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Stop leaving InDesign to collect e-dust on your hard drive

by rilian
5 replies
Hey there folks. I'm rather new to this IM game, but I have a rather odd hobby, bookbinding. I think to date I have printed 7 books, bound them, and given them to family members. That was my introduction to the wonderful world of typography, and I've been hooked ever since. You can go down to post #3 if you want some more info about those, as well as pictures and PDFs to download.

Now as interesting as that is it's not the reason I posted here. I'm here because I want to see if there's some way I could monetize my little hobby. So I have a couple of questions that I would like you warriors to take a look at and answer if you wouldn't mind.

So here's the deal -- I know a lot of you have copies of Adobe's creative suite. What I'd like to know is how many of you actually know how to make use of InDesign. Over the last couple years I've had plenty of time to get to know the program. I spent way to much time figuring out master pages and paragraph styles and generating table of contents all the crap you learn when you break open the program. What I'd like to know is if any of you would find value in a training program show you how to use InDesign to create all your e-books with a minimum of time and effort.

I would show you how to go about creating things like paragraph styles, designing master pages, generating your table of contents, and everything else you need to know to make creating an e-book with InDesign fast and painless as possible. And when I say fast I do mean fast, once I have the text ready I can easily create an e-book in only an hour or two. So do you think would you like some video training on how to use InDesign for e-book creation?

Another thing I was wondering is, would any of you be interested in letting me format the text for your e-book. You'd give me your content, and I would make it look beautiful. I'm not sure how many people actually want this kind of service, so let me know -- would you be interested in an e-book formatting service?

If you think you'd be interested in either one of these services, speak up, let me know. If you don't think either of these are good idea please still speak up. I don't want to waste a ton of time and energy on something that no one has an interest in.
#ebook #fast #formatting
  • Profile picture of the author Loren Woirhaye
    I don't really want to tie you up formatting
    my stuff, since I'd be likely to want to edit
    and change it later anyway, perhaps wrecking
    your work just out of my own meddlesome
    nature. But I'd love to see what you've
    done with bookbinding of those old classics -
    it's a dormant personal interest of mine.
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  • Profile picture of the author rilian
    Alright, here's the PDFs I used when I printed out the books. They are -

    • Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
    • The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft
    • Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works
    • The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
    • A Tale of Two Cities

    I only have photos for the first book I printed, and I was a huge anime nerd a few years ago, so it's a crappy japanese light novel. I never thought to take pictures of the books when I was making them, and I gave all but the crappy japanese novels away. I figure someone might be curious what they looked like printed, that should give a good impression as far as everything but the choice of content.

    The PDFs are all the exact files that I used to print the books, my favourite, and the one that I'm most proud of is "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", but I didn't come up with the layout, I found an existing copy and imitated it. That doesn't mean that one was easy, it took longer than all the others to make, and looks the best in my opinion. For the other books I used the original text, but applied my own formatting.
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    • Profile picture of the author rilian
      C'mon no one has anything to say? I'd still love to hear someone's thoughts about my ideas.
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  • Profile picture of the author sparky.ebiz
    I would be interested in InDesign templates for ebooks and also for a 6 x 9 paperback book format. So either a tutorial from you so I can make my own or have you make them for me.

    There's actually a book publishing WSO that is very popular but outputting the 6 x 9 format is not covered very well IMO. You wouldn't believe some of the techniques & programs that folks are using in order to accomplish this, lol. I'm lucky enough to have a copy of InDesign sitting on my hard drive doing nothing. And according to one of the top contributers to this publishing WSO using InDesign is the only way to go.

    Sparky
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    "Anyone who takes the safe road is as good as dead" ~ C.G. Jung
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  • Profile picture of the author Loren Woirhaye
    Your ideas need simpler expression. You're asking people
    with only a vague curiosity to read and understand some
    dense and perhaps technical text. They cannot be
    bothered.

    That's why folks aren't giving you feedback.
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