making My Life with Master a sellable pdf

Definitely 150 dpi for everything. Even at 72 dpi, fonts still come out looking good. Keeping line art at 300 or 600 dpi has never made any difference in print quality as far as PDFs are concerned, so for file size, we set everything at 150 dpi. And bookmarks, bookmarks bookmarks! Not everyone's going to print it out, after all.

As far as separate covers, one of the things no one has ever bugged us for is a back cover to any of our PDFs. I know a lot of folks don't even print the cover part, they just start with page 2, if they print it at all.

You do not need to resample or replace your images. Distiller will take care of downsampling everything. Our art is 300 dpi at least when I place it, then I downsample them to 150 dpi through Distiller.

Clicking on Job Options for any of those settings allows you to change any settings you choose. For instance, we have a setting which creates small file sized for PDFs and one for high graphics capabilities specifically for print products.

In certain layout programs, you will need to set the Properties of Distiller to get them to match up to what you've put into your Distiller settings. I know if I don't do that in Quark, it sometimes crashes.