Noob Question - InDesign - Is there a custom market?

[acolarik]

Hi Everyone,

I have written many books but this time I want to self-publish an ebook on different platforms. Yes, I could learn from scratch how to build a template or purchase one of the many available out there. Instead I have a completely different idea for this book and a custom layout is needed to make it happen. Imagine a book inside a book where the orientation is landscape, the main body is at the spine and a second book is in the margins commenting on the first. As I am a total noob on this, I need the template to allow saving the book in multiple formats for the most common platforms.

Is there a custom market out there for InDesign? I am referring to specific to the Adobe community and not the generic "work" sites that offer everything and nothing specific.

I really appreciate some guidance, and thank you for your consideration in advance.

With Kind Regards,

Andrew

[Eugene Tyson]

Should be possible in InDesign

InDesign is a large learning curve with a lot of nuances and specifics for ePub creation.

You could hire a specialist / InDesign expert to create a custom layout template for you.
The Adobe InDesign community has fantastic users with huge range of experience.

For templates - although may not have exactly what you need:
Adobe Stock
Envato Elements

(I'm sure there's more)

There's no magic button - it's all user controlled so maybe working with someone knowledgeable in reflowable and fixed-layout EPUB formats, depending on the interactivity and layout complexity.

Resources:

InDesign Tutorials: Adobe provides free tutorials, including advanced eBook formatting.
Lynda/LinkedIn Learning: Courses on custom InDesign templates and eBook publishing.
Books: Titles like "Creating eBooks with InDesign" by Pariah Burke could be helpful.

The InDesign User Group may have connections.

As well as people here are quite knowledgeable.

[acolarik]

Thanks for the reply. Yep, I will definately need some help with the template modification/creation. Reflowable seems to be the way to go. The user groups are not updated as some of them are dead links. I live overseas so visiting in person is not an option.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I know of no online groups or forums I'd recommend, for many reasons.

Tutorials are as good a start as any, but they tend to be... very simplified "push button A, now push button B" affairs that make no allowance for any fault in the source materials or process. EPUB export is not a simple one-step process like print and PDF can be; it's complex, a bit messy and often takes several iterations to get a satisfactory result from even simple source material.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

You have one huge hurdle in that most of the e-book resellers don't permit oddball layouts of any kind. (A common wish, for example, is to do two books back to back, like the old Ace doubles; no platform allows that.)

And Amazon/KDP is twice that strict. They will block (or, later, remove) almost any unique or unusual layout.

But yes, it's quite possible to manage various print layouts and EPUB exports with InDesign, even from a single source file.

Templates... are not the crutch you might think. They often prove limiting, with construction that made sense to the creator but can drive a user completely nuts. Books are simple to lay out for print; they are even simpler to compose for reflowable EPUB export. You would be better off ramping up your basic InDesign skills than trying/assuming a template will allow you to bypass all that. (You will almost certainly not be able to make good use of a template, and be unable to resolve problems with it, if you don't have those basic skills, and a bit more, anyway.)

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "a custom market." If you mean hiring an ID expert to create your book, or at least custom template, the well is bottomless. The problem is that only a small handful of them can do anythng besides drop Word text into cookie-cutter novel layouts, especially for e-book publication.

[acolarik]

Really good to know. Appreciate the insight.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

An additional point, based on your description of goals: reflowable EPUB does not handle side-by-side material very well. It's best used for a single, linear flow of content. Doing things like flowing text around images or text boxes, or trying to create side-by-side text flows — it can be done, but it's fragile and depends on the reader used and its configuration, among many other things. A truly satisfactory result with such layout, for all markets and even the most common slate of readers, is likely to b elusive at best.