Thanks for the great advice everyone. The book went off without a hitch.

@Onpoint331 — Thanks a lot for the snippet suggestion. It made my life so much easier.

In case my work flow can help any other newbie out there…here it is:

I worked within a long doc, not a book. I created one master for the left page, one for the right. I saved this two page spread as a template. I then created 2 different snippet styles to work with (that's all my design needed). I opened the template I made earlier and placed a snippet into each page as I worked, then saved it as an .indd file. I placed my images with object styles (thanks @DavidBlatner!), and copied and pasted text (from a rich text file) with paragraph and character styles — all of whose style names were identical, and were dictated by the original template I created.

I ultimately worked within 4 large .indd files, which comprised the 4 main sections of my book. Then I then merged the entire long doc together by moving one .indd file into the following one.

It was easy as pie! Again, snippets saved my life and were so easy to work with. As well as styles! Towards the end, when I wanted to change the justification in all 4 .indd files, it was so easy to find the identically named paragraph style within each .indd, and changed it from left to left-justified.

Thanks again everyone!

Let's see…there are indeed sections to these 1-page “chapters”, so perhaps I could try creating books from each section.

David's point about overriding objects, and yours about object styles, are good points though. I'm realizing there's plenty of room for improving my workflow. Last year it ended up being rather hodge-podge…

This time around I thought to work from a text file first, then plan on flowing that into each page after the text is finalized and corrected. (Last year I worked on the text right away in InDesign, which proved a bit problematic when text ran long.)

All probably basic stuff that hopefully I'll do right this time around.

If anyone thinks of any other nuggets of wisdom, I'd appreciate it. Thanks for all the advice!