- Planning ahead to set your book up
for layout is the move of a savvy author.
It will save you hassle, pain, money,
and it will probably help you get the exact look
for the interior of your book that you want.
If you wanna learn the pro insider secrets
to setting up a book for layout, then this video is for you.
(upbeat music)
Hey, there, I'm Julie The Book Broad.
I'm a multi-award winning author
and the founder of a fabulous professional services company,
Book Launchers.
If you've watched a few videos on BookLauncher.TV before,
you might think, I'm the expert in all things publishing,
but the truth is I'm a generalist
and the people on my amazing team
at Book Launchers are the true experts.
Today, I'm really excited to share some secrets
from our production supervisor, Melissa Sobey,
on what we do during the editing phase
that sets your book up for success when it goes to layout.
And she's got a few other cool strategies and tips
to get an award-winning interior
after the editing is done too.
Take it away, Melissa.
- One thing I would highly encourage is if you're doing this
on your own without help from another company,
like, Book Launchers is that you do hire a book designer.
So somebody who has worked on interiors
and can set up the layout the best way possible.
If that's not something that you're wanting to budget in,
if you feel like you can take on the task
of creating your layout,
there's lots of great like Skillshare courses
that can help you find the right way to do that,
things like that.
But there's a few things to keep in mind
whether you're doing it or a designer is doing it.
And we actually start prepping for layout
when we're in editing phase.
And one of the things that we do is we work with our editors
to create what we call headings
and those headings are things like, your chapter names,
your subheads, any bulleted lists, things like that,
that are gonna be specific formatting issues.
And you wanna go through and apply headings in Word
or whatever application you're using
to create your document.
You wanna apply these headings,
there's an option in all of them,
all of the word processing software,
where you can apply headings.
And what this helps do when you start to set up your book
for layout is it helps the designer
or yourself create little sections
that are gonna be formatted specifically one way
so that as you're creating this book layout,
you've got something that is repeating itself
and is consistent throughout the book.
- I just wanted to hop in here
and share a couple of things we talked about later,
which was the fact that we generally end up moving
all manuscripts into Microsoft Word
during the editing phase, because all other software adds
these weird little coding things, especially Google Docs,
which has to be stripped from the file.
So when we hit copy edit, and are starting
to build the structure of the book
by applying headings and formatting styles
throughout the manuscript, we prefer it to be in Word,
because Word is the only one
that doesn't import weird things into InDesign.
You'll know this has happened to you.
The weird importing thing,
if you end up with a zillion weird squares
all over your manuscript.
So even though Melissa says that you should start building
that structure of your book in edit
and applying the heading styles,
know that if you're doing that in Google Docs,
it pretty much has to be stripped down to text again,
before it goes to design.
So you're just better off to put in all that effort
in Microsoft Word.
Okay, where were we, Melissa?
- There's are helping us during the editing phase
to start creating those so that you'll see, sometimes,
if you're working with us, you'll get your edit back.
And you'll see editor name applied style one
or something like that and those are there for a purpose.
So while you're in the editing phase,
the way that the book looks
on your Word document is not how it's gonna look
when you lay out the book
for your actual physical copied book.
So yes, you're gonna get something back from your editor
and maybe your paragraph shifted,
or maybe the numbers didn't look the same as they did
when you sent it to them but those are all things
that you are gonna be changing later on anyway.
So, as long as they're applied to a specific style
and that style is consistent throughout the document,
that's what matters during the editing phase.
You actually format and make it look the way
that you want it to look later on in the process.
- Now, if you're using Track Changes
during the editing process, which I highly recommend.
make sure you go through and accept
or reject all Track Changes before your book goes to layout.
Otherwise, your layout person
will be automatically accepting all changes
when the book is imported into InDesign.
That's how you can end up with a weird sentence
(Julie giggles)
where you're like, "I don't remember writing that."
But an editor inserted it and you didn't reject it.
So take the time to get it cleaned up
before you send it to the designer for layout.
Now, Melissa went on to say
that you need to prep your images for layout,
so let's take it back to Melissa.
- It's really important to prep your images.
And by that, I mean, if you're gonna have pictures
or images or charts or graphs or any kind
of illustrations in your book,
you wanna make sure that number one,
they're high res so that when they're being formatted
into the layout, they don't look pixelated or low quality.
But one of the things you can also do is have them recreated
by a designer of some kind.
So we do have a couple of people that we work with
who will take a chart or a graph
and make it look spectacular.
And they'll take that rough designer, that rough outline
that you send us and they will recreate it
and they'll use your book cover as a foundation
for the style or the design of the book
to recreate that graph so that we have a consistent look
throughout the book.
As far as images go,
make sure that they're royalty-free,
make sure that they're public domain.
And if they're not,
then you need to obtain permission to reprint them.
And if you can't get permission to reprint,
but you really like that image,
you can probably have it redone by a designer,
as long as it's not a photograph.
Obviously photographs can't be recreated too easily,
but those are things that I definitely recommend
because you don't want that to come back later
and you find yourself locked up
in some kind of crazy litigation over an image.
- And we've talked about graphs and images
in a different video, which I'll link to at the end.
Now, Melissa is not quite done, but my goodness,
isn't she awesome.
(Julie giggles)
Go ahead and smash that thumbs up button
if you're loving what she has to say so far.
Now, my own tip for images is to not put them
into your Word document while you're writing.
Just make a note and say, image one backpack in Utah.
Number the image, give it a description
and then create a folder of your book images
and put image one in there and label it the same thing.
Trying to put your images into Word
while you write is a recipe for pure misery.
Those of you who've done it, know what I'm talking about.
- Think about where in the book you want them to be,
and keep in mind that the flow of the pages
may not allow you to have it exactly next
to the sentence you want it to be next to.
But if you have a general idea
of where that image needs to belong,
then you can say I'd like it in this section,
or I'd like it to be on a page where this information is,
and that'll help keep the designer aware
of where you need that information in that image
to correspond together.
- And just to show you
how all this work looks when it's done.
Melissa has some examples to show you
to the tile of this up.
Now, before I show you that,
if you're wondering where this came from,
these are excerpts from a deep dive training session we did.
These deep dive training sessions
or things we do at Book Launches on a Saturday
where I showcase authors experts
and members of the Book Launcher team
to help you with writing a book, publishing it
and marketing it.
If you're not getting our launch letter,
you might wanna pause this video,
hit up booklaunches.com/7steps
and get yourself on that newsletter right now,
so you can be a part of our next deep dive training.
All right, back to you, Melissa,
show us how all this looks when it's done.
- Books that we've launched.
And this is an example of applying those headers,
but also how you want those chapters starts
to look in all of those sections.
So if we take a look at this,
I don't know if you can see this or not.
So here, we've got that chapter title
that's in a heading one
and it's exactly like the book cover.
So we've created a consistent style there
where we have that chapter start,
that looks just like the book covers design, okay?
And then we've got down here, we've got a drop cap.
So a drop cap is that first letter of the first paragraph
of the chapter being large.
I don't know if you can see it,
if I put in a little bit closer, you can see that, okay?
There's a couple of options here for chapter starts.
So this chapter, we have the chapter title here.
We have the quote here,
and then we have the actual start of the chapter.
This chapter starts halfway down the book,
the chapter title is up here,
but the actual chapter starts here.
So you can have a chapter that starts up here
like this one does.
So you have it start higher on the book.
You can have one that starts all the way up at the top.
Those are all things that you should keep in mind
when you get to this layout phase,
you should look at books that you like the way they look
and take photos, or if it's on Amazon
and they have a look inside feature,
save that link so that, you know,
these are examples that I wanna send to my designer, okay.
Or that I want to create on my own.
So here, we've got another example of formatting styles.
So this is a subsection in the same book
that we were just looking at.
This is another heading style right here.
So we apply the heading two style here.
So throughout the book,
this is a consistent heading style
for these sections in this book.
And these sections of these books,
of this book in particular,
they require that the photo be right under that subsection.
So in this case, this is not somewhere where we can say,
this photo needs to be somewhere near this area.
This is a case where this photo has to be exactly
where this heading starts.
So what you'll see happen down here
is that there's a blank space.
So this is in the same chapter,
but there's a blank space right here
because this photo has to start with this heading.
And if you're okay with the way that looks,
it's totally fine, there's nothing wrong with that.
That's wonderful, it's consistent,
it looks good, it's clean, it looks fantastic.
But if you have a photo that has to start somewhere,
you have to be prepared for that photo
to drag your section to the next page,
which can create a gap.
- Whoo. (Julie giggles)
That was a lot and if you can believe it,
Melissa still had more to share
during that deep dive training.
But after this, you've got the overview
to set yourself up for layout success.
Whether you're working with Book Launchers,
doing it yourself, or hiring a layout pro
from somewhere else.
The best layouts start in editing, consider images,
and also include the style from your cover
to create that end to end reader experience.
I think you might be wondering about permissions
for those pesky images or quotes you've put in the book.
So this video right here is all about permissions.
And then this video right there is the one I mentioned
on images and graphs in your book.
Both are pretty much essential viewing.
And really, I just wanna hang out with you a little longer,
so please click on over to the next video
and I'll see you there.
(upbeat music)