On Book Design

The general consensus among professional writers is no. Most of them feel that writers can’t be designers, too. After researching the POD and self-publishing industries, I would have to agree that there are a lot of shoddy book covers out there. But I feel that lack of design knowledge and money are to blame.

Professional book designers charge between $20-$30 per hour on the low end of the scale and $40-$50 per hour on the high scale. I did the math for the top wage for a week’s salary and came up a pricetag of $2,000. That sum is pricey for a lot of people.

Does that mean that you should design your own book? Well, that depends. If you have artistic skills, then you can get away with it, as long as you can produce a professional design. There are many books on the market that can help you learn the principles of design as well as give great examples. Check out the links in the side bar under Books.

I also mentioned that money is a big factor. Last week, I posted the costs of professional design software. The Adobe bundles will cost you about $1,000. Although that’s half the price of paying for a designer, it’s still prohibitive to many people. I have a solution for you: Kinkos (or your equivalent of a copy center).

The Kinkos stores in my city have computers with the latest software installed. Years ago, I went to them to produce taxi vouchers for a friend because I couldn’t afford to buy Quark. I’m no longer sure how much they charge per hour for you to use their equipment, but it’s a heck of a lot cheaper than shelling out the money to buy the software.

Before you decide to design your book, weigh the pros and cons first. Research designers and book cover artists to gain a sense of the costs. Consider the amount of time it will take you to learn the skills needed to produce a professional result.

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Professional Page Layout Software

Adobe InDesign
QuarkXPress
Adobe PageMaker

These programs are great for producing publications such as ads, fliers, brochures, newsletters, posters, business cards, and ebooks.

Pros: You have a much greater design flexibility with these programs than you would with a standard word processor or a cheap desktop publishing program.

Cons: The cost of these programs are prohibitive to the average consumer. Quark costs $750 (manufacturer’s price) for version 6.0. Then you have to buy the extensions if you want to design your book with it as well as instruction manuals because it doesn’t come with any.

InDesign costs $700. Like it’s competitor, you’ll have to buy instruction manuals separately. The only good thing I can say about that is the upgrade costs under $200.

PageMaker is the cheapest, but Adobe has decided to stop developing it. You can still get it on Amazon (used) for approximately $230. You may be able to buy it on Ebay for an even better price.

Another issue a steep learning curve with these programs. With a good manual, you can gain a good working knowledge within a few weeks, if you can devote all of your time to sitting in front of the computer and working through the tutorials. Most of us don’t, so stretch that out to a few months or longer.

Long Document Composition Software

Adobe FrameMaker
Corel Ventura

Pros: These programs were specifically designed to create long, complex, and highly structured publications. You can use them to create books, textbooks, encyclopedias, etc. They are the steroid version of the professional page layout programs.

Cons:: Again, the price is prohibited. FrameMaker runs around $800 while Corel Ventura runs for $640 on Amazon. And, like the programs above, the learning curve is steep.

Page Layout on a Budget

Microsoft Publisher
Serif PagePlus
greenstreet Publisher 3 and 4
Diwan Ready, Set, Go!

Pros: The price is much more accessible for the average consumer (under $200). MS Publisher and PagePlus can produce professional quality publications.

Cons: You get what you pay for. While these programs are great for small businesses, I can’t see them producing a professional quality book. Read the reviews here.

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Ben asked me if I knew of any programs that were comparable with InDesign. Thanks to my experience with setting up community portals, I’ve become quite familiar with the OpenSource industry. For those of you who haven’t heard of this term before, OpenSource is free (Sometimes they require you to pay a license fee.) software that you can download onto your computer. The most popular spots on the web are Freshmeat.net and Sourceforge.net.

At any rate, at Ben’s request, I’ved searched for Page Layout/Desktop Publishing software. I also found this article (Choosing Desktop Publishing Software), which you should read before downloading anything.

Artstream-Linux: This beta software can perform vector graphics as well as page layout. Free trial. Linux only.

Scribus: DTP for Linux (appears to work with Windows as well)

Aquascribus: A GUI launcher for Scribus on Macs.

PagePlus SE Free download for Windows

Another resource to check out is Ebay. Sometimes you’ll find an older version of Quark or InDesign. Once you get that, you can always upgrade later, provided your copy isn’t too old.

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Notice how the top graphic is blurry? For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to fix this inside Word. The spacing between each word looks okay, but looks can be deceptive. See the image below.

After I imported my document into InDesign, I reformatted the text to full justification. This is the result of a document that hasn’t been “cleaned” of my word processor’s code. Now I have to figure out how to implement this. Masterson’s book outlines this clearly, but unfortunately, I’m using a word processor other than Word for my current projects. (sigh)

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Word processors are great for writing manuscripts, but poor for book layout design. I’ve tried to create ebooks using Word with disappointing results. The biggest problem I had was trying to implement graphics and screenshots.

Word’s idea of professional looking graphics is abysmal. For what Microsoft charges, they should have done better with this feature. Fortunately, services such as ClipArt.com are available.

Trying to maniplate the graphic on the page is a nightmare. I’ve spent hours trying to reposition graphics that didn’t load in the exact place I wanted them to. Sometimes I succeeded, although I couldn’t tell you how I did it because it was guesswork.

Then getting the text to wrap around these graphics also proved to be a pain. I tried reading Word manuals and online tutorials, but more often than not, they were less than helpful. In the end, I had a bloated file (5MB+) that looked homemade.

Another complaint is the typography. I recently edited a book for a colleague of mine. The first thing I noticed was the extra spacing that littered every paragraph. After about the second or third page, it dawned on me that he had used full justification to format his paragraphs.

Word processors can’t produce the professional look as a page layout program such as InDesign or Quark can. I’ve seen the difference between the two, and it’s like night and day.

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When I decided to self-publish my novels and books, I realized that I needed instruction on how to design a professional quality book. I’ve found one good “how to” book to help get me started, which is Book Design and Production by Pete Masterson. His book is a good starting point, but I needed more indepth information on each of the topics he covered.

I created this blog not only to post examples and reference tutorials, but to allow you to look over my shoulder as I create my own book designs.

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