Self-Publishers: How to Lay Out a Professional "How-To" Page

The number of reasons for self-publishing are limitless, and vary from person-to-person. If you've decided that you'd like to try self-publishing, you already know what your reasons are so I won't try to cover them. What I do want to share here is a method for creating a great, professional page that works well for most how-to books.

Whether you'll be publishing your final work only in electronic (usually .pdf) format, or using a print-on-demand publisher, this method for creating a page layout will help your end product keep the reader's interest and make you a proud self publisher.

What do you need to follow this guide? Not much - just a graphics program (even Microsoft Paint will work) and Microsoft Word.

How-To Page Layouts: The Concept

Before you get started, take some time to really think about a concept for the way your book will actually look. The concept should tie in tightly with the work itself - if your book is focused on how to grow container gardens, you won't want a layout that has a technical feeling to it. The other way around, you won't want to feature a flowery looking concept for a book that teaches how to grind out and make your own knives.

If you approach the concept as a form of art, you'll be much happier with the final outcome. Take a look at some books already published in your general field of writing. You don't even have to own them - hit Amazon.com and run a search, then use the "Look Inside" feature. What you're looking for is a feeling of how the pages are laid out; where are the words placed? The images? Does it use a background or border on every page? Is every page laid out the same, or are there a couple of different layouts for text and images that repeat through the book?

For my example, I'll be using the inspiration for this article. My topic is a book that helps writers get past writer's block by offering a cast of stereo-typical characters, settings, themes, and plots. The idea is to just spark the creative fires. With that topic in mind, I've decided that my concept is "Clean, sections easily identified, with strong artwork to illustrate each page". Your concept doesn't have to be so in-depth that you don't have wiggle room ... it just has to get you going.

How-To Page Layouts: The Design

This step can be performed in any graphics program. I'm rather partial to Adobe Photoshop, but you can use something as simple as Paint if you don't have anything else. All that you need is something that will let you draw boxes, and type in text.

1. Chapter Pages: The first thing you'll want to focus on is the chapter pages. These are the pages that introduce a chapter. Whether you're going for a text book look and feel or something as informal as an rpg game book, every how-to book chapter begins with something to set it apart from all the other pages in the book. This helps the reader find what they're looking for more easily, and it gives you a chance to really pinpoint what belongs in that section.

Some people will find this to be the easiest step of all ... other people will stress on it the same way they do when typing the first sentence on the first page of their latest project. Whichever camp you fall into, take a breath and relax. Nothing is permanent. You can undo anything you don't like.

So what do you do? Grab black and start drawing boxes. Each box will represent a "section" on your page. Using Illustration 01 as an example, you can see that the Chapter... page has three boxes. The top box is where the chapter heading goes. To the left is an illustration block; because I want to focus as much on beautiful illustrations to help spark creativity as words, I decided that there shouldn't be much text introducing my chapters. To the right is where that little bit of text will go, offering chapter details - probably in the form of bullets.

Take a little time with your boxes, but don't stress too much on it. When they're drawn in, stop and think about how this works with your design concept. If you will be using a page background, it needs to be worked in around the space left by your boxes. If you'll be using a flowery graphic beneath every header, go ahead and add it in. In my case, the only decoration created by the layout (since I'll be using so many graphics in the content) is a thin stripe at the top of every page. This stripe will separate sections of the book - characters from settings from plots.

When you're done, go ahead and save your artwork. Just make sure you put it somewhere easy to find, because you'll be needing it again pretty soon.

2. Main Pages: Your main page layouts should reflect the same feeling as your chapter pages, but they'll obviously need to have more space. Again, all that you'll be doing is drawing boxes. Feel free to add text to each box so that you can remember what each one represents.

Going back to Illustration 01 as an example, you'll see that the page has been broken down into 6 sections, each of which have been labeled. I've also carried over the thin stripe from the chapter page.

Here's something else you'll need to look at. In my example, every page within a chapter has the same requirements. They all are focused on one specific thing. Most how-to books, though, will have a very detailed page here and there with other pages that are almost solely text. If this describes your book, you'll want to create one more layout. This final layout, done in the same way as the first two, shouldn't have a "header" line and it should define where you want your text to be - columns, maybe?

Save each graphic in the same place you saved your chapter layout, and go ahead and close your graphic program down. It's time to play in Microsoft Word.

How-To Page Layouts: In Word

Yes, you can use another word processor for this step. I simply don't, so can't offer instruction on how to do it. I'm assuming that it's very similar, and that you should be able to follow the steps with just a little modification. To make life easier on yourself, though, you'll want to go ahead and just use Microsoft Word or a processor that is so much like it that there's barely a difference.

That aside, let's jump right in and finish these layouts off.

1. New Document: To get started, you'll want to take the time to set your document up. Define the page layout, the default fonts, the default colors, etc. so that you don't have to worry about them again. Then, save your document so you don't have any worries about losing your work so far.

2. Insert Image: This is pretty self-explanatory - insert your chapter preface layout to start with (Insert - Picture - From File). Once it's inserted, click on the graphic once to select it. This will bring up your picture toolbar. From the toolbar, click the Text Wrapping button and choose "Behind Text". Now, use the resizing handles to pull the picture in or out so that it fills up your page. It will probably get blurry looking - don't worry, it's not permanent. Save your work again.

3. Insert Text Box: We're going to make each section on the page match our picture by using text boxes. Click "Insert" and choose "Text Box". You'll need to set the cross-hairs on the top left corner of one of your layout boxes, and drag it out so that it matches the picture as closely as possible. Repeat this for each "box" in your picture, and then select the picture and hit the backspace key on your keyboard to delete it.

4. Format Text Boxes: To format a text box, just right-click on one of its sides. This will bring up a box that allows you to set its background color, the style of outlines, and anything else you can think of. For now, leave the outlines even if you plan on removing them later - it will help you find where each box is at as you go along without a lot of hassle.

5. Insert Text: To begin with, just insert some basic "blah blah" lines to give you an idea of how it all works. With that, you're done with your layout - save it and you're ready to get writing.