No Write Way 4

So you’ve sequestered yourself away for two years, altered your mental

and physical chemistry through sleep deprivation and God knows what

else, overcome the existential crises, and managed to produce and edit

your manuscript. Congratulations, you’ve made it through the first 90%

of the work. Now it’s time for the other 90% of the work – turning that

manuscript into a pretty, ready-to-print PDF to send to one of the

various self-publishing outfits on the Internet.

First, the bad news: you know how we were able to scare up good, free

software to do the actual writing part? Doesn’t exist for layout. There

is an open source package called

target="_blank">Scribus, and to be completely fair in the past two

years it’s managed to go from “not even worth considering” to “it would

be so cool if it only…” But it’s not really a solution for doing a

novel – while it’s serviceable for creating short documents like fliers

or newsletters, it lacks the robust tools necessary to manage a

multiple hundred page layout; even if it didn’t, Scribus has a tendency

to create gargantuan PDFs, which will hinder you when it comes time to

upload the final product to the self-publishing service. It’s worth

taking a look at if you’re interested in this sort of thing, but don’t

seriously consider it as an option.

Commercial alternatives at the low end aren’t much better.

href="http://office.microsoft.com/publisher/" target="_blank">Microsoft

Publisher can be had cheaply and easily, but while it’s perfectly

fine for designing a simple flier or brochure, it’s awful for something

the length of a book; it’s bad at flowing text across multiple pages

and it lacks precision object placement control, the two things you

particularly need for laying out a novel.

href="http://www.acdamerica.com/products-x/x/default.html"

target="_blank">Deneba’s Canvas X isn’t great, but it’s not a bad

option; after a long and storied history as a competitor to Adobe

Illustrator and Aldus Freehand (you know, back when there was an Aldus

Freehand) it has emerged as sort of a jack of all trades, master of

none alternative to the vastly more expensive Adobe Creative Suite.

It’s approach to layout is a little counter-intuitive, but at something

like a fifth the cost of CS, it’s worth looking at if budget is an

issue.

If budget isn’t an issue and/or you’re handy with a

href="http://www.bittorrent.com/download" target="_blank">BitTorrent

client(DISCLAIMER: piracy will make you go blind and cause God to

kill puppies) there are really only two programs worth considering:

href="http://www.quark.com/products/xpress/"

target="_blank">QuarkXpress and

href="http://www.adobe.com/products/indesign/+" target="_blank">Adobe

InDesign. Both of these programs are industrial strength layout

monsters, and the differences between them are akin to the differences

between Mac and PC: real but difficult to quantify, and likely to start

a holy war if mentioned in mixed company.

A long document in one of these programs isn’t actually a single

document – it’s a series of documents that each form a chapter,

section, or what have you of the final layout. So the process of

creating your layout is twofold – first you need to create a template

from which to build a series of identical chapter files, then you need

to assemble them into a book.

Building the template file requires that you first split your master

novel file into subfiles, one for each chapter or section of the novel.

Please note: DO NOT ATTEMPT THIS UNTIL YOU ARE 100% DONE EDITING THE

TEXT. It is next to impossible to reflect changes made during the

layout process back into the master novel file, so it’s best to be at a

point you’re happy with before you start this process. Any further

edits the text require will pretty much have to be made in the layout

files.

The basic template will only need one page (three if you’re utilizing

target="_blank">spreads, so you can get a single page and a pair of

facing pages) but you’ll also want to define the styles you’ll use in

your layout. Styles are basically text presets that allow you to keep

your text consistent across multiple documents, and they work in your

layout application work basically the same way they do in your word

processor, with a couple of exceptions. The first is that you’ll be

using a different font for different formats in your text -

technically, for instance, Arial, Arial Bold, Arial Italic, and Arial

Bold/Italic are four different fonts which Word, OpenOffice, and what

have you keep transparent to the user. The next is that, if you want a

table of contents, you’ll need to include at least two different

styles, as both Quark and InDesign have tools that will automatically

build a table of contents based on the styles you select in your

layout.

To build your template, start out be deciding which of the

self-publishing services you’ll be using to make your book available to

the buying public; each one has slightly different requirements. In

addition to page size, the service you’re using will also refer to

“trim” and “bleed” when defining document requirements. The trim size

is the final size of the layout; the bleed is the excess space after

that, which your graphics may need to occupy if you want a borderless

page. You’ll need to take this all into account when doing the layout.

For instance, if you are laying out a comic book at 8×10, your service

may give you a trim size of 8×10 with a 1/4 inch bleed. Your final

layout size would be 8.5×10.5, and you’d want to make sure that all the

important elements were within the central 8×10 of the page. You’ll

also have to consider the “live” area of the page, which is the safe

zone all text should be within – usually this is 1/8-1/4 of an inch

from this border of the trim area. In our example above, even though

your page is 8.5×10.5, you’d want to make sure that all the text didn’t

was contained within the central 7.5×9.5 region.

Something else to keep in mind: if you have headers and footers, or

page numbers, in your layout, then all of this information will need to

be within the margin for the live area as well. Let’s say you were

laying out a novel with a 6×9 page. You wouldn’t have to worry about

bleeds, because a novel doesn’t usually contain pictures, but you would

have to make sure that your headers and page numbers were at least 1/4

inch away from the edge of the live area. If we assume that’s 1/4 inch,

it means your headers and footers need to be about 1/2 inch from the

edge of the trim, and your novel’s actual contents will need to be

another 1/2 inch or so from this material, meaning your main layout is

happening in the central 5×8 region of the page. Note also that you’ll

want to make sure you put your page numbers in the Master layout; items

in the Master layout will automatically appear in every page of your

document.

This all may seem like a lot of overly exact and technical information.

To an extent it is, but once you create this template you’ll be using

it to define hundreds of pages, so it’s vital that you set it up

correctly at the beginning – one small mistake will need to be repaired

across all your documents once your template is finished.

Once your margins are set up, you’ll want to define your styles. Styles

are simply a collection of presets for things like font, point size,

leading (the space between lines), tracking (the space between

characters), and so on. At the very least you’re going to want two

styles, one for your main body text and one for your chapters.

When everything is ready with your template, save it as a read-only

document. Realize, as you do this, that you’re almost guaranteed to

have to change one or two things about the template before you’re done

with this whole process, and when that happens, you’ll want to saved

your revised version as a read-only document as well. This way, when

you open the template, you get a new document and don’t have to worry

about accidentally overwriting your template with live content.

Once you’ve created your new document, import the text for Chapter 1 of

your novel, and make sure you utilize the Autoflow option – this should

cause your layout program to automatically add pages until you’ve

placed all the text for the chapter. If you’ve done everything

correctly, your layout should be handled more or less automatically as

the styles kick in. You may have to manually apply the styles, but this

should be relatively easy.

Scan through the document and check things over. Some things to watch

for:

- Is the font you’ve selected nice and readable? (You’ll want a serifed

font for the main body copy, as those are easier on the eye, but go

nuts for the chapter headers)
- Does the font you’ve chosen for your chapter headers have all the

characters you need?
- If you had to manually apply your style to your body copy, are there

any blank pages at the end of the chapter?

If you feel the need to make any edits to your basic layout template,

make them now in a fresh copy and resave the template. When you’ve got

this document laid out to perfection, save it as chapter one. Rinse and

repeat this step (with a fresh copy of the template) for each chapter

in your novel.

At this point, you’ll want to consult the help documents or a good

tutorial for the specific steps involved in creating a long document in

your software. The process of managing a long document in these

programs is not difficult, but the steps vary rather drastically from

application to application. The basic theory: you have a window in

which you define the various documents for your novel. This window

allows you to reorganize the chapters, assign a set of consistent page

numbers to them, and make sure the styles look the same across all the

chapters.

When you’re done, you’ll want to create one more small document with a

few pages to put at the front of the book. This document should contain

your title page, your copyright page, your dedication page, and if you

chose to include one, your table of contents. Again, the specific steps

will vary, but building a TOC basically consists of opening the TOC

dialog box and informing it which styles define chapter headers. Your

layout app will then automagically build an accurate table of contents

based on the page ranges specified in your book control window. Added

bonus – if subsequent edits cause pages to move, all you have to do is

issue an Update command to the TOC!

Once all this is done, you simply need to output the book to a PDF

using the book control window. You should get one complete document

with your entire text, laid out in a ready-to-print format. Then you

just have to upload it to your printing service – and bribe a visual

artist friend to make you pretty covers – and your book is ready to

order. Now it’s time to move on to stage V, for which I’ll hand the

reigns back over to James – it’s time to pick a self-publishing option,

of which there are many, each with it’s own unique pros and cons.

Tovarich Pizor entered the media landscape as Online Editor of

MacAddict.com, in which role he generated original content daily,

re-purposed material from the MacAddict print magazine for online

distribution, and edited material from freelancers. During the dotcom

era, he also had key editorial involvement with MacReactor.com, Inside

Mac Games, and Vitaminic.com, a European music sharing site. He is the

Mythos Media

layout guru, and editor.