Presenting my books as fine art has become the delight of my life. But as usual, my way is unusual. Writing in InDesign makes fine art ePUBs possible and I love it. Of course the limitations of HTML are always going to be a problem. But InDesign can do a lot. Another part of the problem is that you never really own your ePUBs. Kindle, Books, Nook, and Kobo plus all the rest of the distributing companies … Continue reading →
New Styles for ePUBs in InDesign —this is one of the wonderful things I discovered while I was researching and testing for the revised procedures for making excellent ePUBs in my new book, Niche Publishing for Believers Using InDesign. I was just going edit/proof my old Book Publishing book. It’s twelve years old or a little more. But as I got into it, I ended up with a massive revision. I have learned so much in the … Continue reading →
David Blatner defines design in his latest weekly posting on Linked-In. It seems good enough to me so I decided to share it with you. It’s not earth shaking, and has nothing to do with spiritual reality. But my hope is that you find it helpful. David Blatner defines design What is design? Design is not about making stuff look pretty. It’s not about making it “pop” or look cool. Design, at its core, is the practice … Continue reading →
Araldo is a headline font with spunk for today. I needed something with a little life for my new book production group: Biblia Serif, Dreatha, and now Araldo. This new font family is doing well for me. Biblia Serif and Draetha are both excellent book production font families. In other words, they are not memorable. In fact, if they do their job well, you don’t even notice them. But as I mention in the flyer to the … Continue reading →
This is just a quick note about some free font design resources which provide good typographic knowledge. I’m mentioning this because a large portion of my readers don’t come out of a professional graphic design or typographic background. These things are often not known by authors whose background is mostly found in Office and free design apps. The longer you work in page layout, the more important fonts and font design become for many if not most … 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 →
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 →
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 →