I had a new challenge recently, and for once, it didn’t involve designing a book cover (that was handled by the talented 100 Covers team, whose work you can see below). Instead, I was tasked with creating the interior design for a full-length novel and reflowable ebook—and to match it with its previous book in the soon-to-be trilogy.

© House of El Music

Having done plenty of interior layouts for college students’ senior portfolios, this should have been a standard gig, but doing a print-on-demand school project and doing a full-length novel with possibly hundreds of readers owning copies are two entirely different animals. For one, the student portfolios are almost always uploaded and ordered through book makers like Blurb or Lulu—not Amazon or IngramSpark—so upload requirements are different and not quite as tedious. Second, most student portfolios aren’t for sale to the general market, and if they are, only friends and family purchase them in support of the student. Student portfolios are simply that: portfolios, and while they’re an absolute joy to create, and they represent the well-deserved success of the college student, they’re mostly a mosaic of smaller samples of work that don’t fit into one cohesive genre.

That’s why taking on a full-length novel for a client who wasn’t a college student was a bit intimidating. Plus, with an ebook also on the order list, I had to build my file a specific way that would quickly translate to those wretched reflowable text documents (convenient for readers, yes, but uncontrollable for designers who like everything they make to stay in its blasted place).

So I learned a lot. I learned that everything—absolutely everything—needed to be in a paragraph style if formatting was going to translate to an EPUB file. I learned that each chapter needed to be in its own InDesign file, which would be compiled into an InDesign Book. I learned ebooks are really just websites with no internet, built entirely with HTML and CSS coding.

And I learned the tedious skill of aligning the baselines on each page, how to set my settings to manipulate the tracking between the letters and even the shape of the characters, and InDesign Keep Options. Much of this I’d been doing completely manually when I did student portfolios, so learning it the right way is going to save me a ton of time in the future.

Below you can view three sample spreads from Chapter 2. Because I was trying to match the first book in the series, certain design elements needed to remain the same, like the running heads at the top of each page and the spanner line under the chapter. Most noticeably, I had to completely recreate the section dividers in Procreate so they would appear identical to the previous book. 

Drosselmeyer: The Watcher’s Realm and the previous book in the series (both part of a prequel trilogy to The Nutcracker) can be purchased through Paul Thompson at The Nutcracker Trilogy’s website, and my work on the ebook edition of The Watcher’s Realm can be viewed and purchased on Amazon.

All text in the sample pages is copyrighted by Paul Thompson and House of El Music.