Indesign:: Large Square Book:: a few questions; page color, text stroke, etc..

Hello Blurb,

I’m completely new to Blurb, and relatively new to InDesign (photoshop has always been my thing).

I have an e-book I designed in InDesign that I decided I want to print with Blurb. I have decided on the Large Square size.

First, is there any easy way to set my page color to Black? I tried setting it on my master page, but the gray boxes in the template still showed and I was unsure if those would show up in printing or not….?

To get around the page color problem, I created a black rectangle for each page and made it as big as the bleed…. I want my pages entirely black – is this the correct way to do this?

I also am having a strange problem: any white text I copy from my ebook into the blurb template suddenly has a stroke effect applied to it… and I do not want any stroke! How do I get rid of that?

I am super grateful for any help in advance – I am stuck!

-R