I’m thrilled to be posting my newly designed edition of the 1897 Bram Stoker classic, Dracula, now available here for free download. This is the first book of what I hope will be a long line of redesigned works of classic literature published under the imprint Reider Books. Hope you enjoy reading Dracula as much as I do!

Select the Dracula link below to begin the free download.

Dracula

Many hours and/or days of hard work can be eliminated with a well designed and executed book design template. InDesign and Quark are loaded with potential time-saving and design-enhancing features. I’ve been working on my book design and typesetting process for a long time, and I still do my best to learn something new that I can use (almost) every day.

I’ve seen just about everything that could go wrong in a book at some point over the past 30 years. The big issues to watch out for are correct font and color usage and the proper resolution (dpi) of images, but even the best of us can get the trim size wrong sometimes.

Book design and typesetting have become more important than ever to publishers as they attempt to sell printed books and compete in this era of constantly evolving and improving e-books. Some of my book publisher clients have turned to overseas typesetters to produce their books, but they all still come back to me to design templates for the book interiors.

I charge the same rate per page for typesetting as most of the Chinese and Indian book composition firms. Technology has enabled me to become increasingly faster and more productive, and the competition from overseas keeps me focused on saving my clients time and money. I’m designing and typesetting more books than ever, but I’ll never take the flow of work for granted.

Most of the now-defunct big U.S. typesetting firms were overcharging for their services when the overseas competition put them out of business in the 1990s. The U.S. firms had been charging publishers three or four times more per page/job than was reasonable and the quality of their work was inconsistent and never as good as it should have been.

I can’t claim that any of the books I worked on became bestsellers due to my design and typesetting skills alone, but I do know that the publishers would never keep coming back to me if I wasn’t either saving them money or helping them to sell more books.

I’m always on the lookout for new books to design or typeset. Feel free to contact me any time to discuss your project.

1. Go to the Print dialog box and select “Save to Postscript” from the PDF menu at the bottom left of the screen. (The files won’t convert properly if you save directly to PDF at this stage.)

2. You can convert the postcript files to PDF using Adobe Acrobat’s Distiller program, and then open and edit the files in Adobe Illustrator or another graphics program. You can skip the Distiller step and simply open the postscript file in Adobe Illustrator, where it will be completely editable.

Don’t forget to convert the EPS files to grayscale, or they will be saved as RGB.

Each PDF file has 4 or 5 pages, depending on how many weeks there are in the month. Here are a few sample pages:

Your comments and critiques are always welcome. Hope you’re enjoying the new designs!

I will be releasing a collection of useful forms and organizational tools as PDF files that will be available for download on my web site free-of-charge.

I would love to hear from you if you find any of my designs to be helpful, or have suggestions to improve them!

Andrea

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2012_Calendar_February

Most of the older Mac fonts have limited character sets for accent marks and diacriticals. A lot of the common characters are in the font sets, including acute accents over a’s and e’s, etc., but I constantly run into marks that have to be “hand-set” by adding the accent mark after the letter it should go over, and then using kerning to move the accent marks into place.

Although far from ideal, this method has been working for me for a long time. However, now that I am converting print books into eBooks, the accent marks won’t display correctly if I use 2 keystrokes to create the accented letter.

Fortunately, there’s an easy solution to this problem that will also make typesetting the print edition faster than before.

The Times New Roman font has a very complete character set and is the font most frequently used by the authors and publishers that I work with. I’m not suggesting that you typeset all books using Times New Roman, but if you run into a character that won’t display properly in the font you are using, try converting the character to Times New Roman to see what it’s supposed to look like.

I find that it’s best to use .otf (OpenType) fonts when designing print and eBooks. OpenType fonts have much more complete character sets than the older-type fonts. You can also use the OpenType Fractions with .otf fonts (Fractions doesn’t work with the older fonts).

When preparing a book in InDesign or Quark for both print and eBook editions, it’s more important than ever to keep the formatting as clean and streamlined as possible. I always consider the eBook edition when I’m working on the print files, but I am careful not to introduce eBook formatting that might interfere with the proper output of the print edition.

One of the books I was looking at has a print trim size of 8.5″ x 11″. It is very readable and looks great on the iPad. I wouldn’t want to read this book in PDF format on an iPhone, but it’s great to be able to view books in their printed form on the iPad.

When preparing a book for both print and eBook editions, there is a fair amount of work to do to get the Quark files in shape for export to EPUB.

Fonts must have bold and italic attributes set (or reset), rather than the actual bold and italic fonts as required by most book printers. If you don’t have the font attributes set, all of the text will come through as roman.

If you have ever attempted to export a regular text file from Quark, you will have run into the same issue. It’s not a big deal, but it will take some time to convert the fonts, especially if you have a separate Quark file for each chapter of the book.

When InDesign makes an EPUB file, all of the active text on the pages will appear in the EPUB–not always in the order you want or expect, but everything should be there. Elements that are on master pages will not show up in the EPUB unless they have been activated on the pages, such as when changes to the text of the headers and footers are done on the actual pages rather than on the master pages.

You can make a separate set of InDesign files and delete extraneous text from the InDesign files before making the EPUB file, but I usually find it easier to make the EPUB from the existing InDesign files and then make additions and deletions to the xhtml files in the EPUB using Adobe Dreamweaver (see my previous article on unstuffing EPUB files to open and edit the xhtml files– “Creating and Formatting EPUB Files with InDesign”).

My Quark EPUB files pass validation as is. I have to modify the dc:date line in the content.opf file of my InDesign EPUB files for them to pass validation (see my previous article on unstuffing EPUB files to open and edit the content.opf file—“Creating and Formatting EPUB Files with InDesign”).

Quark does not export any text until you designate the text (and other elements) that you want to appear in the EPUB. To add text (or images) to the EPUB, choose “Digital Publishing” in the Item menu, and add text as a “New Article” using “Add to Reflow View.” You can then arrange the articles in the order you want them to appear in the EPUB using the up and down arrows in the “Reflow Tagging” window, which is located in the Window menu.

I like a lot of the new features of Quark 9, but overall the process for creating EPUB seems to be easier and faster using InDesign.