Thanks for the suggestions. I am going on the cheap for now. I am proofing off my pdf files and the mock-up of my first draft that the printer made appears to look fine. My printer-publisher is a real person who I can talk to - much better than internet printers. He will do more layout, but for a price. At this point, I am still inclined to do this myself.

WORD does allow you to keep the photos outside of the document and link it. I do a lot of adjusting of size on the photos while I edit the text so having them in the document works well. For example, if I add a sentence, then I just crop a line's height off the photo. I am really trying to keep the book strictly within a specified page limit.

The latest quirk I ran across is that an imported "Picture as meta-file" with a border drawn in WORD looks fine in WORD, but when I pdf, the border turns into a dotted line, no matter what PDF options I use! I noticed that if the "picture as metafile" was assigned a "tight right" layout, then I got my solid line back in the pdf. So now I assign all meta-files this format even if they are full page graphics. Go figure? I have no idea why this works.

Yes, I think a real professional would know why all this stuff happens. I just trail and error until I get something to work.