Book Publishing With InDesign CC: Using Desktop Publishing Power To Self-Publish Your Book

Who’s this book for?

Very specific people indeed:

◊Authors and publishers: who have come to realize that they need a better, faster, and more efficient publishing workflow.

◊They also have come to believe: that, for excellence in publishing, professional tools are required.

◊They are willing to learn: the new concepts and techniques to accomplish these goals.

This book is an enjoyable retail read masquerading as a textbook, or maybe it’s the other way around. If I were still teaching my digital publishing degree, I would use it for the textbook of a 6-credit, two-semester course. There is a lot of material here. However, it is designed to be fun and engrossing to read over a period of several weeks or longer.

What is required?

◊A willingness to learn

◊A commitment to do what is necessary

◊A willingness to spend the time required

◊A basic knowledge of using InDesign CC: starting a new document, saving it to a specific folder, file management, basic tool usage, and all the rest of basic computer literacy. Sandee Cohen’s Visual Quickstart book will enable this.

◊A decision to pay for what is needed

This last one is the killer for many: You must be willing to spend $20 a month for InDesign CC. Many of you already have the full Creative Cloud with all of its applications. This costs around $50 a month.

You also must have fast internet access:

We won’t specify it. But in our experience, this means a cable modem. There are other options, of course. But you need to be able to comfortably upload and download things in the gigabyte+ range.

With that covered, enjoy the book!

Part One:

The Self-Publishing Industry

Welcome to my world

I want to say some brief words of welcome as you start through this new book. You will discover that what I am doing is working creatively within InDesign to produce completed books almost as a fine art exercise while maintaining excellence and easily meeting production needs.

What I want to share with you is a method, an attitude, a service to the reader which is enabled by the typographic power of InDesign. I am discussing one-person do-it-yourself publishing, direct communication from author to reader.

Using the new 21st century paradigm of self-publishing

One of the wonderful things about the new publishing paradigm is the control we get as artists, authors, designers, and publishers over the entire package. A modern book is released in multiple sizes, versions, and formats. The content and design remain fluid as we shape the book while we learn and grow.

We can easily adjust content, layout, and presentation of our books after they are released in response to emails, beta readers, FaceBook friends, tweets, comments on our blog posts, pluses on our Google+ post comments, and the whole host of online social networking.

Who is this book written for?

The focus of this book is very sharp. It is for people who are producing books and booklets, non-fiction in specific—beginning with very limited capital and few personnel resources. The good news is that you can start with an able computer, the software I mention, and a vision. Money is not required to start, and little is required as you grow. It will take quite a bit of work, but not more than normal for a project with the scope of a book.

I’m sharing techniques for the new wave of author/publishers who are not (and do not intend to be) large publishing houses. It is designed to help those of you without the resources and connections nor inclination to intrigue the large, mass-market media houses with their incredible capital requirements and insane marketing needs that look more like addicted gambling than actual communication through book production—authors writing and publishers delivering to small niches.

Many new skills are required. One of the trials of the new paradigm is the incredible amount of knowledge and the various skills necessary to do all of this. The good news is that Adobe’s Creative Cloud enables you to use these skills and gain the knowledge necessary quite easily for a small monthly fee. It is the only software available which gives you the power you need to publish creatively and professionally in one package.

My extensive background

I have been uniquely positioned to take advantage of the new workflow. I began as a fine artist in the 1960s and early 1970s. I learned typesetting and graphic design at the hands of a masterful art director in the late 1970s. I spent a decade as an art director myself within a large commercial printer in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

I began teaching these materials in 1991. Within a couple of years, a large traditional publisher was asking me to convert my handouts to a textbook on the new digital printing. I used that opportunity to develop the first all-digital printing and design curriculum in the country (as far as I can tell). I wrote a book a year for them on typography, FreeHand, Illustrator, Photoshop, and finally InDesign. Publishing with InDesign was one of the first books on the new software that would eventually take over the industry.

Becoming a teaching pastor as well as church administrator for my wife’s church in Albuquerque in 1993 enabled me to use my skills in a whole new way. Materials for Bible studies, spiritual dramas, and worship services were a new joy for me.

While all of this was going on, in 1996, I took all my coursework online. I became involved with the distance learning initiative at my community college. I continued to write new instructional materials. I was supplying them to my students on the class Website as downloadable PDFs.

Then I found Lulu in 2002 and my world changed. With Lulu, then Createspace, then Scribd, then Zazzle, then Kindle, and then ePUBs with the Apple, NookPress, and Kobo Writing Life, I could get my writing out to my students very efficiently. Writing books became a real joy to me as InDesign kept getting better and better. More and more I was doing everything in InDesign except the photos. It is a great workflow I highly recommend.

I’ve been able to use all my experience, from fine artist to writer, graphic designer to publisher, as a synergistic whole which is immensely fun and deeply satisfying. This book serves as a reference book for graphic designers and/or authors converting to book production. It’s one of the most complete typographic references for book design, among many other things.

Book design knowledge is rare among designers today.

You need to read or browse all the materials so that you can talk the same language as your suppliers and understand their needs. If you are working with someone else, it will take many sharing sessions. They are not you and they will not put the book together the way you would. You are using them because of their expertise in areas where you are lacking. Respect their advice. Support each other in this process.

This book is organized into seven major parts

There is no way around it. Creating a book and publishing it is a major project. There are seven major areas you need to have covered. Obviously, you can use these parts as references for that portion of your book.

◊Part One: A basic overview of self-publishing

◊Part Two: Writing the copy

◊Part Three: Adding the graphics

How to make a graphic in InDesign. How to convert them in Photoshop for use in ebooks. What formats should be used and why.

◊Part Four: Layout: designing the book

Here you get the information you need to use fonts professionally. This covers why and how typesetting (what we do in InDesign) differs from typewriting (what you do in Word and Scrivener).

Here is the conceptual knowledge on how to set up a functional default set of paragraph and character styles, plus an intro to object styles. You’ll modify these for your use.

◊Part Five: The various ebook versions

Here are design tips and techniques for converting your printed book to a downloadable PDF and various ePUBs: fixed layout [FXL] and Reflowable—ready to upload to Apple ebook, Kobo, NookBooks, Smashwords, and Draft2Digital. Included is a simple conversion process for your Kindle version.

◊Part Six: Uploading to the various suppliers

Information and advice about the companies used in early 2016 for on-demand publishing for free or very close to it.

◊Part Seven: Christian Marketing

Specific help for Christian authors to help your readers discover your book. This advice is quite different than what you will normally find. I’m no real marketing help to non-believers, though the techniques work for you, too.

The New Publisher

Here we are—late in the second decade of the new millennium and we now have a new type of publishing which truly helps individual authors and publishers. The new changes are almost designed for those of us who feel called to share our vision with our trainees, students, and sheep. The new methodologies work better for teachers and leaders in small unique niches than anyone else.

But who cares about books?

Actually, we do. Authors, as a group, are voracious readers. Part of the reason we write is to share the magic we found in books. Many of us start out our personal publishing efforts as bloggers these days—short, pithy writing offering a conversation with those we serve. These writings are easily compiled into books and ebooks. Even though the writing style will need a large transformation, blog post content is largely written and needs only copyediting to make it work in a book.

On the other hand, in a world gone mad for the flashy immediacy (and minimal content) of video, why should we worry about books anyway? The key lies in the parenthetical phrase above and minimal content. We all know the difference between reading the book and seeing the movie. With an excellent novel, you enter an entire world, directed by the wordsmithing of the author. With an excellent movie you are handed a very intense (but brief & limited) slice of the life of that world you entered in the book.

But even this misses the entire point of a good non-fiction book. The depth of knowledge, subtle word definitions, language studies, historical insights, maps, and all the rest provided by a book could only be handled [if it’s even possible] by a very lengthy, ridiculously expensive movie. And these exceedingly lengthy explanatory movies are simply a waste of resources to produce for a relatively nonexistent audience. A four page, explanatory handout for an awards presentation banquet becomes a fifteen minute to an hour video. That would be a major production requiring many new skills and large expenses—and there is often subtle information available in the printed materials that simply cannot be translated into moving visuals.

Though it is true that videos might get us better numbers when we offer a class, it is also true that the students learn a more simple version of data and knowledge from videos than they do from books, writing, and research. Lectures and teachings are converted to books relatively easily. It is easy to add reference materials. Illustrations and graphics are commonly developed by the author for the oral presentation, and often they are ready to use.

Even so, things have radically changed. As a writer, most of my research and reference materials are now online. To be forced to return to printed reference works would really slow me down and I would miss many opportunities to cross reference and discover new insights.

The core is still the book.

Publishing is a huge industry. In 2012, the content creation industry in the US was 504 billion dollars. The largest segment of that was publishing books at $151 billion. Movies were second at $133 billion. But that does not tell the tale. Movies produced in 2015 were 9734 [by far the most ever]. The most recent figures for books show 2,200,000 new books a year. There’s no comparison.

Books have been the major source of knowledge ever since our culture was torn apart by this new technology at the beginning of the Renaissance. Readily available books completely transformed our civilization.

The new digital production techniques have stirred the pot. Smartphones seem to have taken over the world. Now that they have screens of 6 inches or more, they are large enough to use for reading and statistics are showing that it is finally happening, especially for novels.

Of course, for the more complex non-fiction books, teaching materials, or any written material where you need people to be able to follow along page by page, a fixed layout is necessary. That still probably requires a tablet, laptop, or a desktop computer. We’ll cover how to do all of this as we go through the book.

How have things changed?

The entire definition of a book has been revised: many of the materials in this piece you are reading did not appear as a book (in the traditional sense) at first. These paragraphs were first released as the first posting of a new series on my blog, The Skilled Workman, in April of 2011. There was a link to a free downloadable PDF version of these lengthy blog postings at Scribd. The intention was a fully developed book after I was given the complete vision to share. I ended up with six of these postings, as I recall. The book which resulted from this process was a synergistic improvement to the process. The first edition of Writing In InDesign was released in print through Createspace to Amazon at the end of July, 2011.

But a whole host of new options came into play as soon as this first part was posted on my blog. With the new Publish Online option in InDesign CC (2015) I could have simply offered it online for comments, and for early beta readers. But in 2011, I made a downloadable PDF for Scribd. I tweeted about it. I shared it on FaceBook. But if I thought it would help, I could have easily released a Kindle book, an ePUB, and several other ebook variations. I could have also offered it as a printed booklet. The new paradigm of publishing enables me to easily offer a book or booklet in a wide variety of formatted options to attract and communicate with various types of readers.

Most of these options are free. All they take is a little bit of effort on my part. But the final results are much better than what could be done in the old paradigm. The capabilities change weekly. In the summer of 2012, Kobo Writing Life was added to put ePUBs on Kobo. Since then, Draft2Digital appears offering listings to Kindle, Apple ebook, Nook, Scribd, and Kobo. Tomely from Australia appeared a few years ago. Gumroad offers an archive to download with DRM-free copies of the PDF, an ePUB with embedded fonts, and a Kindle version. We’ll talk later about why the embedded font ePUBs matter. But now as mentioned, I can simply Publish Online for my beta readers to get feedback.

Desktop publishing has reached its potential

I clearly remember how excited I was in the early 1990s when I realized that the work I had been doing (designing printing materials) with a team of forty highly skilled people and millions of dollars of equipment could now be done by a single person working at their desk.

That is even more true today when for a small monthly payment, I can have the top professional software for publishing in print, ebook, and video. There is no better software for these processes than InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Acrobat, and Premier Pro. I suspect, CC has all I need for doing audio books also, but I choose to let a man help me and we share the revenue.

It is true that I have taken things a little further than most by designing my own fonts, doing all my own illustrations, and so on. However, the concept is clear and the freedom to communicate in words from your computer is exhilarating. Books, blogs, ebooks, brochures, emails, and much more can be directed to your readers to help communicate the message you have been given.

A teacher/trainer/prophet/leader can now have a world-wide influence from his or her office. We are no longer limited by locale. The author can help the people he or she is called to serve no matter where they live. More than that, it can be done professionally and compellingly without the immense barriers erected by traditional publishing. Global publishing is increasingly part of what we do—from our computer in our home.

Here are some of the things that have changed in publishing since the 1990s: