I offered to design a book for an author friend. Let’s call her “Louise”, because that is her name.
Louise discussed it with the 3 people who commissioned her to write their story, and they gratefully accepted my offer.
I read up on book design, learning most of what I needed from The Book Designer‘s website. I had paid him for consultation to be sure I wasn’t messing up The Cabins of Wilsonia. He charged more for one hour than I often earn in a week, but he was worth every dollar. He is a fount of helpful information.
I bought a template from him to use with InDesign, thinking this would be simple and easy and fast and how awesome to just slam this thing out with all my previous experience and knowledge.
Fall down laughing. . .
Look at some of the work:
- Learn how to change the template so the chapter titles appear as running heads instead of the author’s name by emailing the Book Designer for help, several times because, well, because it is complicated.
- Change the master template page things to have chapter titles in the space where Louise’s name would have appeared.
- Find that in normal books, the chapter titles are on the right page, not the left. If you have the author’s name on every spread, the title goes on the right. If you have the chapter titles on each spread, the title goes on the left.
- Change the master template page things again to accommodate this new information.
- Realize I have the power to eliminate many of the hyphenated words at the end of lines, and go through all 300 pages to fix as many as possible.
- See that changing the hyphenation caused some of the photos to land in the middle of paragraphs, so go back through the 300 pages to scoot them.
- Louise and I decide that a plain divider line looked too plain, so design a fancier, but not too fancy divider line.
- Replace the divider line with the pretty one.
- Go back through the 300 pages and see that I missed some.
- Find that there is a spell check on InDesign and decide it can’t hurt to run it in spite of the facts that I used spellcheck on Word, Louise and I have proofed it many many times, as have the 3 people
- Find a few typos.
Fall down laughing with exhaustion. . .
