Non-Fiction book formatting

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
April 22, 2024
2 replies
1099 views

I have written a non-fiction book with images that I want to self-publish. It's currently a docx file that I want to format myself. There are so many basic tutorials on InDesign I don't know where to start. I've used PS for years, but this is my first go-round with InDesign. Can someone point me to tutorial(s) that can zero in on what I'm looking to do?

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BobLevine

Community Expert

My advice, if this is your only project, hire a professional.

karlapepAuthor

Participant

Thanks. I absolutely appreciate your advice and I understand why you suggest it. But I have a few to publish in the near future and I have some free time on vacation, so I figured I'd start delving into InDesign for this and a few other projects because I like that sort of stuff. I use Atticus to format but it limits me sometimes. Thanks again!!!

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

InDesign is... well, it's a cliche to say it's more powerful than most tools, so maybe it's more useful to say it has almost unlimited scope, and harnessing that scope can be a daunting task. It's about as far from packaged "book formatters" as you can get, even if they have (or can be used for) similar goals.

You'd be best off working through as many basic tutorials as you can find (or find time for) to master ID's many basics of document setup, page layout, style creation and management, and on up to things like live header/footer, TOCs, indexes, image management etc. Some of it similar to other apps, but the differences — even between ID and Word — can really throw you.

There are good tutorials here, on LinkedIn, and in various grades of quality and helpfulness, other places. And the whole purpose of this forum is to have a place to ask questions and get qualified answers.

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

This is about as open-ended as a question can get. 🙂

Do you need help with how to lay a book out in InDesign — the technical aspects of page layout, style creation, project organization, etc? That's a big step, and it might be better if you work through some tutorials on how to do basic document setup, style creation etc. rather than take a giant step up to their complex combination for a book.

Or do you need input on design etc. — layout esthetics, page and content design, content organization, etc.? That's a pretty big bite, too.

The only general advice I can start with is that it's more important to the get the "technical" layout and structure right than any details of font or spacing or margins or the like. If your content is properly structured, with styles applied in a manageable hierarchy, it's easy to adjust those styles for a global refinement of the "look and feel and layout." Fussing too much with fonts and sizes and details when the underlying structrure is shaky usually leads to a need to start over from some very early stage, with a lot of wasted work.

A few more details about your project and your InDesign skills would help in steering your progress.

karlapepAuthor

Participant

Thanks! My book is fairly simple and straightforward. I'm sure there must be templates within InDesign for a 6x9 book, or do I need to create everything from scratch? I use Atticus presently to format books but there are limitations that govern the entire format and was hoping I could tailor things just a bit more. Since I already have InDesign as part of CC I thought I would learn that. Just wanted to get a starting point to do so.

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

This is one of those areas where all of the shortcuts are.... misleading, if not entirely phantom. Book design has to be done correctly, and there really aren't any shortcuts, be they "writer and publisher tools" like Atticus or Scrivener, or templates.

Yes, you can use simple tools, and get simple results. Not very good results, probably not even acceptable results, but... results.

And templates are a bit of a briar patch in that they seem to enable advanced or organized design with just a little cut-and-paste, but they have two problems. The first is the same as above: if you use someone else's cookie-cutter, you end up with someone else's cookie, and yours may well be just one of a thousand such cookies. Not really an optimal path. The second is that templates are often too complex, too "cute" in the way they are structured, and far less cut-and-paste/drop-in/auto-magic than something that breaks, does weird things, won't allow simple changes and after many hours of work produces something suitable only for the digital dumpster.

Book design is an art like any other. You have to bring a certain amount of skill and esthetic judgment, blend that carefully with the actual content and audience, and produce something that conveys the information as effectively and transparently to the reader as possible.

"Book maker" software and templates and formula work rarely gets there.

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