I realized I skipped over this binding dilemma that my particular self-publishing platform presented. Let's just chalk it up to limitations of their technological machinery, but given the industry they are in, I found this very strange....
All of us have seen and even own a landscape format picture book. Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are,” for example, is a landscape picture book. This is NOT NEW.
For all my formatting work to date, I discovered that landscape-format books are not, in practice, possible to publish within the self-publishing platform of the company I chose (which was the #1 top-rated self-publishing platform in 2014, FYI). After searching through the forums, I discovered THE workaround that many SMART folks were able to work out and subsequently shared. You basically have to think of the book pages as calendar pages bound at the top/bottom edges (see top row images). The pages are oriented such that upper page’s bottom edge and the lower page’s top edge meet to make the binding. In a picture book, the RIGHT edge of the LEFT page, and the LEFT edge of the RIGHT page meet to make the binding. In general, most of us do NOT want our books to be oriented like a calendar, opening vertically with image on top and calendar grid on bottom. SO, in your original software program where you created your pages, you must rotate the actual document SET-UP 90° so that your RIGHT edge of your LEFT page is now your top edge, and your LEFT edge of your RIGHT page is now the bottom edge.
Why, in the age of developing rovers for Mars, and the creation of the world wide web, we cannot manufacture a book in its proper orientation on the self-publishing platform, is BEYOND my capability of understanding or explaining. But this is what worked....
OR DOES IT?
All of us have seen and even own a landscape format picture book. Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are,” for example, is a landscape picture book. This is NOT NEW.
For all my formatting work to date, I discovered that landscape-format books are not, in practice, possible to publish within the self-publishing platform of the company I chose (which was the #1 top-rated self-publishing platform in 2014, FYI). After searching through the forums, I discovered THE workaround that many SMART folks were able to work out and subsequently shared. You basically have to think of the book pages as calendar pages bound at the top/bottom edges (see top row images). The pages are oriented such that upper page’s bottom edge and the lower page’s top edge meet to make the binding. In a picture book, the RIGHT edge of the LEFT page, and the LEFT edge of the RIGHT page meet to make the binding. In general, most of us do NOT want our books to be oriented like a calendar, opening vertically with image on top and calendar grid on bottom. SO, in your original software program where you created your pages, you must rotate the actual document SET-UP 90° so that your RIGHT edge of your LEFT page is now your top edge, and your LEFT edge of your RIGHT page is now the bottom edge.
Why, in the age of developing rovers for Mars, and the creation of the world wide web, we cannot manufacture a book in its proper orientation on the self-publishing platform, is BEYOND my capability of understanding or explaining. But this is what worked....
OR DOES IT?
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