I was surprised to find that putting a book together--I mean designing it in a visual way--is actually an artistic process. That's completely different than formatting an e-book; with an e-book, you can't account for what device your work will be read on, and have to keep it all as simple as possible. No graphics, no fancy fonts, nada. With print, though, you get to play with all of that.
As a reader, we don't actually think about little things like font choice and margins, the spacing of each line. But all those things come together to create tone--to provide a full reading experience. Having only gone through the process once, I'd already say that I now think of an adult print book as a piece of visual art--every bit as much as a young reader's illustrated book.
That's truly been the coolest part of putting together indie work, being responsible for every last detail: it makes me think of the content in a new way. I'm now imagining of the end product from the get-go, even when I'm still in the earliest drafting phase...
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