Having your own publishing house is a decision you need to make In today’s version of the publishing industry, you need one regardless. Even if you sell all your books to the big six, you’ll need a way to market yourself and help your book sales. This is much like the fact that all artists need a studio name. You need a professional interface with the world. On the practical side, you need to think about how … Continue reading →
Use bulleted lists The typographic use of bullets and dingbats is conceptually unknown to typists. Lists are at the core of non-fiction and blog typography. Bulleted lists are an extremely effective means of attracting the reader’s attention—as are numbered lists. In fact, there has been a lot of study to find out what readers see and respond to. There are specific paragraph types you can use effectively to attract the reader’s eye or to re-attract it if it is … Continue reading →
Where do you start? My assumption is that this is something you are already doing. You have been writing and you have a body of work you want to publish. If you are not writing, you are not a writer. This is not for people who say “I really want to write a book about…” some day in the undefined future. Writing may be cathartic therapy for you. It may be sharing the weirdness of life. It … Continue reading →
Letterspacing Here is another typesetting capability that cannot even be considered by word processors. We mentioned letterspacing earlier. Letterspacing is the built-in spacing between characters in a font. The basic idea is that the white space between letters should be identical for all letter pairs. Obviously, this is not simple or easy. AT, OOPS, and silly have very different spacing problems—especially the ill. The better the font, the better the letterspacing. In very cheap fonts, individual letters … Continue reading →
When you’re done writing and editing, it’s ready to print! This is probably the best part of the process. In the traditional scenario, design and formatting does not begin until the book is written and edited. If you are writing and editing in InDesign, when you are done writing, the book is ready to release. If you print on-demand, it can be available to your readers in a couple weeks or less (even today, depending on the … Continue reading →
8. No ALL CAPS As mentioned in the underline section, setting letters in all caps is the other way to emphasize words on a typewriter. Typesetting has many more options like italic, bold, bold italic, small caps. Plus we can use a larger size, a different font, a different color, and more. In fact, we must be careful we do not get carried away in our enthusiasm for all the options at our disposal. ALL CAPS IS … Continue reading →
For the past two decades, I have taught digital publishing skills. For the past fifteen years I have written and published books, both traditionally and on-demand. I have taught skills to present digital content transparently, effectively, and gracefully. I’ve learned how to present reader-centered books to my students and followers. But Word [and word processors in general] cannot do this. There are skills and capabilities that are necessary which are simply not available in Office. Here’s a … Continue reading →
6. Real quotes and apostrophes Here is another place where typewriters are limited by the lack of characters. All typewriters have is inch and foot marks. Quotation marks and apostrophes look very different. This is another typographical embarrassment when used incorrectly. There are more keystrokes you need to learn, though you can solve most of the problems by turning on Use Typographer’s Quotes in Type page of Preferences. The shortcut is Command+Option+Shift+’ by default to toggle this … Continue reading →
Niche writers to limited markets Here we begin to see the modern reality of publishing. The change is of the same type as we saw with the conversion in television from three, then four, gargantuan mass-market networks to the current reality of thousands of channels on cable and satellite. The same thing has happened in magazines where there are now over 10,000 magazines in the US alone. There are now millions of active blogs. We are currently … Continue reading →
Producing a KF8 Kindle book Until very recently, I gave some very explicit instructions for the construction of the HTML and CSS needed to step back in time to Amazon’s MOBI format. It was extremely limited in what was allowed. Designers are rarely good coders, and writers even less so. InDesign is the best tool we have at present, but there’s still a long way to go until some of the typographic niceties we rely on in print … Continue reading →