The Shortlist Episode 79: The Short(er) List: InDesign Books

In this delightfully chaotic, laugh-filled bonus episode of The Short(er) List, we dive deeper into a hot topic in proposal document creation: InDesign Books. Designers Becky Ellison and Lauren Jane Peterson unpack when and why to use them, share tips to keep you sane, confess the joys and terrors of page numbering, and honor the sacred role of the all‑powerful ‘Keeper of the Book’. They also share real‑world war stories from huge AEC proposals, swap workflow hacks, and do their best to make sense of managing multiple people editing multiple files.

And because this is The Short(er) List, expect tangents including reading recommendations, animals, Lauren Jane’s incredible hair, and whether InDesign files have souls. (JK… kind of). It’s nerdy, it’s fun, and there’s something for everyone, whether you’re trying to stay up on InDesign best practices or just have a laugh with MO6’s graphic designers. And it makes a great companion to Episode 76: InDesign Rumble (Part 2)!

Podcast Transcript

Welcome to The Shorter List. Hi, I am Becky Ellison from The Short List Podcast, and I am going rogue, because apparently some things are just too silly, weird, or extra to fit into our regular Short List episodes.

So we are bringing those conversations, rants, and other fun stuff that was too spicy for TV direct to you in bite-sized little podcast treats hosted by me and featuring all of your favorite middle sexers.

I am here today with Lauren Jane Peterson, and I also stole our producer, Kyle Davis. Let's get right into it. Today, we are talking about an incredibly dramatic, exciting, mysterious topic.

We talked about this a little bit more in the main Shortlist episode about InDesign and all things related to it, and we went off on a little bit of a tangent on one of our favorite spiciest topics, which is InDesign Books.

So that's what we're gonna be talking about today. Lauren Jane, how you doing? How's it going?

How's it been? How's your week? How's your life?

Oh, good.

It's great. Very happy to be here. It's nice and fun to do something a little different.

And I'm glad that The Shortlist exists. So, you know, inaugural episode for me.

Well, I'm glad you exist. Thanks so much for being on it. I enjoyed our conversation as we were chatting about InDesign, fighting about things.

And I don't know that we actually argued about anything this time. Like, did we have differing? I think page numbering might have been a hot issue.

That was something we...

I don't know. We're pretty much on the same page. And honestly, like, whenever we disagree about things, I see what you did there.

Whenever we disagree about things, I can totally see your case, right? It's not like I actually disagree. It's most of the time a preference, like a working style.

Yeah, it's like, it's hateful respect.

Like, I don't know, Taylor Swift and Beyonce or something. I don't think they even hate each other.

Do they hate each other?

We also don't hate each other. I have no idea why I said that. Okay, so.

We're just two superstars living our best lives.

That is, yeah, that's true.

That comparison, that's very fair. I guess we're both great at our jobs and we have a lot of fun.

All right, well, we'll see you next week. No, we're talking about InDesign Books. We're getting back to the topic someday.

I will get back to the topic on the show. So InDesign Books are something that keep coming up. We have a lot of clients who are using them because they've got a lot of people on their team working in different sections at a time.

It can be efficient. We talked about some of the pros and cons of that. But people are always asking, what's the best way to do it?

What are the best practices? How do we make this work? What mistakes are we making?

That sort of thing. Do you have anything that just immediately comes up as like, oops, this is like the number one mistake not to do, or like best, what's your number one hot tip?

Well, if I can, I want to zoom out a little bit or I guess back up and talk for a second of why. Why would someone use a book versus not?

InDesign Books were not a very common thing at Middle of Six, but certain people and certain firms use them a lot. I think it's worth chatting, why would you use it? Why would you not?

It can feel a little daunting or confusing. Admittedly, when we started using them at Middle of Six, it was like, okay, here's the instructions, everybody make sure you read this. It's different than normal, right?

It's doing something different. So, I mean, what was your... I think you were a little unsure if you liked books, right?

No.

So, what was your choice?

No, I was apprehensive about books because it can be really complicated.

And especially if you're not working in a group of people and you're just sort of experimenting, like, I wonder if books is the way to go. It's very easy to wait into the weeds and be like, why are we doing this? What is happening?

But then I got some experience working with multiple people at the same time on different sections and found like, this is the best thing ever, as long as you don't have people going incredibly rogue with styles.

But I just, yeah, I kind of saw it as like being, you know, kind of not making sense. It's not very intuitive.

You do have to kind of get some practice with it to understand where the things are, what they do, get that panel open and figure out what does it do. Do I have to open the book? Do I have to close the book?

Honestly, after working with books, I still don't know whether I would advise somebody to like officially close the book, because I don't think we ever did when we were working on it and anything like that.

We just kind of like saved and went as we go. Do you have thoughts on opening and closing the book?

Listen, I have my own process, but even if you look online, you know, like InDesign Secrets or some other places, everybody has like slightly different recommendations for things.

So that's where it feels a little, can feel a little daunting or confusing. Like many of the Adobe products, InDesign, there's like five ways that you can do something. But the way I'm thinking about it is like, you know what, as long as there's...

Okay, here's how Middle of Six handles it. If there's one person that is kind of the keeper of the book, which sounds very like, I don't know, Lord of the Rings fantasy. Keeper of the Book?

Yeah, the elder of the scrolls.

It is a strange fate that we should suffer so much fear and doubt. It was so small a thing.

As long as there is a keeper of the book and there's one person that is essentially managing it from a stylistic and structural organizational standpoint, it will be okay.

The closing and saving of the book, generally, I tell people, let's say I was the keeper of the book and there was the three of us, like me and Kyle, I'd say, don't save the book because each of your files, you want to save that.

But we don't need multiple people saving book styles or preferences. There just needs to be one, essentially one source of truth, like one keeper of the book. This is really dramatic.

It's getting esoteric, but I'm into it.

So that's my thought on saving the book.

I thought of an ending for my book. For sure.

Yeah, don't save the book, save yourselves, run for your lives. That was the workflow that we did because I worked with one of our stellar project managers here, Katie, on a proposal that was enormous.

It was like a million pages, a million different sections. We had tons of people working on it at the same time. It was very locked down.

It was like, don't do this. Whatever you do, don't do that. We were all scared in the beginning, but as we got the hang of it, we just like no one was saving the book unless something got changed in the styles or whatever, and that ended up being me.

Somehow, I was keeping the truth, Keeper of the Book or whatever. I would only save it like when I change something core to it, like styles, that sort of thing, and I realized you can just save the files and bring them in.

Another super important thing is page numbering, which we've talked about in the context of just like, when do you do it and how do you do it?

And I'm not sure that there is a more efficient way other than going through and creating sections when you have pages that don't count, blank pages, tabs, sections where the page numbering is skipped. Everyone knows what I'm talking about.

So what I will do is just no page numbers, don't even worry about it, leave them, and then at the end I will go through and then do the sections and skip the ones that don't count because it's a very tedious process that requires focus.

So with books, it's essentially the same thing, but all you have to do is make sure that you're using those footers that are pulling from the actual page number. Do not insert page numbers yourself or this will never work.

But then you bring them together in that books window and then you can, like the books panel, you can tell it to number the pages, update the page numbering, and it will do that throughout your whole book as long as you have those sections in place

and your page numbers are pulling automatically. And then that way, that's what keeps your book numbered in order, even if you have crazy sections all over the place throughout your document.

I also want to remind everyone listening that there's an option in the book menu, right? So there's that little hamburger menu on the right.

If you open the menu, there's update numbering, and then there's another kind of submenu, and you can choose to update page and section numbers, or update chapter and paragraph numbers, or update all numbers, right?

So there are some settings in there, too, that you can go in, and then there's also the book page numbering options, which give you some deeper controls over that.

So you do have a little bit of customization, and Becky likes to go in at the end and do page numbering.

I like to do it from the beginning, because if I try to count, I'm like, I don't know if I have a counting problem or what, but I don't trust that I'm counting properly. So I try to use, I kind of do both, right?

I count by hand, but then I also use, let InDesign do the work for me and count, especially when we're working on big public transit proposals that could be 100 plus pages, right? Massive behemoth ones.

So then if you're adding and deleting pages, then are you're not worried that your numbering is going to go wire?

No.

So what I did on our last big transit proposal that I was on, essentially said to the team, if you add or take away a page, that's totally fine, but let me know, and then I'll sink the book. So then all the numbers will be...

Oh, you kept it.

Yeah. Yep. And I just said, if you can add or delete pages, that's totally fine.

Just let me know. Something else that we did was set a time every day when the page numbers and the book was going to get synced. That seemed to work really well because we were just, I mean, you know how proposal land is, right?

Sometimes it's slow, but then sometimes it's just like turn and burn, like you were racing to the finish line.

Seconds count.

I found that every day, at the end of the day was a really good time because everybody was wrapping their stuff up. Let's say I did, I don't know, from 4.30 to 5.

Every single day is essentially like a blackout period and you can't work in the book, you can't work in any documents, you need to be out. I would put in our chat, hey, let me know when you're out of the book, give me a thumbs up, do a manual.

Essentially, everybody's out, pencils down so that I could sync everything and that way, there weren't any surprises a full week later when I synced the book. It was every day, it updated. So that's how I ran it and it seemed to work okay.

Awesome.

So we want to have somebody be a keeper of the book, they're maintaining the styles, they're maintaining the structure, they're in charge, they can tell everybody to stop working. It's a fun power trip.

If there are things in your life you can't control, control the book. And then we want to make sure that we have pages correctly numbered, whether you're doing that as you go via the Lauren Jane method or doing it at the end via the Becky method.

Both methods are fine and work very well depending on how your brain works go, go forth and number pages. But we want to make sure that the book styles are never being redefined in various files versus the book.

If you want to change, you know, the headers and everything, you know, for the love of God, don't change it in one file and just save it there. You've got to go back to the style source. You've always got to have a style source set.

You've got to make sure that that document is where all the styles live because then every time you save the book, it will push, it will sink that out to the other books. And then we can confidently say that everybody can take a deep breath.

So I really, if you do not have to open and close the book and save the book, every time you work on an individual file in the book, because saving the book is only for saving book-wide changes such as styles, or I think even parent pages would be

By the style source.

Those would come from the style source as well.

So like, yeah.

When you are in the book, again, that drop down menu, there's a synchronize options selection. And if you go in there, you can also control if you want to synchronize parent pages, if you want to synchronize styles.

So let's say you're at the very end of the project and you're panicking a little bit because you added some style, text style to document number three, and it's not your style source.

You can turn off, synchronize paragraph styles and text styles or character styles and still synchronize the book, right? So there are options and workarounds if you're like, oh no, dang, right?

Like you can turn that off technically and still sync the book, still sync page numbers. It's not the end of the world. You just really have to pay attention, right?

I think at the end of the day, using books is really efficient or can be very efficient, but you have to pay attention. You have to slow down a little bit more.

Yeah, pay attention and slow down such as like this.

I think that's true of anything. So what's your book threshold? Like when would you say like this should, you should be using books for this, but you don't need to use books for that.

What would you advise somebody?

I'd say there's two factors that we're looking at. It's length of proposal and number of team members that need to work on the proposal. And, you know, all of those things wrap up under timeline and due date and deadline.

If you have a proposal that's, I don't know, more than 20 pages, I'd say pretty good case for using books. If you're a solo marketer and you're the only one in the file, you don't need a book.

Unless it's a really, really long document and it helps you open and close documents faster because your machine, you know, could have a hard time opening a 100 page document.

That's right. Yeah, file sizes and stuff.

That's a good thing to think about. And then the other thing is if there's, I'd say three or more people working in a document.

Two is, I think, fine if you're on a decent time constraint, but if there's three or more and you're turning on a proposal and you really need to be working at the same time, Books is essentially Adobe's solution to be able to work on something at

the same time because it's not cloud-based, right? We can't be in the same file at the same time.

Yeah, one tricky little thing there is if you are on a OneDrive, a shared drive, which we at Middle of Six are, you have already found that you are able to get into the same InDesign file at the same time, which is, I don't know, some kind of a bug.

I'm not sure on whose part that is, but we have tried everything in the world to get around that. It's currently not possible that we are aware of so you could potentially have the same issue with books.

That's why we had our Keeper of the Book lay down the law that whenever you're in a file, you got to let people know.

You shall not pass!

Because if you do have two people open the same file, save it to the book, then it creates copies. There's all kinds of chaos. You do still have to be a little bit careful if you are one of the very special shared drive folks.

Everyone else, cover your ears. This won't even apply to you because you get locked files and they actually work. Just be aware that you still do not want to try to work in the same file at the same time.

Books cannot solve everything.

But multiple people can have the book open.

Correct. Yes.

Not the document. We want to open the book and then open the document, but it's okay if multiple people are in the book at the same time because you want to open your documents from the book.

But you don't necessarily have to open the book to open the file. You could just open a file without ever opening the book and just work on it, save it, close it.

So I think this is a OneDrive issue. So at my former place of employment, we were not on OneDrive. And if you did not open the document from the book, you got an error.

Interesting.

Yes.

So I think my suggestion still is to have the book open and open the document from the book or else you're going to get that little triangle of death that says there's an error. Sure.

Because we're on OneDrive and there's some like lockfile and syncing issues with books specifically and InDesign files specifically, it's slightly different. And I think it functions a little bit wonky.

Again, my advice is to still open from the book.

Open from the book.

But that might be a, yeah, that might be a holdover from the olden days. I don't know.

See, this is good.

I'd like to hear if anybody has different experience. I want to hear call now. What that is.

Yeah.

Operators are standing by. Yeah. Hit us up on social media.

Yeah, truly. Books are such a wild west last frontier kind of thing because we're all just trying and experimenting as we go.

As you just heard, Lauren Jane's experience with books included a non-OneDrive environment where it was a totally different scenario. You had to open the book.

I think I was just so angered by books that I left them alone for so long that I'm coming from the OneDrive world where you could just open the file, but you never know. Interesting. Speaking of books, have you read any good books this year?

It's been a short year. It's only a little while. Have you read any good books recently?

Well, Romanticy is what I've been reading lately.

So I don't know.

Maybe we have arrived listeners.

Lean in. Let's go.

What's the best book you've read in the last 10 years? Just give it to me straight.

Oh my gosh. Best book I read in the last 10 years. I would say that the Philip Pullman series that is the Golden Compass, that's not what the series is called.

It's the first book of the series, Change My Life. It is his Dark Materials. That's the name of the series.

Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials.

That sounds familiar. I've heard of that.

It is so beautiful. It's technically a young adult, like teen lit. Sure.

And it's so beautiful. And the relationship with people and animals that are kind of spirit animals are called demons in the series. It is so beautiful.

Kyle, have you read it?

Kyle's nodding vigorously, the listeners.

I set out for the north some 12 months ago.

This is the first of the discoveries I made.

A city in the sky. It's beautiful.

I didn't watch the show at all, but the books are so beautiful. They're so beautiful. And it was the first thing that I'd read in a long time that I felt very actually changed by.

It changed you.

I want to get into like, how did it change you? But I feel like we're probably going to be over time and way off topic.

Made me think a lot about like, what is your spirit? And is your spirit inside or out of your body? And like, how does that live on?

And like, is it an animal? Or like, if it was an animal and embodied by animal, what would it be like?

I mean, that brings us back to InDesign Books, which is, you know, the spirit. Is it the book? Is it the file?

Are they one in the same? Can they coexist?

I think it's the book. I think the spirit is the book.

Can the file exist without the book and vice versa? Yeah, so I think that's actually very on topic, and thank you for sharing. Anyway, yeah, no, that was a good conversation.

Again, listeners, if you are having problems with books, if you are wondering, you know, how to do something, trying, wanting to experiment, again, I would always encourage you, try things, try it out, make some fake files, do your own thing,

experiment, and please, please contact us. Let us know, hit us up on social media.

Lauren Jane and I would both be very happy to show you how to do something, or get on a call or whatever, you know, if you would like to get in touch and work through something, we're excited, we're learning too, so let us know.

But yeah, thanks, Lauren Jane. This was amazing. I had a great time.

I want to talk about more things. I want to hear more about this book that changed your life. But I think we got to wrap it up.

We got to hit the road. So listeners, rate, subscribe. Remember to share the love, make a friend, recommend the podcast to another AEC marketer who wants to feel seen because we see you and we love you.

So see you next week with something probably even weirder. Yeah, that's it.

Can't wait to be on again. Thanks so much for having me.

Thank you for being here. Your hair looks amazing. Listeners, her hair looks really good.

I don't, I can't even describe. It's like flaxen, golden. It's like shining in the sun.

Like the wheat of the Elysian fields kind of like, it's a shame you're missing it. Well, anyway, thanks everyone for tuning in and hope your week is great.

Bye.

We love you.

Bye.

Okay, was that usable?

I mean, like, you might have to cut a lot of that out, Kyle.

The Shortlist is a podcast that explores all things AEC marketing. Hosted by Middle of Six Principal, Wendy Simmons, each episode features members of the MOS team, where we take a deep dive on a wide range of topics related to AEC marketing including: proposal development, strategy, team building, business development, branding, digital marketing, and more. You can listen to our full archive of episodes here.