Reply To: Two newbie questions re books

I set up books for a publisher (helion.co.uk) all the time. If your authors submit their Word documents following your company's strict format/guidelines, then why not set each chapter as a separate file. When you want to run Find/Change you just open all the documents and specify All Documents in the Find/Change box.

When you've set up the chapters, set up a new Book file. Add the chapters in the right order. Synchronise the styles by clicking in the little box to the left of the chapter name in the Book list and then synchronise by going to the flyout menu.

As for covers, it's so much easier recently because you can set up 3 pages (for a paperback, 5 for a dustcover) as a spread and each page can be a different size (there's a page tool in the tools bar and you can set individual page sizes/margins there). The publisher I work for likes to have the covers 6 months in advance, so the spine width always changes. Again, it's easy to change the width with the Page Tool — and you can also move pages with this tool to accommodate the changed spine width.

That's just my opinion, of course. There are always a squillion ways of doing the same thing!!