Joel rarely writes for his blog any more, but it is a treat when he does. Today’s article is an excellent example of why his blog is so good: clean, concise, and useful. We can boil down the advice to the following: Fiction authors are unknown Fiction is marketed to a much wider audience who is initially unknown by the author. The new author needs to work very hard on becoming known. Giving away books is essential as … Continue reading →
Click to enlarge As you know, I am convinced that you are hurting your chances with your book if you do not use InDesign in the production process. This is even more true now that InDesign CC 2014 has added the direct export of fixed layout ePUBs. Plus, no one exports the quality of PDF produced by InDesign for print and downloadable PDFs. InDesign now has five ebook export options Actually, with all the options, there are even … Continue reading →
Shatzin has an excellent post today. He still sees the development of larger and larger publishers resulting in a global dominance of someone. Online book sales are inevitably going to increase their percentage. There will be a larger separation between books of text and books with graphics. Much more: you should read the article.
Continue reading →I received this post today from GoodReads purporting to give reasonable figures for editing and page layout for books. The table is from the original blog posting. While these may be common charges for freelancers living in large cities, they only serve to show how far out of touch the bi-coastal publishing industry has gotten. Let me give you some idea of what we are talking about here. I just finished a non-fiction book today with 124,000 … Continue reading →
Forbes has a fun article called: The Man Who Took on Amazon and Saved a Bookstore It is this type of technology which will let the local bookstore compete against Amazon. The Expresso Book Machine can publish out-of-print titles and much more. Of course, Createspace can do this also. It will be interesting to see how Expresso develops. I’m checking it out to see if they will list my books. For those not familiar, the Expresso … Continue reading →
From the Shatzin files this morning: “I think the questioner in this case was also trying to pull us into a discussion of video, audio, interaction, and linking, which I resist for two reasons. One is that, so far, the preponderence of ebooks that have sold any appreciable quantities have not had any of those attributes. They’re just the same words as in the printed books made reflowable for a screen. The second is that my world … Continue reading →
My handbook for the new breed of self-publisher is out! Why do you need to read this book? As I have become involved with the amazing variety of the new breed of authors—self publishing pioneers, it has been stunning to watch and listen as they discuss the problems they are having because they are working in Word. If they are dealing with quality issues, Word rarely has an answer. In fact, it’s sad to see that there … Continue reading →
Now I admit, I’m going on the words of others. I personally bailed on the Nook app and B&N a while ago. I am saddened by the troubles of the local B&N—it’s the only bookstore in town. I was hoping for viable competition to Amazon, but it is just not there. As they are stuck in a supposedly poor version of proprietary DRM, the smelly ears syndrome has got them in its clutches. I’m slightly hopeful that Riggio … Continue reading →
Before I get started with the basics of formatting I need remind you about the goal: a beautiful book which is comfortable to read. You need a customized set of styles to enable you to keep your book consistent and give you global control over the entire book as you format. This is only possible if you first understand how to design paragraphs. I will help you through the basic set up of styles (to implement your … Continue reading →
There are many benefits of the new self-publishing options. I’ll cover the financial at the end. It is very fast! One of the real changes in the new paradigm is the speed with which you can release books, booklets, posters, and so on. If you have proofed copy that is ready to format, you can get it published and released in a day or so. The limitation is only your formatting speed. With the techniques and workflow … Continue reading →
