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

Very specific people indeed:

Authors and publishers: who have come to realize that they need a better, faster, and more efficient publishing workflow.

They also have come to believe: that, for excellence in publishing, professional tools are required.

They are willing to learn: the new concepts and techniques to accomplish these goals.

This book is an enjoyable retail read masquerading as a textbook, or maybe its the other way around. If I were still teaching my digital publishing degree, I would use it for the textbook of a 6-credit, two-semester course. There is a lot of material here. However, it is designed to be fun and engrossing to read over a period of several weeks or longer.

A willingness to learn

A commitment to do what is necessary

A willingness to spend the time required

A basic knowledge of usingInDesign CC: starting a new document, saving it to a specific folder, file management, basic tool usage, and all the rest of basic computer literacy. Sandee Cohens Visual Quickstart book will enable this.

A decision to pay for what is needed

This last one is the killer for many: You must be willing to spend $20 a month for InDesign CC. Many of you already have the full Creative Cloud with all of its applications. This costs around $50 a month.

We wont specify it. But in our experience, this means a cable modem. There are other options, of course. But you need to be able to comfortably upload and download things in the gigabyte+ range.

I want to say some brief words of welcome as you start through this new book. You will discover that what I am doing is working creatively within InDesign to produce completed books almost as a fine art exercise while maintaining excellence and easily meeting production needs.

What I want to share with you is a method, an attitude, a service to the reader which is enabled by the typographic power of InDesign. I am discussing one-person do-it-yourself publishing, direct communication from author to reader.

One of the wonderful things about the new publishing paradigm is the control we get as artists, authors, designers, and publishers over the entire package. A modern book is released in multiple sizes, versions, and formats. The content and design remain fluid as we shape the book while we learn and grow.

We can easily adjust content, layout, and presentation of our books after they are released in response to emails, beta readers, FaceBook friends, tweets, comments on our blog posts, pluses on our Google+ post comments, and the whole host of online social networking.

The focus of this book is very sharp. It is for people who are producing books and booklets, non-fiction in specificbeginning with very limited capital and few personnel resources. The good news is that you can start with an able computer, the software I mention, and a vision. Money is not required to start, and little is required as you grow. It will take quite a bit of work, but not more than normal for a project with the scope of a book.

Im sharing techniques for the new wave of author/publishers who are not (and do not intend to be) large publishing houses. It is designed to help those of you without the resources and connections nor inclination to intrigue the large, mass-market media houses with their incredible capital requirements and insane marketing needs that look more like addicted gambling than actual communication through book productionauthors writing and publishers delivering to small niches.

Many new skills are required. One of the trials of the new paradigm is the incredible amount of knowledge and the various skills necessary to do all of this. The good news is that Adobes Creative Cloud enables you to use these skills and gain the knowledge necessary quite easily for a small monthly fee. It is the only software available which gives you the power you need to publish creatively and professionally in one package.

I have been uniquely positioned to take advantage of the new workflow. I began as a fine artist in the 1960s and early 1970s. I learned typesetting and graphic design at the hands of a masterful art director in the late 1970s. I spent a decade as an art director myself within a large commercial printer in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

I began teaching these materials in 1991. Within a couple of years, a large traditional publisher was asking me to convert my handouts to a textbook on the new digital printing. I used that opportunity to develop the first all-digital printing and design curriculum in the country (as far as I can tell). I wrote a book a year for them on typography, FreeHand, Illustrator, Photoshop, and finally InDesign. Publishing with InDesign was one of the first books on the new software that would eventually take over the industry.

Becoming a teaching pastor as well as church administrator for my wifes church in Albuquerque in 1993 enabled me to use my skills in a whole new way. Materials for Bible studies, spiritual dramas, and worship services were a new joy for me.

While all of this was going on, in 1996, I took all my coursework online. I became involved with the distance learning initiative at my community college. I continued to write new instructional materials. I was supplying them to my students on the class Website as downloadable PDFs.

Then I found Lulu in 2002 and my world changed. With Lulu, then Createspace, then Scribd, then Zazzle, then Kindle, and then ePUBs with the Apple, NookPress, and Kobo Writing Life, I could get my writing out to my students very efficiently. Writing books became a real joy to me as InDesign kept getting better and better. More and more I was doing everything in InDesign except the photos. It is a great workflow I highly recommend.

Ive been able to use all my experience, from fine artist to writer, graphic designer to publisher, as a synergistic whole which is immensely fun and deeply satisfying. This book serves as a reference book for graphic designers and/or authors converting to book production. Its one of the most complete typographic references for book design, among many other things.