Layout books
Coloring books, picture books, planners, recipe books, photo books, word searches and sudoku — where the page is the unit of authorship and the page count is exact.
A layout book is one whose pages are composed rather than flowed. Seven presets share one page designer:
| Preset | Pages are | Typical trim |
|---|---|---|
| Coloring book | Line-art designs, optionally with colour guides | Large, black ink |
| Picture book | Illustrated spreads with a few sentences of story | Square or landscape |
| Planner | Weekly and monthly spreads, trackers, ruled pages | Letter or A5 |
| Recipe book | Photo, ingredients, method, section openers, index | Mid-size, colour |
| Photo book | Full-bleed plates, facing pairs, section openers | Large, colour |
| Word search | Puzzle grids generated from your word lists, plus an answer key | Large, black ink |
| Sudoku | Grids from 4×4 to 16×16, generated from the pages themselves, plus an answer key | Large, black ink |
Because you made every page, the page count is exact — not estimated from a word count the way a novel's is. That matters more than it sounds: the spine, the print cost and the release checks all depend on it.
The workflow
- The brief — what kind of book, how many pages, and the questions specific to your preset. The brief is also the prompt: your answers steer every page and every illustration.
- The page plan — one row per page, with a name, an art brief and (where the preset has words) the text.
- Page layouts — pick a layout for the book, or design your own template.
- The page designer — the canvas. Layers, multi-selection, undo, alignment, text styles and preflight.
- AI page art — render the illustrations, priced per page and quoted before you spend. For a word search, step five is generating the puzzles instead — free, deterministic, and with an answer key of its own; for a sudoku book it is generating the sudoku, which needs no input from you at all.
- Publishing — measure, check and bundle.
Two things that are easy to get wrong
Ink, paper and what it costs — colour costs several times what black does per page, and on most platforms it cannot be changed after you publish. Read this before you design.
Trim and page count are constrained per preset. A picture book at 32 pages can only be a paperback in premium colour on most printers. The presets start you in a configuration that actually prints, which is why some fields are dropdowns rather than free numbers.
What a preset actually is
A set of defaults and rules — trims, ink, paper, bleed, whether pages are authored as spreads, the questions in the brief, the prompt used for the page plan, and whether the preset has AI art at all.
A planner has no art step, because a planner's pages come from arithmetic. Its step two is a structure builder instead: choose templates, repeat them across the book, no credits spent.
Neither puzzle preset has an art step, for the same reason — a grid is arithmetic. A word search's pages are generated from word lists you write or import; a sudoku's are generated from nothing at all. For both, the only thing that can spend credits is one optional page border shared by every page in the book.