Formatting a Book using Adobe InDesign!
For those who have been here with me before the merge, you would know that I wrote my book Fatalities of Us Against the World. As of right now, I have completed the final manuscript, got it back from my editor and now have to format.
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If you have ever opened the software, the amount of things you can do and manipulate can be completely overwhelming, so I’m here to help where I can. Let’s talk basic steps to formatting your book.
1. Layout
- When creating a new document, you are given options to customize the size. I typically aim for 5.5x8.5 but you can always do what you feel comfortable doing. After you input your sizing, you are given more options for margins and bleed.
2. Margins and Bleed
-This step is crucial in creating your book. Your page count reflects the inside margin size! For Fatalities of Us Against the World, the book is 752 pages long with bleed, so the inside margins needed to increase to 0.875in. A great tool to use for this is KDP’s standards. They give rough estimates on page counts and margin settings. For example, if your book is 300 pages with bleed, your inside margin would be 0.5in. From previous experience, outside margins stay consistent with 0.25in or 0.375in (with bleed).
-If you are questioning what bleed is, you aren’t alone. It took me a few weeks to grasp what bleed meant. Bleed is when your book has images that reach the end of the page. You can always alter it and play around with it and see what feels right. MAKE SURE YOU HAVE YOUR MARGINS CORRECT OR IT CAN EFFECT THE PROCESS LATER ON!
3. Uploading your document from Word
- This is easy. Save your manuscript as a .docx to your files. When you go back into InDesign, go to file and select Place. It’ll bring up your files and you select your manuscript and press open. The courser will have some text beside it. Go to the inside corner of the purple line and left click on your manuscript and hold shift key and it will auto populate the entire manuscript into InDesign.
4. Parent Pages!!!
-Parent pages are your best friend in all of this. Essentially it’s a tool to make a master layout. Most pages of your manuscript will most likely be “A-Parent” and I use that for my headers and page numbers. In Fatalities, I put my name in the left header and the title in the right header. At the bottom of each, I put the page numbers. Then I made more Parent pages for chapter designs and section breaks.
5. Page Numbers
-For page numbers, make that text box and select it. Click Type in your toolbar, scroll down to “Insert Special Character” and set it to page numbers, then current page numbers. You can always override the page numbers in the document if needed.
6. Formatting (the fun part🤭)
-This is the part where you design the book to your liking. Meaning chapter headers, chapter pages, section breaks and more. As the author or formatter, I found it best to make the parent pages for the designs and set the certain parents where it needed to be placed. You have all the free will here, but be cautious for your bleed and designs.
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I hoped this helped you get an idea of what formatting will look like. I will make a separate post for all the little tips and tricks I’ve learned in this process.
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After diving deep into general book formatting with Adobe InDesign, I quickly realized that preparing a book for print is one thing, but getting it ready for digital readers—as an ebook—has its own set of nuances. When I was working on my own manuscript, *Fatalities of Us Against the World*, I discovered some critical steps specific to ebook formatting that I wish I’d known from the start. The biggest difference, of course, is the concept of ‘reflowable’ versus ‘fixed layout’ ebooks. For most novels and text-heavy books, a reflowable layout is what you want. This means the text adjusts to fit any screen size, from a phone to an ereader, giving readers control over font size and style. My original guide covers setting up your document in InDesign, and those foundational steps for parent pages, paragraph styles, and character styles are absolutely crucial here too, as they ensure your text flows beautifully and consistently across devices. One of the first things I focused on for my ebook was images. While bleed isn't a concern for reflowable ebooks like it is for print, ensuring images are correctly sized and anchored is vital. I found that optimizing image resolution for web (usually 72-150 dpi) kept the file size down without sacrificing quality on smaller screens. Don't forget alt text for accessibility – InDesign lets you add this directly! When it came to chapter titles, which are so important for navigation, I made sure they were consistently styled. This helps InDesign automatically generate a clickable Table of Contents (TOC) when you export to EPUB, a huge win for reader experience. Page numbers in reflowable ebooks are dynamic, meaning they change based on font size and device. So, while my print edition has fixed page numbers, I didn't worry about them in the same way for the ebook. Instead, the focus was on clear section breaks and a well-structured TOC. Exporting your ebook correctly from Adobe InDesign is key. When you go to File > Export, choose EPUB (Reflowable). In the export options, I learned to pay close attention to things like CSS settings, making sure my styles were correctly mapped. Embedding fonts is another critical step to ensure your book looks exactly as you designed it, regardless of the reader’s device. Always check the ‘Embed Fonts’ option. After exporting, I used tools like EPUBCheck to validate my file – it catches common errors that could cause problems on platforms like Amazon KDP or Apple Books. Finally, the most important step: testing! I loaded my EPUB file onto different ereaders and tablets to see how it looked. Text reflows differently, images might wrap unexpectedly, and sometimes clickable links don't work. Catching these issues early saved me a lot of headaches. While InDesign is fantastic for book formatting for both print and ebook, understanding these specific considerations for digital formats will make your publishing journey much smoother.