Awww, thanks, @Vincent_Vincent !
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This depends upon one’s objectives.
As a fiction writer with limited resources, I agree with @drmajorbob . I deliberately chose mid-list conventionally published authors’ books as my models for both print-on-demand and e-book output. This gave me assurance that the book designs I copied were professional quality, but did not include the bells-and-whistles that a publisher’s flagship author might receive. Scrivener handled this with ease, as well as formatting short fiction for contest and magazine submission.
I’ve managed to produce tables in back matter. I would feel reasonably confident trying either a small chapter-head illustration, or a beginning of chapter left-hand page full page illustration. I attempted drop-caps once, and after much cursing found another way to set off the first paragraph of a chapter—and there are several quite professional ways of doing this.
One thing I always keep in mind that what looks good in paper books often looks execrable in e-books, and is very difficult to duplicate, besides. One need look no further than professional publishers’ products to find many regrettable examples.
Hope this helps!
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@Silverdragon I agree on all counts. I also just added a table to my front matter to place my publisher’s logomark and their company name side by side.
I hear you about eBooks. The good news is I’ve been a web developer for 25 years, and eBooks are mostly just html and css, so I’m modifying my eBook to have things like custom fonts and some other niceties. That will also be the topic of my final class (in a few weeks).
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