Tag Archives: publishing

Book Production speed becomes more important…

Skilled Workman Posted on by

Mark Coker makes the following prediction for 2014: Production takes on increased importance in 2014 – One of the most important secrets to ebook publishing success is to write more books. As a writer, your writing is your unique creation. It’s your product. Authors who write great books (and produce more of them), are the authors who build sales and platform the fastest, because each new book represents an opportunity to please existing fans and hook new … 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 →

A possible replacement for PDFs or a new type of book?

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This one almost slipped past me. Bob Levine wrote about  it at InDesign secrets. Adobe’s now giving away licenses to the .folio format. This could be huge! Magazines were dying because .folio was so expensive Now maybe we’ll see some more folio readers. Maybe tablet reader apps will be able to handle folio also. Maybe PDF will finally go the way of the dodo. The ability to offer books with multiple columns and portrait/landscape versions gives technical … Continue reading →

Don’t toss your Pages 09! It’s needed to open RTF files

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One of the more irritating things about Mavericks is how some capabilities have been lost in the transition to newness. I do like the new free versions of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. I like them a whole lot more than Office, for sure. But some puzzling things have appeared. The one which affects me the most is the inability of the new Pages to open RTF files. This doesn’t sound too bad, but many of the word.docs … Continue reading →

Questions from authors about publishing their book

Skilled Workman Posted on by

I received this email a couple days ago. It is typical of the type of questions I get from every author for whom I either publish their book or produce the digital artwork for their book so they can publish it. The only proviso is that I only publish books for authors I know, for books that I like. I’m a fairly radical Christian, so I expect any books I publish will promote the Gospel, be a … Continue reading →

Desktop, laptop, or tablet?

Skilled Workman Posted on by

I found a good article today which explains many of the issues. My main issue with the conclusions is that I cannot be productive with a laptop. If you are just writing, an iPad with Apple’s wireless keyboard will do the job for you very well. The article misses my most important category of software apps: the Creative Cloud. My two most used apps [outside of Mail and Safari], are InDesign and Photoshop. I can easily see that … Continue reading →

One of the hopes for the local bookstore…

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Forbes has a fun article called:   The Man Who Took on Amazon and Saved a Bookstore It is this type of technology which will let the local bookstore compete against Amazon. The Expresso Book Machine can publish out-of-print titles and much more. Of course, Createspace can do this also. It will be interesting to see how Expresso develops. I’m checking it out to see if they will list my books. For those not familiar, the Expresso … Continue reading →

The ePUB3 hype: I thought we were talking about books?

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From the Shatzin files this morning: “I think the questioner in this case was also trying to pull us into a discussion of video, audio, interaction, and linking, which I resist for two reasons. One is that, so far, the preponderence of ebooks that have sold any appreciable quantities have not had any of those attributes. They’re just the same words as in the printed books made reflowable for a screen. The second is that my world … Continue reading →

Book Production Services

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I regularly provide production help to Christian authors, as led by the Spirit. Feel free to contact me. What I want to do below is give you some idea of the options I offer. We can also negotiate custom relationships. Radiqx Press Production Charges Most of my books are done as a whole, so editing, proofing, formatting, exporting for upload are all part of the same process. I normally charge $60/hour for my billable time. To prepare a … Continue reading →

Longer books sell better!

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I had a frustrating weekend. I was reading a novel. I enjoyed it. But it stopped halfway through— BANG!—just stopped. I was irritated. I had just started getting into the characters. So, I bought the second one in the series. It was also very good, but it did the same durn thing! So, I bought the third one in the series, and it did the same thing. There’s one more book in the series, and I’ll probably … Continue reading →