End of April and Building a Book

I see the end of April snuck up on me a little. I've been wrapping up the chapbook, and it's looking really good. That's kept me from doing novel edits, but I'm close to releasing this. Actually, let's do a little impromptu tour of this project in InDesign and talk a little about how the sausage is made when it comes to laying out a book.

 There are multiple ways to layout a book. Word, while not a layout program can be used. LaTeX is another option. I use Adobe InDesign, which is an industry standard for major publishers. it's also technically complex to use InDesign, and not the cheapest option. (With how Adobe is pushing into AI, I know some creators are growing concerned about using Adobe products, but that's not a story for today.)

While I'm still working on final edits for the Therianthropic Dreams, I've gone ahead and put all the poems in the book into the project. I've got the grid turned on because I was working with how I want the text areas to sit on the page. One of the challenges with this chapbook is text size.

Compared to the other three books I've laid out before, I'm using a smaller font size. I want the lines of poetry not to wrap. I'm experimenting with various options. For the moment, I'm thinking of using a version of Baskerville that lets me get more characters per line.

When using a program like InDesign, the options you get for how to control your fonts are much more complex than a word processor.

 You can control font size leading and even the kerning of the text. There's even an option for automatic hyphenation option, which is quite granular, and there are settings for managing your widows and orphans. These hanging lines are undesirable elements in a book layout.

All of this power lets you really control your text. And that's why it's there. This isn't a program that just lets you layout a simple book, it's a program that lets you layout an entire magazine with images and articles that continue in the back after a new article appears. That's beyond how I use the program, but all the power for that is built in.

in this screenshot, I've opened the story editor, which is one way to edit the text, and see what styles you have set. I also have the flow of the text visible here. For a project like this, I have everything in one flow, but it doesn't have to be done that way. Each poem could be it's own independent flow, and that's maybe how I should have done this. I might update my design templates to split off the title into a separate text box so i can better control the title placement and get those independent flows.

The layout I have right now is serviceable, but still needs some refinement. In the above screenshot, the last line of text in the poem on the screen is actually the first line of another stanza that carries on into the next page.

This isn't ideal, but it's something I can fix by inserting another line or possibly seeing if I can create a style that forces the lines of text in a stanza to remain grouped. I'll probably cheat and just add the space, but I'm pretty sure I could add a style to keep this form happening.

All told, there's a lot of little finessing with the layout to do still before I can send it to the printer. However I've already put the text into InDesign before the final copy editing is done so I can work through these issues and know what my paint points for this will be. I'll also see if there are other fonts that work better for this project.

There's a lot that goes on with book layout, and I'm only scratching the surface of what you can do. This is also the big complex way of working, so if you're looking to self-publish, don't feel obligated to go this way.