InDesign settings

Hi Dave. Don't worry about the "slug." It's the area that is cut-off outside of your printed material. Set your bleed for .125 on all sides. Don't set up for facing pages, just single pages. While it's nice to see how spreads will look, this will just be a hassle when you have to create bleeds on all four sides as required. When you place your photos, make sure they, or your colored background, extend all the way to the outer bleed area, knowing that this area will get lopped off when the pages are trimmed. I also set up a "safe area" guide based on the safe area suggested on this site. Can't recall, but I think it's about .25 inside the page edge all around. While I've never seen pages trimmed anywhere near this (but it could happen), it's a good idea to stay clear of this outer boundary in the gutter between pages. You don't have to set a "document resolution." Just make sure your photos are 300 ppi. When I have all my pages the way I want them, I export a PDF, using the PDF X-1a preset. I open the PDF in Acrobat and export JPEGs. Then I create a .zip archive of everything and upload. For a full-wrap cover, you don';t find out the dimensions until you create your book, because the size is based exactly on your page count. I created a cover (in a seperate document) that was 18.375 x 7.25 (I have 32 pages in my book), and uploaded it with the rest of my pages. When I got to the cover selection page, I found out that it was a bit samller than what I needed, so I went back and resized accordingly and quickly uploaded a new cover.

Hope this helps. Good luck!

To clarify the InDesign bleed and slug settings - are those set at 1/8" so that the image ink (bleed) will go outside the trim area? I am a little confused on this as I have set the document size 1/4" larger.
Using "facing pages" and Bleed/Slug set at 0, I have set a .5" margin on the inside of each page and .25 larger on the other dimensions. I will keep my photos within that margin. I hope to add a background color to each page and don't want to end up with a white border.

What is the "slug" setting?

Should I be setting my document resolution to 300 dpi or 600 dpi?

How do you set up the full wrap cover image in InDesign. I will make separate file(s) for that. Or can I do that separately using BookMaker?

It may be an idea just to list the settings and upload steps that you know work well for InDesign.

I am really looking forward to seeing my first "book" - about a 6500 km. bike trip across Canada.
Thank You, .................. Dave