By accident, I found out I could enrich the experience (beyond Brad’s illustrations at the beginning of each chapter) of  the 93,000 word manuscript I wrote with Adobe InDesign’s ‘bells & whistles’ in ways I haven’t seen anyone else do in an eBook.

InDesign has been a fantastic tool for digital creatives for many years. For whatever reason, no one has given the content of fiction or nonfiction ‘story’ eBooks a real shot in the arm as far as UX or UI or even basic design. IMHO.

Not that my design style is sophisticated, it surely is not. But it’s distinct and easily digestible.  And most of all, it’s MINE. Not everyone will like it or even ‘get it’, and that’s ok. Let me be clear; I had not been trained on InDesign. I was a hack. 

We are in the era of tutorial videos and while I embraced that culture wholeheartedly, InDesign is a very complex tool. Enough that I often wanted to brain myself or simply throw my effing laptop out the window. I tried to hire InDesign savvy folks to build it from my instructions but couldn’t get my style across. To be fair, I didn’t even have a shoestring budget, I had a single working mom budget: teeny tiny. More hair pulling and gnashing of teeth. This led me to more investigation of other epub tools and I looked at Apple Pages once again. For whatever reason, I had not noticed the ability to animate drawings the first time I reviewed it.
While it cannot animate text frames, gifs and audio files to play in a specified progression, I believe there are enough tools that I can manipulate in ways that haven’t been used yet to convey a different way of telling a different kind of a story.