HOW TO DESIGN AND LAYOUT YOUR SELF PUBLISHED BOOK! (PART 1)
Hey everyone, I’m back with another little glimpse into the self publishing journey behind Creative Food Photography, my first book! Today we’ll be taking a closer look at the process of designing and planning the interiors and layout of the book. I’ve split the blog post into two, so as not to overwhelm you, with part two coming atcha super soon! My hope is that this blog post (and the one coming up) will help YOU on your self publishing journey too, as well as get you super excited about grabbing yourself a copy of my book if you haven’t yet. You can find all the places to order it right here :)!
Now, are you ready to get stuck in?
HIRE A BOOK DESIGNER!
I’ll be totally honest, my initial gut instinct was to bootstrap the book, to save the ‘expense’ of hiring a designer and simply do it all myself. But thinking back to some of the best (cook)books I have read and the book shoots I have been involved in behind the scenes, I knew that if I wanted a professional finish, I needed to approach the book design the way a publishing house would and that meant hiring a designer and art director. I also recognised that I would likely burn out if I tried to do all the things AND moreover, that attempting to design the book myself, would take my energy away from what only I could do - write and photograph the book with total dedication.
TAKE AWAY!
Honestly assess what you’re good at, what you have the time for and what part of the book design and creation process YOU can do better than anyone else. Then make a list of the book design tasks you don’t have much experience in and find your team to help you out!
Now, if you’re hell bent on designing the book yourself, ensure you know your way around Indesign. Canva simple won’t cut the mustard!
PLAN THE LAYOUT OF THE BOOK
The first step towards getting the layout for Creative Food Photography right was to create a flat plan. What on earth is a flat plan? Well, it allows you to map out what sections of the written and visual content go where in the book and to establish how much space and with that how many pages each section of the book requires (see image at the top of the blog post). Creating a flat plan means you avoid needing to cram in content at the last minute or ending up with LOTS of empty pages without having anything left to say.
I’d actually never created a flat plan before writing Creative Food Photography and didn’t know where to start, but luckily my art director, Fiona knew what she was doing and together we worked through the manuscript for an entire day, identifying how much space we needed for the text and how much wriggle room we had for the images. It was fun, but also really intense and after 7 hours of working on the flat plan, I was pretty pooped!
TAKE AWAY!
Flat planning is time intensive, but a necessary step in the layout, design and direction of the book. It ensures that you don’t create a repetitive, uninspiring or confusing layout that leaves your reader bored or overwhelmed.
EXPLORE THE USE OF NEGATIVE SPACE
Flat planning with focus will enable you to build some negative space into your book design. The thoughtful use of negative space is - in my humble opinion - what average books lack and exceptional ones have in spades! For those of you into food photography, you’ll know that negative space can be so powerful in your images, am I right? It’s the same for book design, so be sure to incorporate it into the layout from the outset.
TAKE AWAY!
Incorporate negative space into your book design from the very beginning!
CREATE A SHOOT LIST!
With the flat plan done and layout roughly set, you’ll have a MUCH better understanding of how many images you require to complete your book. This is important from a purely practical perspective because it means that you know exactly how many images to create and can plan your time accordingly.
This is also important from a design perspective because it will help you decide HOW you’ll shoot your images and what TYPE of images you’ll capture. What do I mean by this? Well, very similarly to curating an Instagram feed, images that you intent to place beside one another on a spread should ideally sit comfortable next to one another, bound together by their style or colour palette. Make sense? And the images you shoot will need to work with the corresponding text too of course.
For many of you reading this blog post, that means the image must showcase the recipe it’s placed beside. For me it meant positioning images so that they clearly demonstrated a specific technique I was writing about in the book.
In order to stay on track, I created a shoot list and printed out my images as I went along. I stuck these on the wall and moved them around until I was happy with their position and felt there was a nice, comfortable flow.
TAKE AWAY!
Book design includes planning and carefully thinking through your images and ensures they work well together on a spread. This is where YOUR knowledge and expertise as a food photographer and food blogger can really shine, so make it count!
STORE YOUR IMAGES AND CONTENT SAFELY
Ok, I appreciate this isn’t necessarily a design or layout issue, but having an external drive (two if you’re feeling a bit antsy) to save your book content is worth gold. I created marked designated folders, one per chapter which made my workflow so much easier and free up mental space I used to delve deep into my photography, writing and book design process. I highly recommend you do the same!
TAKE AWAY!
Book writing and design requires creativity as well as serious planning and organisation skills. Having an external drive to save your content on will be worth it!
WANT TO READ MORE ABOUT SELF PUBLISHING…
I’ll share part 2 of this blog post later this month. In the interim if you’re interested in self publishing, please head to this blog post, this blog post, this one and this one as well as these podcast episodes (1) (2) (3) (4) or these writing diary highlights on instagram, for more information. And if you want to be sure not to miss a single insight into my self publishing journey and want to grab my FREE book proposal guide too, then why not join the mailing below? I’d love to have you.
P.S. WOULD YOU LIKE A COPY OF CREATIVE FOOD PHOTOGRAPHY?
If you want to learn more about food photography, love what I do or simply wish to support my work, you can get your copy of my book right here.
Thank you in advance for all your support. I really, really appreciate it.