Professional Book Design Templates
25 February 2013
Veteran book designer Joel Friedlander, whose posts have been regularly featured here, has released a series of professionally-designed interior book templates. The templates are designed to work with Microsoft Word and look (to PG’s eye), much better than those PG has developed for Mrs. PG’s books from CreateSpace’s interior templates.
Each template set includes both POD and ebook versions. Print templates are available now with ebook templates appearing in a few days.
Here’s a link to Joel’s Templates and a link to a Q and A about the templates.
Some indie authors worry that their books don’t look as good as those from major publishers. Joel may have an answer to that concern.
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I’m distracted by other issues. You can’t get an ebook template alone, you have to buy the print template along with it? So $47 for an ebook template and the print thing you’ll never use? And that’s for 1 ebook? If you want to do 2 of your books it’s $107? (There are numbers here, I’m automatically confused.)
They look lovely.
I believe you can purchase a multi-book license for $107 which allows you to create as many books (of your own) as you wish using the template. (You must purchase the commercial license for $207 if you’ll be offering book design as a service to clients.)
The templates do look gorgeous. (Although I use InDesign for my POD books.)
The ebook-only templates are coming soon, at lower prices for each license. I see that they will be Smashwords tested as well.
I’ll be checking back later.
I shudder at the though of Word export being used as e-book templates. I realize, of course, that hand crafting your template into a bare, or minimally formatted e-pub is a challenging learning curve, and better software is needed for this task.
The templates do look lovely though.
Neato! Joel does terrific work. When I’m ready to publish, I’m stopping there first.
I think it’s cool he’s innovative and responding to a need!
Thanks for the mention, PG, we’ve had a tremendous reaction to launching this new site, so obviously it looks like something people had been wanting.
And the ebook templates will be up and for sale by themselves under the same licensing terms but at reduced prices. Look for these before the end of the week.
Good luck, Joel. Mrs. PG wants to buy a couple of the templates.
Not to be Mr. Dour or anything, but I foresee an awful lot of indie books looking exactly the same inside.
Better style clones that look decent than a patchwork quilt primarily composed of DEAR GODS WHAT WAS THE LAYOUT PERSON THINKING.
I am Most Tempted Indeed. (Though I’ll probably adjust stuff to my own preferred fonts, ha. I just need a document with all the fiddly bits pre-set.)
What of that? Many trade publishers’ books look very similar one to another.
I’ve developed two Word templates already for myself, and my oh my did they take a ridiculous amount of time. I’m modifying one so I’ll have a third. Now that it’s already been done, I can’t see the point of using a template that is surprisingly similar in font choices etc (from what I can see of the samples shown), but… I did spend a ton of time reading Joel’s blog when I was learning to create my own template back in September!
His advice (in his blog posts) was enormously helpful at the time and I still have several pages bookmarked. Makes me wonder if I’d have been tempted if this had existed back then… I don’t regret learning what I learned, but the time commitment was massive.
I really love this. I’ve been trying to figure out print formatting and just haven’t been able to manage to churn out a professional result. This simplifies things, especially the ebook+print deal. VERY glad for this. I’m not surprised template stuff like this is becoming available for indies, it just makes sense.
ABeth and TLE, those are two of the biggest reasons we got into this project, so authors could get “all the fiddly bits” right without that “massive time commitment.”
We’ll continue to release new designs every month, and I hope that mitigates to some extent the similarities in the books made with templates.
When you’re doing some of the new designs, are there any that have… Hm. Not initial drop-caps, but ones that go both above and below their text line? (E.g., if the initial capital is 3 lines high, the middle is on the line that starts the chapter, and it extends both above and below.) Or even initial caps that only go up? I’m not sure where I imprinted on this format, and it probably indicates a great moral failing (as well as needing fonts that don’t show off huge whitespace when the first letter is “T” or “P” or “Y”), but it’s something I miss…
(Some examples, which are usually Not Quite What I Mean:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_nUDSsZhZUmQ/TFPKKNzmARI/AAAAAAAACpA/fgn4mp1DmrM/s1600/300720103887.jpg
http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/etexts/LytPage/LytPage148.gif
http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a49/DougLoudenback/skirvin/book/02_death_etc.jpg
The “E” in the middle is exactly what I’m talking about.
ABeth, the ones that are on the same baseline as the text are known as “stand up caps” as opposed to the drop cap. Your preference is a bit of a hybrid, but it can be a nice design touch. I’ll definitely keep this in mind as we develop the templates. I’m not a big fan of the stand up cap, and some of your examples were a bit… odd. But the last one is a great example, so thanks for pointing that out.