Amateur covers are obvious! The number one mistake is made by adding all kinds of fancy trimmings to your type. Not only does it make the type much harder to read, but all trained designers have been strongly told that NO ONE EVER does that. As a result, there are very few professional covers with type stylized like that. If it is, the type is carefully embossed, maybe beveled. Using the minimal amount necessary to get the … Continue reading →
Updating the ebook conversions techniques to InDesign CC Your book is ready to print How do I produce my ebooks? Here’s a set of workable techniques: InDesign Ebook Conversions for $2.99 If you had enough sense to fully format your book in InDesign, the answer to how to make ebooks is “easily, though not simply”. The largest problem most graphic designers have is that this whole “ebook thing” is a confusing mishmash of options and possibilities. This book … Continue reading →
This is the plaintive question I get every time after I have set up, formatted, and uploaded a book for a new author. It is also one of the most common questions I see while socially networking. Buy $2.99: How Do I Make The Next Book Better? There are three basic underlying concepts 1: Producing a print version of your book 2: Dealing with the size of your production budget 3: Producing a manuscript which can be easily … Continue reading →
How can I make it better the next time? This is the plaintive question I get every time after I have set up, formatted, and uploaded a book for a new author. It is also one of the most common questions I see in the FaceBook and Linked-In groups, Google+ communities, and specialized author forums in which I spend time. It is coupled with the question, “How can I get the print version set up?” There are … Continue reading →
This has been a day for it. All my sources are talking about nothing else. Here’s an excellent article about where indie and self-publishing may go There’s some good stuff here. The real problem is two-fold: The transitional future of the dedicated ereader Getting book discovery out of the hands of Amazon The ereader is going Some of this may be wishful thinking on my part. But the sales stats are proving my assumptions to be true. … Continue reading →
In the ePUB world, it is amazing how much bad press is given to InDesign. In fact, the coverage given to coders and developers of ePUBs matches the hype received in the media by Obama. But we won’t go there. I just received yet another posting in an author group I am in this morning. The writer stated that InDesign does not handle embedded fonts in ePUBs well. This is simply untrue. In fact, InDesign ePUB export … Continue reading →
I’ve been saying this for a long time, but now stats are surfacing to show my point. Dead Tree Edition has a good article on it showing that only 25% of tablet users prefer digital magazines over print. That means three-quarters of tablet users prefer print. My point is that DPS is a dead-end for Adobe. It is one of those “you did a wonderful job of making something I really didn’t have any need for” type … Continue reading →
One of the real issues with ePUBs and Kindle books are the horrendously ugly HTML lists which have no typographical relationship with the rest of the copy in the book. InDesign CC has made a large step forward by beginning their development of a robust convert-to-text option for our ePUBs. Let me show you the issues with a sample document: Here we see a small bulleted list using an oversized red dingbat from the font, Embellishments … Continue reading →
One of the new changes to InDesign CC is an innocuous checkbox at the bottom of the Table of Contents dialog box for: Make text anchor in source paragraph. What this does is make sure that any TOC has functional links in the exported ePUB. As Ron Bilodeau commented, “You can now have multiple ID-generated TOCs within your document(s) and they will all exist with correct links within your exported ePub file.” Now you can have custom … Continue reading →
I had a frustrating weekend. I was reading a novel. I enjoyed it. But it stopped halfway through— BANG!—just stopped. I was irritated. I had just started getting into the characters. So, I bought the second one in the series. It was also very good, but it did the same durn thing! So, I bought the third one in the series, and it did the same thing. There’s one more book in the series, and I’ll probably … Continue reading →
