Book Publishing With InDesign CC: Using Desktop Publishing Power To Self-Publish Your Book

by David Bergsland

This book is what I would use for my textbook if I were still teaching my six-credit Digital Publishing course for the Business Graphics degree I designed, taught, and led for 18 years in community colleges. This is a major update for me. Many of the changes I've been waiting for with ePUB production have been implemented. InDesign now stands at the top of the heap for book production in general and ePUB production in particular. You do not need to know code, though understanding how HTML and CSS works will aid your conceptual understanding. I was luke warm about FXL until I realized that the new fixed layout ePUBs would show gradient paragraph rules, gradient strokes and fills in tables, and much more. The only major thing we're missing is the fact that justification does not work in FXL. The exported ePUBs upload flawlessly to the iBooks Store and Kobo Writing Life. Coupled with Kindle's Textbook option, we now have an easy, efficient way to share training materials with our students and readers. Finally, the 21st century book publishing software we need is within our grasp. There's still more to come, but the present version is very good.

Kindle Edition

Published April 6, 2016

About the author

I've been a compulsive reader since I was eight years old. It's not uncommon for me to read a book or more a day. I became a fine artist during my hippie days from 1967-71. After graduation from U of Minn, I almost immediately got into publishing, first as an illustrator, then as a graphic designer, then a typographer, art director, instructor, program director, author, font designer, online teacher, self-publisher. All the while I did some art, wrote a lot, and kept myself busy.

My main blog and Website is The Skilled Workman which covers resources for publishing books and ebooks with InDesign, plus training for designing fonts.

These days it's primarily a solid food believers site.

The spiritual blog is
Reality Calling which covers my Christian writing and books, plus the books of authors I represent and/or design for.

I sell my fonts at MyFonts.com for the most part, but also at fonts.com

Reviews

[Александр Гидревич · Rating 2 out of 5]

Now I'm on chapter 24 of the book. Do I consider the book useful? Kinda. Generally speaking its good enough to dip your toe in the subject of self-publishing with InDesign. Main reasons for my low star review are following:
1. lack of visual examples on important subjects (paragraphs, layouts);
2. overload with topics that have no direct connections to main focus of the book, so it means that you'll be scrolling a lot;
3. some examples of graphics, lets say, not for my taste;
4. marketing suggestions for christian authors make me cringe each time.

Things that I found useful are recommendations on visual structuring text by means of typography, list of paragraph styles to prepare and common mistakes (undesirable solutions) in formatting.