I have now published 3 books and am on the edge of finishing another one. I write this post not to talk about my books, but rather the skill required to assemble the pages and present it to a publisher.
Two of the books I have published are Adult Coloring Books and the other is a WordSearch Book. I wrote and illustrated all of them using not one, not two, but three apps from Adobe Creative Cloud:
- PhotoShop
- Illustrator
- InDesign
I am currently using CreateSpace (owned by Amazon) as my means of self-publishing. They have certain requirements for file submission. For one, they only accept PDF files and the artwork for the cover must be a specific size based on how many pages are in the book.
For the assembly of all the elements, there is nothing else I’d rather use than Adobe’s InDesign application. I will say it’s easy to use if you’re experienced with other Adobe products but without some training, it can be somewhat overwhelming. This is because it has so many options.
The good news is that because of all those options, it is amazing what can be done with it.
I also use it to prepare things like:
- Employee Handbooks
- Long Contracts with many pages
- Menus
- Calendars
- Convention Guides
- and more