If you are self-publishing, one of your tasks is to design the interior of your book. You can use your word processor, but that often leads to a shoddy job (see Book Interior Design: Tips to Avoid the Amateur Look). Scribus is an open-source desktop publishing program that you can use for your book interior design. In this post, I’m going to provide some Scribus files that you can use as templates to develop your book interior design. Instructions included.
Scribus
You will, of course, need Scribus, which is available for a number of platforms. As a believer in open-source software, I’m using Linux (Ubuntu, to be exact). If you are new to Scribus, be warned: Scribus has a moderately steep learning curve. (Not as steep, however, as Adobe InDesign.) This is why you want to start with a template to work with as you learn the ins and outs of the program.
The Templates
I’ve made three templates: one for the front matter of your book, one for the book chapters, and one which is the front matter and beginning of the soon-to-be-best-selling novel “Lollipop” by Volomire Nobakeoff. The templates are for a 9 in x 6 in page size book and are available in the Downloads section below. As examples, I made Lollipop.pdf from Lollipop.sla and Mody_Dick.pdf from the basic novel templates. I provide everything you need to make the files except the fonts.
The Fonts
The templates use only two fonts; download them here: EB Garamond and Sorts Mill Goudy. Instead of these fonts, you can use any fonts on your system. In order to use different fonts, you will have to edit the Scribus styles.
Work Flow
Scribus slows down with large files. I once tried to work with a 68,000 word novel and it was unusable. The best way to use Scribus is to make your front matter and individual chapters as single files then put them together later with a separate program. I used pdftk in Linux but there are programs for Windows and the Mac that will do the same thing. Below, I provide a file called How_to_Use_the_Templates.pdf which describes the making of Moby_Dick.pdf from the basic novel templates.
An advantage to this method is it is easy to find a mistake that you know is in, for instance, chapter 3 and fix it. Another is that if you make a horrible mistake and completely mess up, you have only destroyed one chapter an not the whole book.
One of the drawbacks to this method is that changing anything in your book that affects the whole book, such as margins, fonts, location of headers, or page size requires you edit all the files. So carefully consider the look and feel of your book before you start final production. I make a bunch of separate front matter and chapter files and print them out to see how they look. When I’ve got the look I want, I start making the final book.
Downloads
basic_novel.zip – (896 kB) – This zip file unzips to a folder containing everything below. (896.5 kB)
Lollipop.sla – (86.8 kB) – The Scribus file for the beginning of “Lollipop” by Volomire Nobakeoff.
Lollipop.pdf – (238.4 kB) – The PDF file from Lollipop.sla.
basic_novel_front_matter_template.sla – (60.2 kB) – The Scribus file for the front matter of your book. This is a text file. It may open directly in your browser. Just “Save Page as” – it will have the extension .sla and it will work fine.
basic_novel_chapter_template.sla – (78.2 kB) – The Scribus file for the book chapters. Opens as a text file. “Save Page as”.
basic_novel_template_information.txt – (1.3 kB) – This file contains information about page size, margins, fonts, styles, and more. A big help if you are trying to learn Scribus.
How_To_Use_the_Templates.pdf – (43.4 kB) – The instructions for how to use the basic novel templates. Required reading. I use the example of making Moby_Dick.pdf from the basic novel templates and the Moby Dick text.
Moby_Dick.txt – (52.4 kB) – The text of the first three chapters of Moby Dick by Herman Melville.
Mody_Dick.pdf – (758.8 kB) – The PDF file resulting from the How_To_Use_the_Templates.pdf instructions.
Update
This posted was updated on 5/23/16. The first paragraph of chapter 1 in “Lollipop” and the first paragraph in chapter 3 of “Moby Dick” were formatted as “paragraph indent”. This is, of course, wrong: the first paragraph of the chapter should be “paragraph no indent”. This has been corrected in all files.
A third font, Alegreya, slipped into the templates as the page number font. This has been changed to EB Garamond. Also one of the page numbers was formatted as italic. This has been changed to normal.
Thank you!!
How do you download templates for Scribus? I have been unable to find a step by step guide on how to see the new templates which I have downloaded directly to the templates folder in Scribus. Thank you.
Hi Jay,
My template files are regular Scribus .sla files. Make copies, put the files in your working folder, and open them as you would any file in Scribus. Double clicking on the file usually works. If not, start Scribus and use File Menu -> Open… and you should be able to select the file you want to use.
Hope this helps.
I have a question. In InDesign, you can sync up all of the individual chapter files (if you decide to make each chapter different files) and if you add or subtract a page from that file, the entire collection of files updates its page numbers to reflect the change. There is also a master template(s) from which one can assign to each page. The advantage of this is that when make a change there, it automatically updates all of the files using that master template. Lastly, one of the reasons why I am searching for alternative software is because InDesign does not allow footnotes with tables, which is critical for academic writing. So how does Scribus handle each of these issues provided above? I appreciate your time and look forward to your reply.
In Scribus, you can put all the chapters together and get the advantages you mention. However, with all the Scribus versions I’ve used, the programs gets very, very slow. So slow as to be unusable. For my book-length projects, I’ve broken the chapters down into separate files, as I indicate in my post. This means that small changes, like repositioning the running heads are a pain. The Scribus people know it is slow with book-length files. I would advise using Scribus only for your final production. It is likely a bad idea to use it for writing or much editing.
I have not tried to use tables in footnotes. The table function in the version I’m using, 1.4.6, is kludgey. The scribus wiki has an announcement about the improved table handling in Scribus 1.6. See here.
I wish you luck. If you are writing academic papers or a dissertation, you might try Latex. I have used Latex for my document preparation for years. I think Scribus is better for book projects and magazine-style layouts, but Latex works well for documents.
This is such an incredible resource you’ve put into the world for free. I can’t thank you enough for your time — you’ve given me hope for creating a product of which I’m proud.
I guess that the folks who put out Garamond have changed their naming conventions a bit. Your Scribus template searches for EB Garamond 12 SC Regular, when I believe the name is now EB Garamond SC 12 Regular. Or maybe these are different and I’m messing up!
Best,
Anthony
Anthony,
I just looked in my system and I have three small cap (SC) Garamond fonts: EB Garamond 12 SC (the one in my template), EB Garamond SC 12 (the one listed by Font Squirrel), and EB Garamond ALL SC. The first two look identical but the third is different.
I’m betting you could find the EB Garamond 12 SC by searching the web. If I revisit this template, I might change the name to reflect the FontSquirrel offering. Best of luck in your endeavors, -John