SELECTION tools not working on one side of a double page spread

[Martha Myron]

I planned to write my entire second book on finance directly in Indesign - not getting very far at this point and I've tried all the suggestions. What am I doing wrong?

[Eugenio.NYC]

Hi, sorry about that

I don’t have a solution, but maybe if you try to reset the preferences will work, here the instructions:

https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/setting-preferences.html

[Frans v.d. Geest]

Could have several reasons:

objects on Master ('parent') page?

objects locked?

objects on a locked layer?

[Martha Myron]

TKU Happy New Year. I will check this out. 

[jane-e]

@Martha Myron 

If you don't see it, show a screen shots of your Layers panel (expanded) and Pages panel 

Jane

[Lukas Engqvist]

InDesign needs to have text flow in frames. (In that respect it differs significantly from Word or Google Docs). If you have a book normally you would create a Primary Text Frame, and you can flow the text through the book. Sometimes there is a prmary text frame and you are placing the text in the Parent (previoously Master) Page, resulting in the same content on all pages.

Showing Text Threads can help to understand how text flows.  There are many tutorials on how to thread text, please confirm that you are comfortable with this part first. https://www.indesignskills.com/tutorials/indesign-threading-text/

Note that you want to have InDesign in Normal view so that you can see all frames and construction elments. It is tempting to turn of the "clutter" by swithching to preview, but then you will find it hard to to know why things do not work as expected. Even turning on "Show Hidden Characters" is a good idea, so that you can know there is no unwanted break character affecting your text flow.

If you have a series of threaded frames and still have problems a screenshot of where you are finding the problem would be helpful…