Author Advice - Bringing your book together

Bringing Your Book Together.

When you have all the components of your book; text files. images, contents etc, ready then it is time to move towards creating your final design - you’ve probably already designed sample pages by this stage.

Make your first page, Page 0, your Cover; even though your Instant-Books Edition is digital a good cover design will help you in promoting your book and will be used in the Instant-Books Catalogue.

Then Page 1 can be the Copyright notices as in a traditional book, so that Page 2 will be the start of your Contents. Then you are into your Book proper with the various chapters that make up your Book.

Which Typestyle? Which Font?
There are so many options available that it can be very confusing trying to decide which Typestyle, Font Size and Size of Illustrations to use in your design.
You have hundreds of choices so to make it simpler we normally prpare text in Times Roman 9pt Font Size or Arail 9pt Font Size; though we do use Comic Sans and Brush Script fonts when we think they are appropriate; in a recent design of ‘Bumping About Brittany’ I used French Script Font for contents, chapter headings and picture captions to give it a ‘French’ feel.

What Size Illustrations?
All our illustrations are prepared seperately from the book and saved in appropriate file format; jpeg or png files for pictures. After the text has been imported into the ‘Paragraph Text’ boxes on the pages we import the illustrations, check the ‘Properties’ of the imported illustration and tick the ‘Wrap Paragraph Text’ and ‘Size 1.00mm’ boxes. Now the text flows around the picture which we can then drag into the position we want on the page, the text automatically rearranging itself.
It is tempting to throw all your digital pictures into your book design, but wait an think about it. You are trying to acheive a balance between text and pictures that makes for a pleasing page design with the pictures complementing your writing.

Acheiving Good Page Design.
Too much of one thing can unbalance the page so as a general rule are the pit-falls to avoid:-

  • too many, or too large, pictures simply because you can.
  • pictures incorrectly positioned, remeber they complement your text not compete with it for attention.
  • too many different Font Styles, or Font Sizes, on a page confusing the reader.

Work on your design on-screen until you are satisfied, then print it out to see if it looks good as a physical reality.

Finally Print Your Instant-Books Edition as a PDF File.
Select your ‘Print’ option, select the ‘Acrobat Distiller, or PDF Creator’ printer. In your printer properties select ‘A4 Page Size’, ‘Black & White’ or ‘Colour’ option, and ‘eBook’ print specification. Check in ‘Print preview’ that you have selected the correct options, correct if neccessary, and then click ‘Print’. You’ll need to specify the File Name you want your book saved as, and the location where this file is to be stored; then the lengthy conversion of your design into a pdf file begins and it can take some time depending on your design.
When your design has been converted Adobe Acrobat reader will automatically open on-screen displaying your Instant-Books Edition.

Next Author Advice topic - Pricing Your Instant-Books Edition
See the full Author Advice Directory pdf file in Adobe Acrobat