Tag Archives: professional

Digital books still increasing

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There’s a lot of confusion among authors today. Primarily, it shows as: are digital books still increasing? The answer shouts back: Of Course! Here’s a quote from Jane Friedman’s post this morning Looking Back at 2016: “The market for adult fiction is primarily a digital one “It’s commonly said that in the United States, overall trade book sales are divided about 70-30 print-digital, and that ebook sales at traditional publishing houses are flat to declining. (You’ve probably … Continue reading →

Author Website, you need a WordPress blog

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I read a good article this morning by Jane Friedman entitled Building an Author Website on WordPress: How to Start Smart. I thought I’d better add my two cents. She’s advertising a course which may be good, but I really have no idea about that. Oldstyle Websites are expensive A traditional static site starts at about two grand. But, a fully interactive, responsive site with e-commerce can easily start at $50,000 US and go much higher than that. Obviously, … Continue reading →

A free sample of “Book Publishing With InDesign CC” is available

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I’ve published a sample of the new book on the Adobe servers. It’s about 75 pages of the various sections of the book. If you are interested in a review copy I recommend the PDF is reader’s spreads with the full color graphics. Let me know if you are interested. Here’s a link to the page with more information and purchase links. If word processor book production is taking up too much time and the results are … Continue reading →

Basic page layout part four: Getting them to read it

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Before I get started with this, I need remind you about the goal: a beautiful book which is comfortable to read.  You need a customized set of styles to enable you to keep your book consistent and give you global control over the entire book as you format. Excellent typography is only possible if you understand how to design paragraphs. Styles make paragraph design possible. We will deal with them conceptually, but you should know this is … Continue reading →

New version of InDesign CC 2015.2 released today!

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Click on the image to find links to download the free trial, buy a subscription, or whatever. This is always a big day for me. I’ve been working getting ready for the changes, so I can help you with any questions. Again, this go-round, there’s not much for book production. OpenType and Glyph Features There are new features to help with OpenType glyph choices. They are available from the Font Menu, from contextual menus when selecting characters [right-click], and there’s … Continue reading →

A good article on kerning in InDesign magazine for July

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Kerning is that area of typography rarely talked about. Ilene Strizver has a good article on kerning, both what it is and how to accomplish it, in the July issue of InDesign magazine. One of the sure signs of a pro book designer is in the kerning of the heads and subheads. That along with solid widow, orphan, and runt control are major areas of page layout normally ignored completely by users of Words. Of course, the sad … 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 →

Lightning Source: the pro’s choice for POD?

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The image is meaningless fill. I received this comment from Michael W. Perry, Inkling Books, Auburn, AL. I’ve been wanting a guest posting on this for a while, so I am appropriating his comments for that purpose. I’ve never dealt with LS. I never have the budget. But it is definitely the pros’ choice. Lightning Source is the print-on-demand supplier for the traditional publishers. Many authors find it very difficult to deal with, but Mike, like me, has … Continue reading →

The sadness of Word & how it’s damaging self publishing

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As I have become more social online, the prevailing grief for me is listening to all the new authors whose main problem is that they are using Word. Whether it’s one of my Facebook groups like Christian Indie Authors or Indie Christian Authors, a Google+ community like Christian Authors, or the authors who tweet, the ones in Linked-In groups, or GoodReads groups, and many more, the common lament is, “How do I do this in Word?” The … Continue reading →

Looking professional: Letterspacing, kerning, and tracking

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Letterspacing Here is another typesetting capability that cannot even be considered by word processors. We mentioned letterspacing earlier. Letterspacing is the built-in spacing between characters in a font. The basic idea is that the white space between letters should be identical for all letter pairs. Obviously, this is not simple or easy. AT, OOPS, and silly have very different spacing problems—especially the ill. The better the font, the better the letterspacing. In very cheap fonts, individual letters … Continue reading →