How do I make a book?

Thank you to everyone who has replied. My book will have fewer than 300 pages and maybe 12 chapters. It's a book about bringing a dog into your home and will cover overall start-up, care and training as well as outside activity. It's a straight line publication and no footnotes so very simple page by page but with chapters devoted to each area of concern. After reading the comments I may do separate InDesign documents for each chapter and then 'collecct' them into one book. I am not a fan of Word and would rather use InDesign, which was a replacement for Quark Express when I first started using it... so yes, a long time user. This is my first book an hopefully not my last, but from comments here it sounds like I will be best off simply doing it all in InDesign as the final will be a ebook published as a PDF file. I will want to wind up with one file for the page numbering part which can be done easily in one InDesign document I think.

Any further comments are welcome, but for now I'll just start by doing chapters as separate documents and 'paste' it all together when the time comes to make the one big file. I'll then do the Table of contents by hand. This sounds like the simplest way to handle it.

Hi Ken:

I believe you are a long-time InDesign user, but books are a specialized niche. If you can set aside 3.5 hours, this would be a great use of your time: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/indesign-creating-long-documents-13887227/creating-indesign-book-files

~Barb

You've gotten good answers — to pretty much everything, as far as I can see — but let me sum up as an experienced author/publisher:

• If you're "writing" a book, you probably want to do it in Word. While both tools work fine as an authoring tool, Word is a bit better at all the "word processing" that goes into creating, editing and managing text content. Don't fuss too much with the format but use styles for every element and avoid Word's Super-E-Z spot and override formatting... it will bite you when you try to pull the project into InDesign.
• When the book is more or less complete, import it into InDesign using a fully defined page layout, with proper page sizes, margins, facing pages, headers and footers, all that. The Place menu has an option to 'Show Options'; you'll want to use that to review and map styles and other details. (You will probably end up repeating this step a few times until you get a completely clean and organized ID file ready for final editing and layout. Just back up and start again.)
• Unless you are writing something enormous, or will have chapters that need to be managed separately (meaning separate authors, editors, content review, etc.) just keep it all in one INDD file and use sections and chapter headings to break it into chapters or sections or parts. It's much easier to manage one file than several collected using the Book feature.

And as with all pro publication tools and process, define, use and manage styles meticulously — Paragraph, Character and Object. There should not be a single 'undefined' or 'default' item in the file, and never, ever any spot override formatting.

. Do I make InDesign documents for each chapter with pages and then bring those into the 'book?' Then the Table of contents later when I bring in several chapters?

By @Ken Nielsen

That is exactly how it works 😉 A 'book' is a container for separate InDesign files. If you create the TOC be sure to turn on 'use book' in the options.

What kind of book? 

If text only - maybe Word will be sufficient enough? 

If not for printing and not too many "images" - maybe still Word?

There's nothing simple about it, honestly. Unless you're dealing with an extremely long document and a very weak computer, there's no real reason to use the book feature. Can you tell us about the project?

And I concur with Derek, indexing is best done by a professional.

The "book" is an InDesign feature where you assemble a number of InDesign documents, it's usually used for very long documents.

If you're writing a book the best workflow is to write it in (say) Word and finalise your MS there and then bring it into InDesign. The output will depend on the format you want – print and/or eBook such as Reflowable ePub or PDF.

If you're new to InDesign it would be wise for you to take some lessons before starting to format the book.

Indexing is the last operation when you have the book paginated – if it's a complex book it's best to hire a professional indexer.