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Writing in InDesign is the only sensible choice for writers in the new paradigm of on-demand self-publishing

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The greatly expanded and rewritten Writing In InDesign Second Edition has been released

Buy it Now!

Versions available so far

What started as a relatively small update turned into a large scale revision when I began adapting my popular Writing In InDesign book to the responses and suggestions I received. I have been pleasantly surprised at all the people who have found this useful. Increasingly I have found that InDesign is the best tool available to enter the new paradigm of on-demand self-publishing in the 21st century. The release of InDesign CS6 has made this position even stronger.

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

One of the wonderful things about the new publishing paradigm is the control we get as artists, authors, and designers 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, FaceBook friends, tweets, and the whole host of contemporary social networking online.

You can publish directly from your writing! Print, PDF, ePUB, & Kindle

InDesign is the best tool available for authors desiring to control the look and function of their book as you write: print or ebook. There is no better way to help the reader understand what you have to share. From your basic InDesign document(s) you can easily export the best PDFs for print, colored PDFs for reading online or on your iPad, ePUBs for iBooks and Nook, and a Kindle version for Fire and the older versions. No other application has nearly the control over typography.

This book gives you a solid background in typography, page layout, and book design while providing you with the latest instruction on the creation of on-demand books for the best providers (print, ePUB, and Kindle) used by the new generation of self-publishers in the 21st century.

There is great joy and satisfaction in being able to control and direct the look and presentation as create your world in words. Your book becomes a much more meaningful creative experience. Your readers receive the love and attention you send their way. It’s a wonderful way to write!

Experience the joy of creation!

Three areas needed more attention: typography, InDesign graphics, and ePUB & Kindle design

To keep the reading experience comfortable, no matter what the experience level, this additional material was added into eight extensive appendixes.

  • A: Basic Typography Part One [60 pages]: 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 might do in Word and Office [I don’t use them anymore, at all]).
  • B: Setting up styles: Typography Part Two [32 pages]: 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.
  • B2: A set of default styles [6 pages]: For new book designers, here are step by step instructions for setting up a set of defaults which will get you started. You will modify these many times as you proceed in your book design journey. But, You must start somewhere.
  • C: Image production & formats [24 pages]: Why InDesign is a superior illustration program for book illustrations; the difference between vector and bitmap; how to make a graphic in InDesign; how to convert them in Photoshop for use in ebooks; plus, what formats should used and why.
  • C2: Cover design [6 pages]: You increasingly need to be concerned about how readable your cover is when reduced to thumbnail size on a Website. This is true of your print covers as well as your ebook covers. Plus, a brief tutorial on a cover design created in InDesign.
  • D: Uploading your finished book [17 pages]: This covers step by step procedures at Lulu and Createspace for print books and for downloadable PDFs at Lulu and Scribd with tips and techniques learned.
  • E: InDesign and ePUB [29 pages]: Here are design tips and techniques for converting your printed book to a validated ePUB—ready to upload to ebook distributor of choice (or to sell directly). Included is a simple conversion process for the Kindle version of your book.
  • F: Repairing the XHTML and CSS [15 pages]: This mainly applies to those of you still using CS5.5 or earlier. Thankfully, it is no longer necessary. If you are in an earlier version, you need much more than what is contained here (I recommend Liz Castro’s EPUB Straight to the Point). For those of you comfortable in these two coding languages, here are simple, generalized instructions on how to crack open your ePUB and make it fancy.
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Writing in InDesign is the only sensible choice for writers in the new paradigm of on-demand self-publishing — 5 Comments

  1. Pingback:Writing in InDesign is the only sensible choice for writers in the new … | InDesign | Adobe-Tutorial.com

  2. Pingback:No, No! to double-space and double-returns » The Skilled Workman

  3. Pingback:Writing in InDesign is a true reader service » The Skilled Workman

  4. I’m amused when I hear that writers are ‘supposed’ to write their books in Microsoft Word. Word was initially developed for business correspondence and it’s still clumsy for any other purpose, particularly for long documents.

    The professional writers I know tend to have a workflow that may start in a simple text editor, so they can concentrate on words rather than formatting and write on the go. As the book acquires some bulk, they often move into one of the specialized writers apps such as Scrivener, which runs on Macs, PCs and (by the end of the year) iPads. Those apps are designed to make the high-level complexities of writing easier. In Scrivener, for instance, you can tag scenes in a novel by what characters are present, then you can have Scrivener show you only those scenes, so you can see if what that character is doing flows properly and doesn’t have any problems. And if you need to rearrange those scenes, you can do so in an instant–no messy cutting and pasting.

    Word only enters into that workflow if an author is releasing his book through an established publishers. Most of those are a decade or more behind in their workflow and insist that manuscripts be submitted in Word according to some set of specs. And no publisher with any sense of taste publishes a book with Word. They import those Word documents into InDesign or Quark to do the layout.

    More recently, the addition of various ebook formats has made that process more complicated. With Scrivener, you can actually output your book in a Word format that can go to a traditional publisher, into ePub (for Apple and B&N) and in the mobi format for Amazon Kindles. For books without a lot of complex formatting that may be good enough.

    For more complicated formatting and for high-quality self-publishing you need apps like InDesign and Quark, which are specifically designed for laying out complex and often lengthy documents. Until InDesign 6.0, quite a bit of work was involved in reformatting a complex document for different output formats. With 6.0 that changed. The same document can include print versions, as well as various digital versions in portrait and landscape modes.

    And in a feature that I consider utterly marvelous, the content in each can be based on a master document. Find a typo or an error, and fixing it in the master document fixes it in all of them. Unless you’ve had to wrestle with that sort of problem, you don’t know how marvelous that is. With 6.0, Adobe finally positioned itself very effectively as THE way to publish in all formats. David is 100% right there. InDesign (or Quark) belongs in any serious publishing workflow.

    The only fly in the ointment is the dogged insistence at Amazon and Apple of sticking with their own proprietary formats, particularly for the formats that can handle complex documents (Amazon’s KF9 and the one Apple’s iBooks Author creates). Both are, for the most part, just non-standard versions of epub, a hint that both companies know they’ll have to eventually relent and go with epub.

    But until then, author/publishers may experience problems creating complex books for Kindles and iPads. The good news is that Amazon has a special InDesign plug-in that creates Kindle documents straight from InDesign. It just hasn’t been upgraded for ID 6.0 yet and Amazon is not saying when it will. And the even-better news is that InDesign 6.0-exported epub displays quite well on my iPad, with only bits of the formatting being lost. If you know InDesign and don’t want the hassle of learning iBooks Author, which seems a bit quirky, you can bypass it.

    In short, while we’re still in the dreadful ‘interesting times’ when everything is changing and nothing works very efficiently, there does seem to be a light at the end of the tunnel. Perhaps within the next two years, author/publishers will be able to release attractively done books/ebooks for every outlet with few of the current hassles.

    I just wish digital publishing were more like print publishing. For print, I send two files, one for the cover and one for the interior, to Lightning Source in Tennessee. Within two weeks and without my doing anything, that book is available on almost every online bookstore on the planet and to almost any bookstore. That’s not even remotely true right now with digital publishing. Every major outlet wants me to make a separate contract with them, for me to follow their often nasty rules, and for me to submit that book in their peculiar format. That’s going to have to change for digital publishing to truly take off.

    Michael W. Perry, Inkling Books, Seattle

  5. Great response. You have finally shown me a reason to even consider Scrivener. I do have a couple questions.

    1) KF9. The way you describe it I suspect that it’s a fixed layout tool. But for fixed layout, I’m not sure why I’d go with anything other than PDF.

    2) KF8. I’m surprised you haven’t mentioned that more. Right now, it is the only place where I can easily embed fonts and do a lot of the thing I on ly wish I could do with ePUBs. I am waiting anxiously for the new plug-in for CS6 from Amazon. More than that, I am waiting for the Mac,PC, iPad and Droid Kindle apps to support KF8. Once that happens it could become the new standard very quickly.

    I’ve been surprised that my normal choice for ebooks is a Kindle book to read on my iPad Kindle app. If that Kindle app supported KF8, I’d tend to abandon ePUB. iBooks and Nook are just too expensive. I also find them clumsy to use.

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