I’ve been waiting a long time for today.
It was back in 2010 when I first started thinking about providing do-it-yourself authors with the tools to produce professional quality books on their own, using professional quality tools.
But life never works out the way you think it’s going to, does it? Despite lots of discussion, plans, and a lot of work, nothing happened for years.
It wasn’t until 2013 when I connected with my associate Tracy Atkins that we were able to change the self-publishing world with the launch of our BookDesignTemplates site. But the revolution that we began was based around templates for Microsoft Word.
And hey, that’s pretty amazing in itself. Over the last 21 months thousands of authors have used our Word templates to do their own formatting, at a fraction of the price it would cost to hire a typesetter.
Every month we get contacted by authors who are just thrilled at the ease with which they can now create industry-standard print and ebooks without having to take a college level course in book design and construction.
That’s a win in my book.
Now for the Other Shoe—Adobe InDesign Templates
But even with all the great feedback, and the expansion of our brand into lots of other templates and a growing number of tools for authors, I was still waiting to realize my original dream.
Providing authors with templates that would produce truly good-looking books, ones that would stand up to the books produced by trade publishers, yet require no great experience in typesetting, typographic design, or page construction.
Today we change that with our first selection of templates for Adobe InDesign.
Here’s a link to our new InDesign Gallery: See the InDesign Templates
What you’ll see there are six fiction-oriented designs that are similar to our first six templates for Word.
- Balance—a clean, uncluttered look for your contemporary novel or literary nonfiction.
- Bomber—assertive display typography combines with smooth and readable text to make sure your readers enjoy every page of your page-turner
- Crimson—classic elegance that can turn even a long manuscript into an intimate reading experience
- Flourish—a balanced look with colorful and distinctive typography
- Legend—evokes the feelings you stir in your readers, with an elegant script display front and a traditional page layout
- Premise—brings a balanced and rational tone to your most dramatic stories
In this first group of templates we’ve intentionally kept things simple, leaving many of InDesign’s complex features out in favor of your ease of use.
Although these are intended for fiction, they can be used just as effectively for nonfiction books like essays, memoirs, biographies, and any other manuscript with minimal formatting requirements. In the coming months we’ll be converting the rest of our templates—including our nonfiction, children’s, and illustrated books to InDesign files as well.
A New Era for Adobe Software
One of the recent developments that made this possible is the new way Adobe is selling a lot of their software through their Creative Cloud distribution.
By moving to a subscription model, they’ve opened their outstanding (but pretty expensive) software to a much wider audience.
So to use our InDesign templates, and get all the advantages of this program’s advanced typography, you no longer have to invest hundreds of dollars in the software. You can now get it for as little as $19.95 a month.
A Complete Solution
Keep in mind that these are not “bare-bones” wire-frame templates like the ones you get from various self-publishing companies.
With each template you download, you’ll get:
- Our hand-crafted template file for use with Adobe InDesign, for both PC and Macintosh versions of InDesign
- Master pages for your title, copyright, chapter opening, and text pages
- Paragraph styles for all typographic elements like body text, chapter number, chapter title, and more
- Available in the most popular book sizes
- Layouts that conform to standard book industry trade practices
- All fonts needed and which you see in the sample layouts, all completely legal
- A PDF example of the template design so you know how it should look
- Access to our Template Formatting Guide to get you up to speed fast
- The confidence to know that your book will be formatted correctly
- Our 100% satisfaction guarantee so you can try it out for 30 days, risk free
- Files that are fully compatible with Adobe InDesign CS5, CS6, and CC (Creative Cloud)
I’m really excited to share this with you today, and to realize a longstanding dream of mine. I hope these templates allow even more authors like you to create the books you’ve always wanted to share with the world.
Sale Notice: To celebrate the launch of our new Adobe InDesign Book Templates, all 6 of them will be on sale at 40% off for this week only. Sale ends Friday night at midnight est, and no coupon is required, the price will automatically adjust when you “add to cart.”
If you have any questions, let me know in the comments.
