Category Archives: Book Production

I’m teaching a Webinar on troubleshooting the font design process

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Please click here to contact us with any questions Troubleshooting Your Fonts Webinar   Dear David,      Happy New Year and welcome back to the Fontlab webinar series! To start off the new year  (Tuesday, 21 January at 11:00CST) David Bergsland will talk to us about troubleshooting the font design process. For many, if not most, new font designers dealing with the sheer quantity of characters and glyphs is daunting. What is needed is a procedure to get your … Continue reading →

The new flat UIs or the Emperor has new clothes

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We all remember the story. A king is scammed by cunning tailors to walk around naked. The new iOS7 and Mavericks [OSX.9] are clear examples of this type of thinking. The lemming designers, like the Weather Channel, are beginning to run around proclaiming the wonders of the new kingly style. As you can see below, shutterstock claims the lemmings are going wild for the new style. Hey! The emperor is naked!!! Fashion which forgets about the reader … Continue reading →

Author beware! You are responsible to make good choices

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Dave Bricker posted a long article today about the dangers of publishing without knowing the expenses and requirements of book production. You need to read the article if you are ignorant of the scams perpetrated on authors. Most publishers you run across with a quick Google search as you start your hunt for help will be vanity houses seeking to scam the author. There are countless people lusting after your production money This is where you need … Continue reading →

A possible replacement for PDFs or a new type of book?

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This one almost slipped past me. Bob Levine wrote about  it at InDesign secrets. Adobe’s now giving away licenses to the .folio format. This could be huge! Magazines were dying because .folio was so expensive Now maybe we’ll see some more folio readers. Maybe tablet reader apps will be able to handle folio also. Maybe PDF will finally go the way of the dodo. The ability to offer books with multiple columns and portrait/landscape versions gives technical … Continue reading →

One main benefit to self-publishing and ebooks: unlimited shelf life

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Here’s a quote from my new book, Writing In InDesign CC, due out soon. I don’t know about you, but I tend forget this in the heat of the moment as I am launching a new book. “Sales continue to grow: Unless you are publishing very unique time-limited work, on-demand sales slowly grow and continue to grow. Because there are no warehousing issues, there are no reasons to stop selling your books. In many cases, your sales will … Continue reading →

Don’t toss your Pages 09! It’s needed to open RTF files

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One of the more irritating things about Mavericks is how some capabilities have been lost in the transition to newness. I do like the new free versions of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. I like them a whole lot more than Office, for sure. But some puzzling things have appeared. The one which affects me the most is the inability of the new Pages to open RTF files. This doesn’t sound too bad, but many of the word.docs … Continue reading →

Lightning Source: the pro’s choice for POD?

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The image is meaningless fill. I received this comment from Michael W. Perry, Inkling Books, Auburn, AL. I’ve been wanting a guest posting on this for a while, so I am appropriating his comments for that purpose. I’ve never dealt with LS. I never have the budget. But it is definitely the pros’ choice. Lightning Source is the print-on-demand supplier for the traditional publishers. Many authors find it very difficult to deal with, but Mike, like me, has … Continue reading →

Questions from authors about publishing their book

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I received this email a couple days ago. It is typical of the type of questions I get from every author for whom I either publish their book or produce the digital artwork for their book so they can publish it. The only proviso is that I only publish books for authors I know, for books that I like. I’m a fairly radical Christian, so I expect any books I publish will promote the Gospel, be a … Continue reading →

Desktop, laptop, or tablet?

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I found a good article today which explains many of the issues. My main issue with the conclusions is that I cannot be productive with a laptop. If you are just writing, an iPad with Apple’s wireless keyboard will do the job for you very well. The article misses my most important category of software apps: the Creative Cloud. My two most used apps [outside of Mail and Safari], are InDesign and Photoshop. I can easily see that … Continue reading →