Placing Illustrator EPS Problem

Question

I am trying to import an 6.875 x 10.5 inch document created in Illustrator CS6, saved as an eps, into Indesign CS6. Here is the problem:
The file is lettering for a comic book, so the lettering is randomly occuring on the page. It doesn't spread to the borders of the
of the 6.875 x 10.5 inch page. When I go to place it into Indesign, it comes in cropped to the dimensions of where the actual
lettering fitted on the illustrator page. (for example, if I just had once caption box with text in the middle of the page that was
1x5 inches, the imported eps document will come in as a 1x5 inch eps file.)  The problem here is that I can't center it properly
without having to adjust each imported eps and line it up with the page. This is rather diffucult because it has to line up precisely.
I remember this being a problem in CS4 also, but I came to a solution and can't remember what it was.
So my question is, How do I get Indesign to recognize the Illustrator eps as a 6.875 x 10.5 inch document that I can just center
using the align tools? Not sure if it is something in illustrator I need to do.
Any help is greatly appreciated.  Thanks!

Answer 1

One other thing. I used to be able to drag the file from "finder" on my mac, directly onto the ID document. It would then automatically place it there. Now when I do, there is the small preview box that comes up. I then have to double click to get the file to come in. Then it just crops it to the "artwork only", not the actually entire crop area. To top it off, once I get the file in, regardless of how, I can't use the align tools to get the file centered. This is really making my workflow counter productive. To have to "cnt + d" instead of just dragging and dropping the files and then using align tools to get everything centered is going to make putting a 200 page book a very long process. I have to be missing something here. I can't believe that these simple things would be removed from ID in the latest version.  Basically my work flow is this. Create an ID document and then drag and drop the "tiff" files of the art on one layer. Then doing to the same with the lettered eps files. The reason I don't just use the illustrator file is because when I save an Illustrator file that I simply add lettering on top of the artwork, it makes a 15mb piece of tiff artwork with the illustrator lettering into a 30mb file (if not larger). So I have to remove the art and then save it as an artless file, with just the lettering. I'd be more than happy to hear if anybody has a better way to do this. Illustrator is bloating my files. Once I separate the art and the lettering only files, I am working with the 15mb art and then 350kb eps file of the artwork, instead of working with a 30 plus mb Illustrator file. That starts to seriously make the file size of a 200 page book go up. Thanks