Tag Archives: page layout

Readability is the prime virtue of book design

Skilled Workman Posted on by

I decided I needed to beat an old drum. Readability is the focus of book design typography. This was the core of curriculum in my digital publishing degree. It’s the center of my graphic design and book design efforts. Without comfortable, readable content, your book has a severe handicap. What is readability? This is all about book design typography. Here’s a little graphic to show you some of the things that influence how easily you can read a … Continue reading →

Are you an author, for real?

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I just read an excellent article in CreativePro called Are you a creative professional or a hobbyist?  The article is talking about graphic designers, but it equally speaks to authors and writers. The dividing line is the tools you use Every day I see questions on FaceBook, Google+, and the author groups and forums in which I participate. They are all basically the same. How can I do this or that without bothering to learn how? It’s usually written with … Continue reading →

Make more with five book sets than 5 single books

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I was talking to my author friend, Guy Stanton III, today and he shared this with me. Many of you already know this, but it’s worth a mention anyway. You know what’s really ironic, David, about combining all the books into one boxed set? I will make more money on the sale of the boxed set than if I had sold the entire series individually, but what’s even cooler is that the customer is going to pay … Continue reading →

Kindle books still require InDesign CS6 and the Amazon plug-in

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I sent my new book (see the cover to the left) to Kindle KDP. I exported it as ePUB2 with embedded fonts and so on. I converted it with Kindle Previewer.My first reader complained that all the graphics were destroyed. (A graphic 600 px wide by 35 px tall was displaying 600 px wide by 500 px tall.) Plus, the embedded fonts were gone. Plus, nested styles were gone. The custom dingbat bullets were gone from the lists. … Continue reading →

What desktop publishing did to graphic designers, self-publishing is doing to authors

Skilled Workman Posted on by

OK! I’m a little punch-drunk I’ve been through this before. In fact, I’ve been through it five times now. it’s been pretty much non-stop since 1991. My life and career [yours too, probably unless you’re a kid born after 1980—especially after 1990] has been radically transformed on a continual basis since 1990 with five major paradigm shifts. Hand-drawn art and metal type to photo-production [Offset Lithography]—the 1960s & seventies:  I started in the midst of this change. My … Continue reading →

New Release: Writing In InDesign CC 2014 Producing Books, more than an update

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CC 2014 virtually redid ePUB export—adding fixed layout & radically improving reflowable ePUBs Indesign has always been the best software for publishing: print & ebook. I have already posted quite a bit about the new software. Most of the improvements seemed to be focused on we self-publishers. But my book is also redone— in places quite radically. A review by Mary Campagna Findley for the CS6 version “David Bergland has challenged me to think beyond the writing, editing, and cover design … Continue reading →

Book Production Charges are often ridiculous!

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I received this post today from GoodReads purporting to give reasonable figures for editing and page layout for books. The table is from the original blog posting. While these may be common charges for freelancers living in large cities, they only serve to show how far out of touch the bi-coastal publishing industry has gotten. Let me give you some idea of what we are talking about here. I just finished a non-fiction book today with 124,000 … Continue reading →

Does quality matter in the new publishing paradigm?

Skilled Workman Posted on by

As I have been experiencing, learning, teaching, and writing about on-demand self publishing over the past decade or two [I actually started self publishing ebooks in 1993 or 4], one area of book design has slid right past most of the new authors. This is quality. We won’t even discuss how quality dropped in the slide from letterpress to offset. That’s back in the dark ages, pre-digital. Silly person! That doesn’t matter any more. The one that … Continue reading →

Typography does not start with font design

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This is the first major confusion in typography. Many believe that typography is font choices. They spend a huge amount of time on which fonts to choose, how fonts developed historically, and the reader reactions to these fonts. This indeed is a good portion of typography, but this pursuit misses the entire point. The point of typography is to use words to communicate. Font choices can help—but this is really a small portion of what we need … Continue reading →

Setting up your book to be read: page layout

Skilled Workman Posted on by

Page layout basics One of the more daunting aspects of book design for the inexperienced is page layout. Most people have Word experience and as I have said countless times already—Word cannot do professional page layout. In fact, it is worse than that because Word’s feeble attempts give you bad habits and poor expectations—which must be corrected. Many settings have to be covered for every document. Many of these are set up as you go through the … Continue reading →