Tag Archives: Amazon

2018 publishing realities are no surprise

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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 →

Printing consolidation necessary to survive

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Printing consolidation necessary: Xerox buying R.R. Donnelley This is all part of the consolidation necessary to make these hugely expensive presses run. Hardware prices make printing consolidation necessary. The article in Publishing Executive only covers magazines. But it goes much further than that. In my world, everything is on-demand. This includes the on-demand presses, and the four ereaders: Kindle, iPad/Phone, Nook, & Kobo. We’ll see this change here also. Someone will take on Ingram, just like someone will take … Continue reading →

Have you seriously considered audio books?

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You should check out audio books There are many reasons for this. A large part of it is that many of the youth [people under 40] have spent a huge amount of time with iPod (or the even earlier WalkMan) earphones stuck in their ears. In addition, many of them spend large amounts of time driving or riding to and fro. For example, the last job I had before I became a full-time writer-designer-publisher required an hour and a … Continue reading →

Amazon is not the enemy, it’s the pathfinder

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Get off your lazy butt—it’s a jungle out there! The only way to beat the leader is to be better at what the leader does. I was reading yet another excellent article this morning from Mike Shatzkin about the current state of affairs in traditional publishing. He makes good points, which also apply to indies and self-publishers. We need to keep our head in the game. Amazon earned their place in publishing They are dominant in ebooks, not … Continue reading →

Guest post: The future of ebooks by Michael W. Perry at inklingbooks.com

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Michael’s comments are worth reading I didn’t ask his permission this time, but this is an excellent comment by Michael in reply to my posting about the probable need to go back to using Amazon’s Kindle Export plug-in in InDesign CS6. Michael’s comments are again right on target as far as I can tell. My only hope is that someone at Amazon reads them. Many thanks for such a detailed explanation. My main take-way is that Amazon … Continue reading →

Guest Post: Amazon has put itself in trouble proprietarily

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This posting is a slight expansion of a comment made by Michael Perry of Inkling Books on my “Designing ePUBs With InDesign” New Release posting this morning Michael has been a long-time friend of The Skilled Workman, and his comments have made this a much better blog. He is much closer to a traditional publisher than I. His opinions are worth analyzing and I agree entirely. As you can see in his comment, Amazon is not interested in … Continue reading →

Writing and working in InDesign makes using it easy

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I was talking to a friend a couple days ago. He mentioned the primary trouble he has in using InDesign to format his books: when he gets into InDesign he can’t remember how to use it. Suddenly, it dawned on me that this is a primary reason why writing in InDesign is so effective. Not only is writing fully formatted in InDesign the best method of communicating clearly with your readers [outside of excellent content], the simple act … Continue reading →

Why Mark Coker’s wrong about the iBooks Store

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Mark wrote another strong article calling iOS8 a game-changer because iBooks will now be installed as part of the basic operating system. I doubt it—for a very simple reason. The iBooks Store is a lousy interface Let me just give you one example. My preferred genre is Christian epic fantasy. It’s not listed in iBooks genre so I try to search for books tagged like this. I get a list of heathen authors whose name is Christian [like … Continue reading →

The state of publishing is becoming a bit more predictable

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        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.  

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New Release: Writing In InDesign CC Producing Books

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Released, January 15, 2014 for InDesign CC9.2 By now many of the sites have listed the book. As usual, we are still waiting for iBooks approval. But it’s up at Amazon in print and Kindle. Kobo has it listed. The rest are all in process. The best option for ebooks is the link below where you can get an archive with a downlaodable PDF plus a DRM-free ePUB with fonts embedded. This will enable you to load … Continue reading →