inserting "masterless" chapters into a book and applying a Master once inserted

[Andrea Coyle]

I have a project that the end product is 4 books.  I have 30 chapters that will be used in different formations to make up these 4 books. Each book will have it's own unique style (header and footers only)

1. Can I design each chapter as it's own file, leaving the headers and footers blank. Then link the chapters to 4 "book" documents in the order they are needed and THEN apply that book's style (header/footer) to it?

2. In a perfect word, If a change needs to be made in the future, I'd like to be able to update the original  chapter file, and that file is updated in each book file it is placed in.  Thank you for any help/advice you can offer.

[Creamer Training]

No-books have that type of control. Books don't have a "book style" to apply-all it can do is sync the settings from a source document to the other documents and adjust the numbering in the documents; even then it can only sync styles (text, colors, parent pages, etc.) of the same name and add new styles not in the receiving documents. 

You could try using variables in the headers/footers and populate them later--either globally or on a per-chapter basis. 

Be sure to select what you sync when you are synchronizing the book--or use different names for each book. For example, Title_Bk1, Title, Bk2, etc. 

I like to add a "style guide" to my book at the end; this guide has all the styles used in the entire product sorted by type (titles, headings, body styles, etc.). That way, I can make my update there and sync them out as needed to other documents. 

Other options include linking to the content with InCopy or Em Software DocsFlow; that way you can make edits to the content and update the text separately in each chapters (with potentially different formatting).

[Andrea Coyle]

Thank you!

You have given me quite a few things to consider as I  move forward.
Would you suggest any tutorials that would help in this overall process? Everythng I find is more basic.

[Creamer Training]

This is more of a specialized consultation job--I think it would be difficult to find online video training this specific.

You can look here for certified instructors (filtered for the USA, but you can change that):

https://learning.adobe.com/partner-finder.html?products=InDesign&partnerType=Certified%20Instructor&...

Look for someone that specializes in long documents.