For the holidays, I set up a 64% Off sale for one of my powerful book design font groups on MyFonts. This includes the font families of Librum, Librum E, Librum Sans, Bookish, Bream, and Bulkr. So, instead of the normal $25 a font/$75 a family, all the individual fonts and families in the Librum Book Design Group are available for $9 per font/$27 per family or less through February 3, 2018. The image on the left links to a copy … 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 →
I thought a good way to start the new year would be a 2018 ebook conversion guide. Things changed quite a bit in 2017. Plus, CC 2018 added some handy new features. Remember, I have a seemingly unusual attitude. I believe that spending a lot of time hand-coding a book is a waste of time. The good news is that InDesign CC now works well enough to make writing code unnecessary. 2018 ebook conversion guide As you know, … 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 →
I’ve waited a long time to write this: InDesign CC 2018 adds borders to shading! This is one I’ve been pushing for over the past decade or so. I was excited when they added paragraph shading. I never could understand why the borders weren’t added at the same time. Regardless, the InDesign team added them for this update. Finally, we have a good sidebar solution for ePUBs This has always been a major hassle in ePUB design. Sidebars simply don’t work … Continue reading →
On-demand lay-flat binding options are few. Joel Friedlander posted on 9/11/17 on the subject, talking like it’s no big deal. This is true, but only in traditional publishing, in most cases. On-demand lay-flat binding options are few Joel says, “My conclusion, after quite a bit of research, testing, having prototype books created so I could try to destroy them, is this: sewn bindings will give your book a structural and aesthetic integrity unachievable by other means, and it’s … Continue reading →
In the new video course, InDesign CC Book Production, Putting the book together, one of the books actually produced is a Class Project MacDonald’s Light Princess. The Light Princess is a delightful, whimsical fairy tale by one of the major influences of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald. The cover is simply a book designer’s bit of humor. I thought you might like to have a copy to read. By clicking on the cover or the link in … Continue reading →
With this final release, InDesign CC Book Production, Putting the book together, my video coursework for book production is complete. This course removes the difficulty and relives the complexity of producing excellent quality, professional books. This is a very practical course. There is a lot to learn, but none of it is very difficult. It is very complex though. It is the goal of the course to make the complexity easy to understand and relatively simple to execute. If you have … Continue reading →
Today, my first course of book production has been released. I’m building video coursework for using InDesign to produce books on Udemy starting with basic typography. Actually we start with the very beginning, where you must choose: Book size Margins Column width And more This first course of book production lays a solid foundation This is the largest lack in most self-published books today. Much of it is not the fault of the author or designer—it’s the tools they are using. … Continue reading →