Hello everyone,

Well the hurricane knocked out power and net access for a few days here on the east coast. Thankfully, things are now back up and running with everyone safe and sound. Though, there still are some downed trees and flashing streetlights. That being said, I wanted to take this time to talk about designing the interior and exterior of your book for print.

Let’s get the most important thing out of the way first – designing your book interior in Microsoft Word is a VERY BAD IDEA! Ironic, isn’t it? The most popular word processor of all-time is actually one of the worst when designing for print. Is it possible? Yes, but it’s much more of a hassle.

For instance, if you want to create unique headers for each of your book chapters, you need to split your word document into ‘sections’ and break the connection so it doesn’t go to all the pages. Do you even know what a section is in Word? If you did, good for you, I did not!

Also, although you can set margins and the like within word, if you have to make adjustments to fit more formats like tablets, e-books, 6×9, etc. It’s not as simple as it may appear to be. Often times changing the margins also drastically changes how your text appears in the document and how many pages it becomes.

In addition, page breaks, pressing enter multiple times for spacing, using tab, all big no-no’s when publishing the book on an e-pub platform. On Kindle for instance, the books are based on an HTML foundation. So if you put any weird things in word that aren’t HTML friendly, guess what? You’re probably going to see a broken line of code somewhere within your manuscript. You can see an example of this in my ‘recent posts’ when I copy and paste things from my manuscript, into the blog.

But we’re talking about print right? Well, in that case, there are two options that can be utilized to format your book properly.

1.) Hire a professional layout designer to build the book for you. Createspace and Lulu have professionals that will provide this service for you, but it is NOT cheap. You’re looking at a starting price of $299.99 from some of the places that I’ve shopped around with. After having torn my hair out as my girlfriend and I tried to figure out InDesign, no wonder it’s $299.99!

2.) Get the Adobe monthly subscription and use InDesign to format the book. If you don’t know what InDesign is, you might want to stick with #1, it may be cheaper in the long run.

InDesign is essentially a professional layout program. People in the industry will use this or other fancy named programs to create interior and exterior layouts for magazines, books, interactive advertisements, interactive PDF’s, etc. Having just skimmed the surface of this program, it’s very powerful indeed. Once my girlfriend and I figured out how to create a “book” and have each chapter with its own unique heading, the possibilities of this program became endless.

It allowed the freedom to manipulate and edit the text so you don’t get “widows” What the heck is a widow?

But in all honesty, if my girlfriend hadn’t taken classes in InDesign, and I hadn’t any experience in graphic design, I probably would have hired a professional. There are times where the program will refuse to do what you want it to do; forcing you to scour the web with obscure terminology to find the right tutorial for your needs.

So, what does this all mean? Does this mean that you shouldn’t type your manuscript in word? Absolutely not. What this means is that -you- the writer, must be cognizant of the ‘quirks’ that come with working in Word. Of course, I would never write my entire manuscript in InDesign, it’s not meant for that. You simply need to be aware that Word may not be the ideal program for formatting your text into book print, but it will be a great starting point.