Adobe’s InDesign is a wonderful tool. The software is expensive, though if you are a student or teacher you can get a slight discount, but if you have access to it I highly recommend using it.
InDesign can be used to layout a book PDF, as well as be the starting point for an ebook. Print books in particular require certain elements to make it look professional, such as page numbers and headers with the name of the title and author. However, inputting this information can be tedious, unless you take advantage of InDesign’s master pages feature.
Lynda.com has a great database of articles, including “This week’s featured five: Using InDesign master pages.” The article introduces and goes over how to effectively use master pages, and it includes five helpful videos.
Below is an excerpt:
3. Creating master pages strategically for a book or other long documentThe next tutorial is from chapter one of our Creating Long Documents with InDesign course. When you’re working on a long document like a several-chapter book, author Mike Rankin encourages you to set up your master pages strategically by first creating a base master, then placing additional master pages with tweaks that might be desirable for different kinds of spreads like body copy and chapter openers upon that base. This strategic layering will give you greater flexibility as the project grows, and keep you from having to set up completely new masters as the project expands.
Read the full article here.
Adobe InDesign is the best software to use when designing a book for print and ebook. I’ve been using it for years and it made my work easier.
I still like Sigil the best for ebooks, but InDesign is great for print, for me.