February 19, 2024 by admin

How to Create a Book Jacket Template in InDesign

How to Make a Book in InDesign: Part 2

The following are basic instructions. They should only be used to help your creative process. This tutorial is only to assist you build the book cover. Your book cover will be personalised. Use your imagination! Have fun!

In this article, you’ll learn how to make a book in InDesign. Creating your InDesign book doesn’t need to be daunting or difficult once you know a few basics. In this tutorial, you’ll find all the steps and everything you need to create a book in InDesign.

There are ten essential steps for creating your InDesign book templates from scratch, including how to create a book cover and how to make a book layout. You’ll also pick up some handy tips from the pros. 

1. The Book

For many first-time book designers, it might also be the first time you come into contact with Adobe InDesign, so brush up on the basics before you begin designing so you can confidently approach creating your book. 

For book traditionalists and enthusiasts, print books still hold a huge amount of appeal. The most common and cheapest print format is the paperback (or softcover), which is the best-value choice for self-publishers. Several print-on-demand sites, like Blurb and CreateSpace, have sprung up in response to demand from self-publishers and independent publishing houses who want to create and sell paperbacks online. 

The ‘shelf appeal’ of hardbacks helped publishers to sell large-format titles in record quantities last year, which makes this more old-school print format one to watch. 

Hardbacks are more expensive to print but sell at a higher price point too. Check out this tutorial on how to create a hardback cover tailored to a young adult audience:

2. Design Your Book to a Standard Size

If you’re planning on selling your book online or distributing it to bookstores, it’s in your interest to design your book to an industry-accepted size. 

FPO

US Standard Book Sizes

• Pocket Book: 4.25 in by 6.87 in
• Digest: 5.5 in by 8.5 in
• US Trade: 6 in by 9 in
• Hardcover: Ranges from 6 in by 9 in to 8.5 in by 11 in

UK, Europe and Worldwide Standard Book Sizes:

• A-Format: 178 mm by 111 mm
• B-Format: 198 mm by 129 mm
• Demy: 216 mm by 135 mm
• Royal: 234 mm by 156 mm

3. Understand a Little About Paper Stock

Paper stock is the type of paper the pages of your book will be printed on. The ‘stock’ combines paper finish (such as coated or uncoated) and weight (measured in ‘Grams per Square Meter’, GSM). 

The heavier the paper stock you choose, the heavier your book will be, and the width of the spine will therefore be greater. While an experienced printer can advise you on the best sort of paper stock for your project, you need to know how this will affect the spine width of your cover so that you can accommodate this in your design.

Once you know your book’s paper stock and page count, you can either ask the printer for the spine width or use an online spine width calculator, like this Gutenberg calculator.

4. Learn How to Typeset Your InDesign Book Template

Typesetting is the process of arranging text on the inside pages of a book. Some book designers choose to specialize in typesetting, as the process of typesetting can be very skillful and time-consuming. 

However, this isn’t to say that you can’t learn how to typeset your books. This tutorial provides a good overview of the basics of typesetting books in InDesign:

Once you know the basics of typesetting, you’ll also need to develop a good eye for spotting fonts that are suitable for typesetting. Most typesetters tend to opt for tried and trusted serif typefaces. Here are a few pointers to help you choose typesetting fonts which will always work beautifully. 

Look out for fonts which are:

• Clear and legible, and readable at a small point size.
• Easy on the eye, with few stylistic ‘quirks’ (these can tire the eye).
• Available in a wide range of weights and styles, such as Book, Roman, Italic, Bold and Black, to give you plenty of flexibility.
• Beautiful and have a classic, familiar feel to them (a serif like Gorgeous is a great crowd-pleaser for setting body text).

5. Get Inspired and Think Creatively for Your Book Cover Design

Walk into any bookstore, and the sheer creativity and diversity of book cover designs will blow you away. Readers do judge books by their covers, so it pays to think creatively and strive to design a book cover that catches the eye and entices a prospective reader to pick up your book.

You can find great inspiration from sources online, such as Pinterest, which is flooded with inspiring book design images, or the amazing Book Cover Archive. Sites like these can give you ideas for the theme, mood, fonts, and color palette you might want to use in your design.

These tutorials will guide you through the basics for creating your book covers, as well as give you a few pointers for designing genre-appropriate covers:

6. Make Use of Parents

By placing elements such as page numbers and chapter headings on Parents, you can apply these elements consistently and quickly to a large number of pages. 

Parent pages can be accessed from the Pages panel (Window > Pages) in InDesign. 

In this example, I’ve created three different parent spreads for the inside pages of a book in InDesign­: a ‘Title’ parent for the opening pages of the book with no page numbers, a ‘Start of Chapter’ parent with page numbers but no running headers, and a ‘Chapter Body’ parent with page numbers and running headers along the top of each page.

Once you’ve set up and applied parents to your book, you will also need to get familiar with the process of threading text throughout your document. Read up on how to do this with this quick tip tutorial:

7. Create a Book File and Section Your Book

InDesign offers you a really useful feature for creating long book documents—these are called Book Files. A Book File is a collection of grouped documents (usually chapters). 

There are several advantages to creating a Book File rather than simply creating your book as one large InDesign document:

• Firstly, you can share styles across the chapters within the Book File and the page numbering sequence will continue from one chapter to the next. 
• You can also make changes to your book more quickly and easily when you use a Book File. Instead of opening a single file with a large number of pages, you can open only the section or chapter you would like to edit, which makes navigating through your book much easier.

To create a Book File, go to File > New > Book in InDesign. You’ll be prompted to give the book a name and to save it. 

When you’ve created the Book File, choose Add Document from the Book panel’s main menu. From here, you can add InDesign files to the book, which would normally be chapter files (e.g. Chapter 1, Chapter 2, etc). 

Once you’ve set up a book file, it’s important to set up the page numbering of your book correctly. This can be a bit fiddly, so let’s look at an example. 

Here, I want to set up my book so that page 1 begins on the first page of the opening chapter. So I select the opening chapter page (which is currently page 13) and choose Numbering & Section Options from the panel’s main menu.

In the New Section window, I check Start Page Numbering at, and set this to 1. From the Style menu below, I choose ‘1, 2, 3, 4…’, before clicking OK. 

I want the first 12 pages of my book to be numbered with Roman numerals. To do this, I select the very first page of the document and again choose Numbering & Section Options.

As before, I check the Start Page Numbering and set this to 1. But this time I choose ‘i, ii, iii, iv…’ from the Style menu, and click OK. 

You may also want to add a differently numbered section to the final pages of your book.

As you update the page numbers or add or remove pages in your book, the Book File will update the page numbering throughout all the documents (chapters). 

8. Prepare Your Book for Printing

This is the last step in this tutorial for how to create a book in InDesign. Once you’ve completed the cover and inside pages of your book, you’re ready to export it for printing. 

The standard print-ready file format most printers will request is a PDF. 

Go to File > Export in InDesign, and choose Adobe PDF (Print) from the Format menu. Choose Press Quality from the Preset options to ensure your artwork is exported at a very high quality. 

Top tip: Export your cover and inside pages as a single pdf file. Use the “spreads” option when exporting.

Remember page numbering as stated below.

Assignment

1. Create five different parent (master) templates. (Remember, one will be for the table of contents and the other will be for a single page of text.
2. Design Each template. Each one should be unique and have a specific purpose
3. Each parent layer should include images and captions
4. set guides in your parent layers
5. Dynamic numbering is required.
6. A cover spread is required. It should be designed in Photoshop and imported into InDesign (Use a separate InDesign file.
7. A publisher’s logo is required for the spine of the book. Create this in Illustrator and import it into InDesign.
8. 4 Chapters are needed for this project. They must be completed in separate InDesign files.
9. A parent template is needed for start of each chapter.
10. Have fun with this, but remember the alignment of elements on the page. If you complete the parent pages correctly, you shouldn’t have a problem.

Fussell, G. (2024) How to Make a Book in InDesign: Envato Tuts+, Design & Illustration Envato Tuts+. Envato Tuts. Available at: https://design.tutsplus.com/articles/how-to-make-a-book-in-indesign–cms-32534 (Accessed: 19 February 2024).

Keung, L. (2022) How to Create a Book Jacket Template in InDesign: Envato Tuts+, Design & Illustration Envato Tuts+. Envato Tuts. Available at: https://design.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-create-a-book-jacket-template-in-indesign–cms-32733 (Accessed: 19 February 2024).