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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
I’m working on new video coursework about using InDesign for publishing. The first course is concerned about book production getting started understanding typography. My concern is reaching my target audience which is you. I’m writing for an elusive niche—people like yourselves who understand the value of the typographic power of a tool like InDesign. As a font designer, I am very much aware of the fact that no software can build typographic communication as well as InDesign with … Continue reading →
Here’s an excellent article about the domains needed for your author platform. Get domains set up well as early as possible. It’s one of your major decisions and needs to be done as early in the process as you can manage. Get domains set up well! Your entire marketing effort is built on your domains. That’s the source of your Facebook posts, your tweets, your pins, and so on. They are all ephemeral. Your website/blog is relatively stable … Continue reading →