Filling in the Pretty Details
Being in our own home is a relief and our house is finally getting back to normal. Our little resort town is pulling itself back out of hurricane mode too. The standard greeting these days is still, “So, how’d you make out in the storms?” The telling gets a little shorter and a little less painful each time. Our own way of healing.
I’ll be glad to get back to my regular writing schedule, as the cleaning and putting away is almost done.
We’re nearing the end of the process for self-publishing my book with Draft2Digital. This post is going to address the look of the inside of the book. I’ve already discussed choosing the size of the book and what the outside front cover, will be. It’s just as important to have the inside pages of the book be attractive to the eye as well, which is why I selected justified margins for the manuscript document earlier.
One lesson I’ve learned for future books – don’t be afraid to insert blank pages where it makes sense for logical separations as well as for esthetics. I want to add a point here regarding the Table of Contents that I discussed in the post for 10/29/24. The ToC is generated automatically by using distinctive chapter headings and that’s a great thing. One problem I ran into was that I also have divisions of Part 1 and Part 2, and included them on the same page and printed directly above the first chapter title of each section. This confused the ToC generating program, and at first I ended up with only two chapters – Part 1 and Part 2 – and had to go back and manually identify the chapters. I realize now that I should have printed the “Part #” on a separate and otherwise blank page. I didn’t figure out this easy fix before I published, and it would have been a headache to go back and change it after production started. So… next time I will have them on their own pages.
One of the first choices here is what color the pages will be. D2D offers white or cream. Personally, I like cream because I feel it softens the appearance of the dark print on the paper with less contrast, easing strain on the eyes. There may be cases where the starkness of black on white is desirable for a particular story. Mostly, it’s a personal preference, and I’m glad to have the choice.
There are check boxes to have D2D automatically add frontmatter and endmatter for the book. The program generated all of these pages but I had the choice which to include or not: Copyright Page, Dedication, Acknowledgements, Also By This Author, About the Author, a teaser for another book. D2D will store all this information in their database, so I only have to type once and the program will add the text of the page(s) to any future books. For example, I only had to type my bio one time to add an About the Author page, and when I click the box in the future, the bio is added automatically. Edits can be made to the entries for updates.
Once the decisions to add those pages or not is made, D2D moves on to the Preview step. Here I got the opportunity to see what the document will actually look like as a real ebook. As choices are made and boxes checked, a simulated preview appears on the screen that shows what the reader will see as they turn pages.
There are a number of choices available for adding design features to the book and give it a more polished professional appearance. These are primarily for chapter headings, and include a variety of fonts with accompanying flourishes. Some are modern and sleek and others are more romantic and flowery. It was fun to play around with all of them and see what I liked best, though some clearly didn’t fit the theme and substance of my book. There’s also an option for Dropcaps – to make the first letter of the first word in each chapter larger than the text so it stands out and hangs over two or three lines depending on the font – but I didn’t select that for this book.
The preview box on the selection page let me see how each of these options looked in conjunction with the other features in my book. After I made all the design choices, it was time to see my ebook. I clicked on the button to download a proof copy that I could read on my Kindle. After reviewing and checking every little detail in the proof, I was able to approve the ebook and send it to Publishing.
What’s Next? Would you like a paperback with that?
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