World Famous Comics: Perfect Pages: Self Publishing with Microsoft Word, or How to Avoid High-Priced Page Layout Programs or Book Design Fees and Produce Fine Books in MS Word for Desktop Publishing and Print on Demand
Perfect Pages: Self Publishing with Microsoft Word, or How to Avoid High-Priced Page Layout Programs or Book Design Fees and Produce Fine Books in MS Word for Desktop Publishing and Print on Demand
Product Description: Often rejected out of hand as a typesetting tool, Microsoft Word has greater typographic capabilities than even most long-time users realize. With a little tweaking, Word can produce type that few readers could distinguish from the best of Quark or InDesign. In this book, Aaron Shepard gives a tour of the depths of the program, describing the settings, commands, and manual adjustments you need to create type that no book reviewer will scoff at. Skeptical? This book's own typesetting is the proof!
It looks like it was designed with Word The promise and premise of the book is to use Word instead of more expensive programs in designing your book, pages "no reviewer will scoff at." The acid test for most readers will be, "Does it look like a 'real' book?" Order a copy, if you want to verify for yourself, since there is no Search Inside feature with this book. When I look at this "book" I see what appears to be a Word document with "book" margins around the page. I felt let down. The book shows how to create blocks of text with correct book formatting; if this is what you are looking for you won't be disappointed. I'm not sure how helpful this would be to someone that is expecting more from a book. Good luck.
A good one for the self publisher There are a lot of answers in this volume, all very helpful to the self publisher. It covers so much ground, it may not address your specific need, but it is certainly one of the best available. Formating is the most difficult part of self publishing and this book will save you a lot of time and misery in that specific requirement.
Useful book First, I have immense respect for Aaron Shepard and have learned a great deal from Aiming at Amazon. I just expected more from this book about how to typeset, or appear to typeset, a book. I don't ordinarily use Word, but could if necessary. I use WordPerfect and so much of what this book recommends is done much more easily with WordPerfect. In fact the ref. book on WP 6.1 gives even more detailed information on kerning and avoiding rivers and the like. So, I bought Perfect Pages and will refer to it, but not the way I thought I would. I'd urge Aaron to put a WP appendix in the next edition.
Good Information As I almost purchased an expensive desktop publishing software to format my self-published book, I was thrilled to be able to acheive the formatting objectives after a review of this book for a fraction of the cost. For instance, I had tried to set up headers with chapter titles using different odd, even pages and first page suppression and was frustrated when it was not working as I intended. This book clearly laid out the use of sections and the use of the 'same as previous' button enabling me to successfully format my book using MS Word. Thank you!
Self-Publishing's Little Secrets Very good advice, some of which I will use in my next book. Highly recommended to serious self-publishers.
Anything Goes Trivia
Trevor
Megaton Man
