The distraction of COVID-19 fear is foolishness. I’m not saying that the virus is not dangerous. You should be following the CDC guidelines. But the fear is foolishness. Life in the flesh is a terminal condition. Your flesh is going to die. There have only been two men in history whose flesh did not die: Enoch and Ezekiel. This is nothing new and the death of your flesh is no big deal. Unless, of course, you have … Continue reading →
I received a solid article on presentation design this morning. Building powerful presentations with type requires good typographic knowledge and a clear understanding of readability. I don’t think Illene went far enough on some points, but basically, keep it simple and clean with legible fonts. Simple, right? Certainly not! You’re fighting habitual reader/listener issues—boredom, attention deficit, ignorance, and a host of other issues. Your presentation needs to be one of your most powerful tools. You need superior tools—and … Continue reading →
It seems like book marketing sanely gets attention the old-fashioned way with well-written content. Sarah, in her blog Marketing Christian Books, has an interesting post this morning called How to get more attention for your books. The idea of intense, seemingly unnatural, social campaigns may be slowly passing away. Don’t get too excited though. The idea that search engines are pulling back in front of social media is no real surprise. However, it remains true that this applies more to … Continue reading →
The new InDesign update arrives with more than just a bunch of fixes. It gives us new controls for shading and borders in consecutive paragraphs. You can now export a document as individual page PDFs. There are several other things which might interest you. You can find them at Adobe’s What’s New page. Dealing with consecutive paragraphs As you probably recall, if you had shading or borders applied to consecutive paragraphs, you were forced to have a style … Continue reading →
Susan, at Marketing Christian Books, makes an excellent point this morning—even for non-believers. You have to believe your book will change lives to market it effectively. This is contrary to the publisher’s position which is to believe your book will make them money. That may drive your publisher, but it will not drive your readers. Here’s a quote from Susan: Do I believe that my book has the power to help someone change their life for eternity? … Continue reading →
Again, Kindle image size rules change. Not a whole lot, but the new outrageous Kindle image sizes become more understandable. I was reading a Kindle formatting guide, from Amazon, the other day which said full-width images needed to be 3000 pixels wide. This is not that bad. However, in Aaron Shepard’s Publishing Blog today, I read the following paragraphs: But not long ago, I received one of those dread quality notices from Amazon, in this case warning me of … Continue reading →
The 2018 publishing realities are no surprise to any of us who have been working and keeping track of sales, books, and so on. Traditional publishers believe they’ve whipped the self-publishing problem. But though there is some stability, they are ignoring many key facts. Mike Shatzkin gives us some insight Here’s a quote from today’s post. He sees tradpub missing the elephant in the dining room—Amazon One “tell” is that Amazon doesn’t believe ebook sales are reducing, they … Continue reading →
Sarah, from Marketing Christian Books, has shared some new year self-publishing trends for 2018. There are five things to mull over and I think she’s right. Independent publishing will continue to grow. But this is a mixed blessing. The number of books is growing like crazy, but the number of readers hasn’t changed much since 2012. Amazon will continue to streamline operations for book publishing. There’s good reason to believe that Createspace will disappear and print books will … Continue reading →
The ebook future grows complex — more confusing as far as I can tell. Right now in my work, ebook design is being largely constrained by the limits of Kindle. I’ve mentioned this several times. Increasingly Apple ebooks are becoming a problem as the Apple marketers constantly change their marketing lingo. At least monthly, Apple bounces one of my ebooks because I am using what they told me to use, i.e. the iBookstore, and now they don’t … Continue reading →
I’ve been fighting the stupid Kindle argument more and more lately. Kindle remains stupid, as far as formatting is concerned. Kindle’s immense list of things which cannot be done remains. Worse yet, they continue to strip out a lot of stuff. I’ve come to do a Kindle version with: HTML lists: InDesign does an excellent job of typesetting lists with custom indents and special bullets. They work fine in ePUBs with embedded fonts, but Kindle ruins them. … Continue reading →