Ctrl-Z (or CMD-Z, if ya nasty) is a keyboard shortcut I’ve gotten quite familiar with during my time writing and as a graphic designer. In the past few weeks, this combination of pressing two buttons has become second-nature, as well as backspacing into oblivion, be it on a mobile device or otherwise. The road to formatting my manuscript, Unsecret Identity: Eric Icarus - Book One, has been a bumpy one—but, like the main character in my story, I will learn to fly and transform this ebook into a printed, tangible part of our reality. With that said, it’s still going to be a while before I fully spread my wings.
Putting the ebook version together was relatively simple: I used the free software Amazon provides, Kindle Create, and while very (VERY) limited—not to mention glitchy—the program served its purpose. In fact, Kindle Create’s lack of choices made the adaptation process simpler. Fewer options means less time spent dwelling on what should go where, etc. There are other book-designing programs but the free alternative won me over. However, I got what I paid for. At the end of the day, I produced a digital version of my novel that I am proud of and gleefully released it in the Kindle Store.
The plan was to always offer a printed paperback edition, and perhaps a hardcover copy somewhere down the line. The first thing to do when executing a paperback project such as this is selecting your preferred program. Like with the digital formatting software, there are loads of options. I use a PC, so any Mac-exclusive programs weren’t going to work for me, though I’d love to give Vellum a spin. My designer background led me to InDesign, which is primarily used to create publications.
I started out familiar with InDesign, but after some trial and error (and sprouting a few more gray hairs), I’m not quite an expert, but I know way more than I already did. I won’t go too deep into the weeds, but let’s just say something called Autoflow when placing the bulk text of your manuscript document was, well, maddening to decipher. Naturally, it turned out to be a simple matter of holding down the shift key. Despite being slightly embarrassed, I was off to the races after having finally been able to paste my book’s text from its initial Word document file into the InDesign document margins I’d set up. Autoflow distributed the overflowing text by creating pages as necessary. This was a huge relief because I had previously began to accept that this was going to be a much longer and much more tedious process.
Referencing other popular books similar to my young adult action/sci-fi/fantasy genre, I was able to determine the precise design I wanted. Now I knew what my novel’s interior would actually look like. It pays to have an extensive book collection, for those physical copies were an immense help. The front matter, chapter start alignment, headers, footers, and all the title pages had been set up with relative ease. At this stage, I felt pretty confident that I’d be submitting my precious PDF to a service like Ingram Spark for printing in no time. First rule of writing - never assume anything will be easy. It was quite jarring to see that the text I had pasted into my InDesign document did indeed use the size and typeface I wanted—it did not, however, retain any of the font choices. In other words, it displayed all the text as regular, with no italics of any sort.
After readjusting the spacing yet again, I gave it another try, this time being more careful about copying and pasting directly from the selected text in my Word doc (as opposed to simply placing it). This probably doesn’t make a difference but it worked for me. Like I said, I don’t claim to be an expert yet.
Without getting into any more boring technical details, and in an effort to keep this blog entry at a reasonable reading length, I’ll skip to where I am at as of this writing: I’m happy to say that the major bugs have been smoothed over and now it is a matter of tweaking the details. Drop caps, fleurons, imagery, etc. - this is where the fun begins.
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Unsecret Identity: Eric Icarus - Book One is available now from the Amazon Kindle store.