Author Advice - Book Design 2

Basic Book Design for your Instant-Books Edition

Good Book Design is about the design of each page being pleasing to the reader, for Instant-Books Editions this means ‘pleasing’ when read on-screen or when printed as an A4 sheet of paper. We are always looking for the most pleasing balance of ‘printed text’, ‘illustrations’ and ‘white space’ - note the ‘white space’ because if you simply ‘cram’ as much information as possible onto each A4 page the result will be awful!

Here is how we prepare our Discovery Walking Guides ready for Instant-Books Editions.

Written Text:
All written text for a book is prepared in a word processing program (usually Lotus Word Pro) on a ‘chapter by chapter’ basis and each ‘chapter’ file is saved as a ‘Rich Text Format’ file; if you save your files as either ‘Text Format’ or ‘Rich Text Format’ it should avoid any problems when ‘importing’ them into your page design.

Page Size & Estimated Pages:
In our DTP software (CorelDraw7) we open a new project with A4 paper size (297mm high, 210mm wide) and specify the estimated number of pages for the project; typically 80 pages but we can always add or delete pages as our project nears completion.
If you want two A5 pages as your A4 page design use the ‘landscape’ view and divide your A4 page in half by setting a vertical guideline down the centre.

Deciding Printed Area of Pages:
On the opening ‘Page 1’ we draw a ‘paragraph text’ box and give it the attributes for the standard text (Times New Roman), font size (9pt) and justification (fully Justified).
The ‘Printable Area’ of an A4 page is 294mm high by 204mm wide but if you use this ‘maximum printable area’ each of your pages will look distinctly crowded, also should you have your book ‘plastic comb’ bound by a copy-shop the binding will obscure your text. As a starting point try giving yourself a 15mm margin around your text box, resulting in a 267mm high 180mm wide text box.
If you are planning to print out and ‘plastic comb’ bind some copies of your Instant-Books Edition, or if you expect buyers to do this, you might want to move your text box another 10mm to the right.

Copy ‘Paragraph Text’ Box onto All Pages:
We simply select the Paragraph Text Box on Page 1, copy it ‘Control + C’ if using a keyboard shortcut, go to Page 2 and paste the Paragraph Text Box ‘Control +V’, go to Page 3 ‘Control +V’, Page 4 ‘Control +V’, and so on until we have pasted our standard Paragraph Text Box onto every page.

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