to delayed, which shows that it doesn't show me moving the image around. It just shows where my little frame will end up being. It shows the outline of my frame. But if I select immediate click, okay, When I drag this, it's actually showing the image as I drag it around. In design has to process what that's going to look like at every little moment, every little place that you're moving it around so that can keep in design a little too busy and slow things down. Again, for mine, I keep it on delayed, even on my computer that has a lot more processing power. I always set it to delayed. And this last one is outside of design. Make sure that you don't have too many things running in the background of your computer because it can steal away some of your processing power, close everything else down. If you're having difficulties in design on a Mac, that usually means right clicking and pressing quit. Because even if I close like this, I have, if I close this, it's still going to be running in the background just a little bit. Not too much, but it's still going to run in the background. So you can go ahead and quit things or you can make sure there's not something in the background that's updating. Or if you have anti virus that's running a scan or something, you can pause those things just so you can get through whatever changes you need to make in end design. So there's probably some other more advanced ways that you can speed and design up, but I'll leave a link to an article talking about those in the resource file, if that's something that you need. These are only the changes that I've ever had to make. And as long as you meet the minimum for end design, your computer should be able to handle your book file. It may run a little slower sometimes, but for the most part it should be able to keep up. 22. Conclusion—You Did It!!: I'm so proud of you for making it all the way to the end of this course. By now, you should be a pro at formatting your own children's books. You should have an interior print file and an ebook file ready to upload. And you did it all by yourself. Don't forget to show off your new skills by uploading a sample of your book to the class project section of the course page. As a reminder, you can do that by going to file Export, and choose Jpeg. Type in the page range and select Spreads. Navigate to the class projects and upload your file. I would also love it if you left a review for this class, let me know what you loved and how this course was helpful to you. Don't forget to follow me on Skillshare If you're interested in any more book related courses or you can check me out on my website at Vivian Reese.com I wish you the best on your book journey. I'm so proud of you for making it all the way to the end of this course. By now, you should be a pro at formatting your own children's books. You should have an interior print file and an ebook file ready to upload. And you did it all by yourself. Don't forget to show off your new skills by uploading a sample of your book to the class projects section of the course page. A reminder, you can do that by going to file Export and choose Jpeg. Type in the page range and select Spreads. Post it on Instagram. And feel free to tag me. I would also love it if you left to review for this class, let me know what you loved and how this course was helpful to you. Check back here in the future if you're interested in any more book related courses or resources, I will have a course on formatting your own children's book cover. So make sure to check back. I wish you the best on your book Journey. Bye.