Category: Formatting

New interior design for Picture Imperfect!

Thought I’d share shots of the new interior formatting for Picture Imperfect, my steamy mystery romance, AKA “A Sassy Suspense,” and a stand-alone set in the Pacific Northwest.

I wanted to update some language from the first publication that might cause some folks harm. Ie. words like crazy, insane, and overweight (which was only used in the book once, but if it caused harm, I apologize). Now that I know better, it felt like the right thing to do was correct some language.

While at it, I redesigned the interior with some snazzy new formatting that I love! The cover hasn’t changed, but I’m including a shot of Picture Imperfect next to Head Over Heels, as PI is twice as long!

PI is my longest book, with multiple points of view, a love story, a mystery to solve, family and friendship complications, and – ta-da, of course a happy ending!

What I found doing this update is there was one typo!! Fixed it.

I also got to update a bit of technology.

And I discovered I still love this book!

The new formatting applies to the print and digital editions, so if you pick up a copy, you’ll get it as it is now, February 2024 moving forward.

Same cover, “Not for Resale” because it’s a proof copy
Title page is the same
Sample of new interior formatting (this is the first scene with Gabe’s mom’s point of view – she gets a love story in the book too!)
Another sample of the new interior formatting. I love the script! (PS, don’t zoom in and read the page if you don’t want a spoiler)
New author pic, taken, you know the drill, in my bathroom with my shower curtain backdrop behind me.
Comparing spine width to Head Over Heels

Wanna check out PI? HERE

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My First Time

Formatting a book for print, that is.

Actually, I’ve never formatted an eBook, either. I usually farm out my work. But this time I’ve decided I should learn to format myself. It makes updating files so much easier. For some unfathomable reason, I decided to start with print formatting.

CreateSpace has templates for use with Microsoft Word, and it would probably be a lot easier if I just downloaded one of those templates. Only problem is, my copy of Word is so old (the 2003 edition) that I can’t save as PDF, which I need for uploading to CreateSpace. And…years and years ago, when I built this site and my pen name’s site, I decided to upgrade my Dreamweaver and PhotoShop. They came combined in a program called Adobe Creative Suite 2. Creative Suite has since updated to a cloud-based service, but for someone like me the $20 U.S. a month when I only put out maybe two books a year (that’s being generous, LOL) isn’t worth it. And I don’t design my own covers. So, being the obstinate sort, I decided to try learning how to format my print interior pages with the very old InDesign CS2. The problem? Back when I was buying how-to books for Illustrator and PhotoShop, I didn’t buy one for InDesign, thinking I would never need it. Now, there are a lot of great free templates available for InDesign book interiors, but try finding one for the CS2 version of the program. So, instead of downloading a premade template and creating my book from there, I’m building the template from the ground up. Thanks to YouTube and Google, there are a lot of places I can go for help, but the set-up is never quite the same because, you know, Cindy has old software. This might take me awhile…

Just to prove I’m really at work, here’s a shot of Page 1 of PICTURE IMPERFECT in my Word doc, followed by how far I’ve gotten in InDesign (I finally created page numbers on my Master pages, but they aren’t starting in the right spot. My next challenge is creating running, alternating page headers.)

PI_page1PI_Print

The idea is that once I have the template down pat, I can use it for future releases as well. And, if you can read Page 1 of the Word doc, that’s the world’s first peek into PICTURE IMPERFECT! (Which will go up for pre-order just as soon as I’ve got the cover commissioned).

Yup, I need to create a new website page for the book, too.