Section VII: Laying out Your Book Pages
Once you’ve completed your manuscript—including editing, rewriting, and proofreading—it’s time to lay out the pages. CreateSpace requires that you submit your pages as an Adobe PDF file, no larger than 100 megabytes (MB). If the file exceeds 100 MB, it will be rejected, as the printing equipment cannot work with files larger than that.
You have a choice of publishing the interior of your book either in black and white or in color. In most cases text will be black, but you may want to include color images or other graphic elements. If you choose color for the interior, CreateSpace will set a minimum price for your book that may be higher than the market will support.
In our first book, Greener Living Today: Forty Ways to a Greener Lifestyle, we initially included color photographs inside. The text was conventionally black, but the headers, footers, and inside images appeared in color. Although it’s a small book—66 pages—CreateSpace demanded a minimum price of $14.95. We didn’t believe the book could command that price tag, so we pulled it from Amazon and converted it to black and white. That allowed us to sell it for $9.95 and still receive a decent royalty.
Color graphics also increase the size of the PDF file. In Environmentalists in Action, we included eleven one-eighth-page black and whites. Even those tiny photos made a significant difference in file size, boosting each page from about 400 to 700 kilobytes (KB). In our book Fountain of Youth, the pages containing larger photos totaled about 2 MB, whereas text-only pages were closer to 500 KB.
Several desktop publishing programs are available for designing the layout of your book’s interior pages, including Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign, and Microsoft Word.
InDesign costs around $800, and Microsoft Word limits your ability to format images and text with precision. For purposes here, we will discuss Photoshop, our preferred method, and a program that many people already own. The tips below are based on the assumption that you know your way around Photoshop. If not, review our Photoshop Primer on page 179.
