Have you ever done book design via Word? How did it turn out? I've been reading Aaron Shepard's books and am intrigued?

Word is a great program for typing, doing some light page layout adding a illustration or two - but if you are serious about publishing your work, your book will most have its layout done in something more professional. Like Quark Express or Adobe InDesign. See, Word is OK or even great for "direct to desktop printer" work.

But, when a book is printed in greater quantities it is not done page by page. Depending on the number of copies and page format 8 to 16 or 32 pages are printed at the same time on large sheets of paper, which are then folded, put together in the right sequence, bound and cut to size. If you want to know more about the process, check this page:http://www.howstuffworks.com/offset-printing.htmBut all that shouldn't really concern you just yet.

If you are planning on doing maybe a couple of small books, for test purposes or for your friends and family, you can get by just fine with Word. I'd suggest only, if you are going to take the files to some other place to get them printed - copy all the fonts, images etc. that you used with your Word file into a separate folder on that disk. Just in case if some last minute corrections are needed.

Don't drop them into another Word file. If you used JPEGs keep them that way. Word is not intended for graphic work.

Other programs like PhotoShop are used for that. And what may seem just fine to you as a lay person - to a professional might be completely unusable. Word is not really great in keeping the layout intact when transferring from one computer to the other.

In fact - its horrible. :PA good thing would be to also make a PDF file when you carry your final work to the printer - PDF can save fonts inside the document and also its page layout stays the same where ever you open it.