Does your printed masterpiece deserve a special creative book cover treatment? Maybe some silver or gold, or the book title sticking up? How about the title pressed below the surface of the cover? Or some parts of the cover design being shinier than other parts? We’ll explain how the printer produces all of these creative book cover treatments, and more, for hard (casebound) covers, book jackets, and paperbacks. We’ll also mention how you could actually fake some of these effects yourself. Here’s what we’ll discuss. Feel free to skip to any section: Metal foil stamping Metallic ink Debossing ..read more

Having a style sheet for your book helps to keep spelling and punctuation consistent throughout. It usually includes a section for each letter of the alphabet, and a space for notes at the bottom. It’s easy to create one while you’re writing your book, and you’ll be able to use it for your book’s website, marketing materials, and everything else you’ll be producing as an author. Below is a template to get you started. View our style sheet as an example We created a style sheet for Book Design Made Simple and we also use it for this website and all our book marketing materials. View it by clic ..read more

Back cover copy is the text that goes on your book’s back cover. Everyone judges a book by its cover (you know that!), and your front cover only gets a few seconds to grab a reader’s interest. However, once a reader picks up your book and flips to the back cover, this is your big chance to sell that book. You need to convince that reader to buy using compelling back cover copy. Back cover copy sells books Front covers attract … back covers SELL! Your back cover is a powerful marketing tool, so be sure to make the most of it. Take off your author hat and put on your marketing hat for this very ..read more

What exactly is an InDesign book template? It’s a blank InDesign document that has all the background work done for you. When you open a template, you’ll see an untitled document that’s already set up with InDesign preferences, trim size, margins, and styles. Our InDesign book template is a companion to Book Design Made Simple, the only book that guides you through every step of designing your own book using Adobe InDesign. We believe that anyone can learn to craft a well designed book, and now we’ve created an InDesign book template to get you started more quickly. In this article, we’ll exp ..read more

It’s easy to create a live index for your book in InDesign, and there’s a major benefit to doing so: If you move any of your text, the index markers stay with the text and the index automatically updates! In Book Design Made Simple, we explain how to create paragraph styles for indexes, how to import an index from Word, and how to typeset an index. Here, we’ll explain the simplest way to create a live index in InDesign. Adding first-level live index entries All indexes include first-level entries. These are the main entries placed in alphabetical order in the index. (Your index may or may not ..read more

Book endpapers (also called endsheets) are probably the least noticed part of a hardcover book. But the endpapers are literally what hold the pages and the cover together. And they can add value to your book if you use them well. If you’re publishing a paperback, take a look at the examples in this article for ideas anyway; you’ll find that the same principles can apply. The function of endpapers In our previous article about book binding, we showed how a casebound (hardcover) book is held together. Here’s the illustration that shows the parts. You can see that without the endpapers, the whol ..read more

Back when Fiona started Book Design Made Simple, she decided that writing in InDesign would be easiest. (After all, it was her native habitat.) And now one of our readers has admitted to doing the same. So we thought we’d explore the various reasons why anyone would want to write in a layout program. For us it worked perfectly. How about you? Reasons for writing in InDesign Our book is filled with over 200 InDesign screen shots, and most of the pages are a complicated mix of text and illustrations. A huge percentage of the illustrations were produced in the same application. So there are three ..read more

Front covers attract and back covers sell—we’ve said it before. At the same time, a book spine should broadcast. Most books in stores and libraries are shelved with their spines facing out. If a book has a great title and a well-designed spine, it’ll attract a lot more eyes than its neighbor on the shelf. So here’s how to accomplish that for your book. What to include on the book spine The book spine should display the most important information at a glance: author’s last name, title, and publisher or colophon (logo). Normally you don’t include the author’s first name or the book subtitle, tho ..read more

In Book Design Made Simple, we suggest type sizes that should work in most situations for adult readers. But there are so many other situations! What about children’s books? What about large type books? Reference books? In this article we’ll suggest solutions for these kinds of books. And we’ll only discuss printed books; with ebooks, the reader can enlarge or reduce the type size to whatever works for them. Understanding typefaces and type sizes First, let’s look at the parts of a typeface that are related to its size. The x-height and other aspects of a font can make a big difference in how ..read more

The advent of the internet has changed the landscape of books. Self-publishing is getting easier all the time, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. The biggest hurdle you’ll face as an online bookseller is marketing. Every self-publishing author in 2021 needs to know how to do keyword research! We’ll explain the basics of Amazon KDP ads and then show you how to find the most effective Amazon KDP keywords that will sell your books. Self-publishing with Amazon KDP There are various ways to publish your books online, but one of the easiest by far is through Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, KDP for sh ..read more