DIY Print Books: The Fiddling Fail

DIY Print Books: The Fiddling Fail

Welcome back to another instalment of Design Adventures. This time around, we're tackling my experiences with the first couple attempts I've made at the creation of a print layout. OMG! We're already moving to discussing print?! Yes, we are! Aren't you excited? Print editions are... a very different kettle of fish from ebooks.

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Note: Yep. Still reposting. The next few posts may be the ones where this either works brilliantly or fails completely.

Welcome back to another instalment of Design Adventures. This time around, we’re tackling my experiences with the first couple attempts I’ve made at the creation of a print layout. OMG! We’re already moving to discussing print?! Yes, we are! Aren’t you excited? Print editions are… a very different kettle of fish from ebooks. When you see designers talk about how authors should hire professionals to do this for them, this is what they’re talking about far more than the ebooks. Creating print books is an art form all of its own, especially when you’re working with image-heavy manuscripts. I’m usually not, though, so like with my post on ebooks I’m going to be focusing on fiction manuscripts.

In this post, I’ll discuss my attempts at reacquainting myself with DTP software since it’d been a few years since I’d done anything much with any of them and, when I last used them, they were part of a university course on how to create print books. It was quite basic, but it taught me what I needed to know.

So, the first question then, is what do you need? If you want to make your own print layout, what do you need?

  • A computer
  • Word processing software OR DTP software

Yep, that’s it. You need a computer and a program like Word or OpenOffice and that’s it. You can create your entire print layout in Word. Whether you’d want to is another question and one only you can answer. You can also use Scrivener to create your print layout. Its compiler has the options for it. I admit that I don’t know how well either of them work, but if you’re willing to invest the time in learning how to use the programs you should be able to create something quite pretty.

As a bonus, both these programs have far less steep learning curves than dedicated DTP software, so it’ll be faster to get the hang of things. DTP software… seems to like throwing you off the deep end. You don’t need something as expensive as InDesign either. Scribus is a free DTP program. It’s not as feature-rich, but it will get the job done.

As I said before, this post will discuss my attempts to reacquaint myself with DTP software. I have no pictures of these attempts largely because I didn’t keep the files (or send anything off to print a proof from). It’d been a couple of years since I’d touched DTP software (InDesign CS5 if you’re curious). I was actually surprised by how much I’d remembered given I hadn’t actively used the knowledge in a while. It came back really quickly!

These first attempts all focused on using Feather by Feather and Other Stories to do the layout since, well, it’s a collection and has a wide variety of formats for me to play around with. It has enough short stories to let me remember the very basics and enough pieces demanding specific formatting and attention that I don’t get frustrated about being stuck tackling those basics. This is not an approach I recommend unless you have previous experience with DTP software. You'll want to spend time learning how to do the really simple stuff first. Figuring out how to make a book with loads of different formats and page requirements look good does not fit on that list.

However, once you’re past that initial curve, it’s actually a pretty good type of project to practice with because it offers you such a different range of things to practice. It practically forces you how to use paragraph (and if you want character) styles economically and how to create master pages that do what you want them to do. You can’t rely on the standard styles or on just overriding those styles because any changes you make to fix one item may well break another. It also helps you learn how to deal with a variety of problems and what kind of things you need to leave alone. You can’t always fix issues in the same way. Every situation is different even if you’ve got the same issue in multiple places in your text. (It’s extremely tempting to play with widow/orphan control forever. There is only so much you can do about them. BACK AWAY FROM THE FIDDLING. Just. Back away.)

It became apparent very quickly that designing a good-looking anthology was a bit more than I could handle back in 2013. My skills were just too rusty and I couldn’t get things to work right. Admittedly, it was a bit of a blow to my self-esteem. So much so that I still haven’t managed to get out that print edition of A Promise Broken that I had grand plans for. (It will come! Just more slowly than I’d anticipated or wanted.) After a couple of attempts trying to make things work how I’d wanted to, I decided to put the anthology aside. I never got it to the stage where I would’ve felt comfortable ordering a proof. All in all, I tried to design this layout three times before feeling confident that I knew what I was doing well enough to try a simpler project without getting frustrated by it. (My brain. It is weird, I know.)

Tip: If you want to learn how to do your own layouts, a collection of all sorts of different formats is probably not what you want to cut your teeth on first time. Tackle it when you’ve got the basics down.

Next time, I look at the very initial proof of A Promise Broken and exactly why it still hasn’t appeared in print format. (This initial proof stage of A Promise Broken makes up attempts 4 and 5 of DIY Print Books as well, so... You know. Soon we'll start to get to the more specific things where I will be including actual pictures like I promised in the introduction! Be either very excited or absolutely terrified?)