Tag Archives: reality

Printing consolidation necessary to survive

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Printing consolidation necessary: Xerox buying R.R. Donnelley This is all part of the consolidation necessary to make these hugely expensive presses run. Hardware prices make printing consolidation necessary. The article in Publishing Executive only covers magazines. But it goes much further than that. In my world, everything is on-demand. This includes the on-demand presses, and the four ereaders: Kindle, iPad/Phone, Nook, & Kobo. We’ll see this change here also. Someone will take on Ingram, just like someone will take … Continue reading →

Color e-ink paperwhite: coming soon?

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Gizmag has an interesting article today about color e-Ink. They claim it will not have any impact on ereaders. I hope they are wrong. Paperwhites, and their ilk, are one of the largest drags of ebook publishing today. They are great for simple novels and white papers. They are quite bad for non-fiction with its need for complex lists, large tables, color images, and so on. Color e-ink could bring the most popular ereaders to a new … Continue reading →

Is Kindle worse or just archaic?

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Mumble, grumble, PITA, ;oebpa;b/ hkvo… Ok! Now that’s off my chest. I just had fits with a Kindle book for a client. I use to do them first (after the print/PDF versions were complete) because they were such a pain in the a…, but I’ve begun doing them last because they’re just bleah. Working with Kindle formatting seems like stepping back a decade. For me, the ePUB problems have largely been solved: paragraph shading, anchored graphics, embedded … Continue reading →

Book Publishing With InDesign CC: Spiral-bound

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Even after over forty-five years, there’s still that little thrill when you see a finished book for the first time. It’s too bad that Amazon won’t carry them. But, they are the best choice for the classroom or self-study. The spiral-bound workbook I had to cut out the Christian marketing section to get the page count below the 470 page maximum for spiral-bound. The only thing I really miss are the color graphics. To get that (and … 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 →

Studying poster design to help your covers

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CREATIVE PRO HAS AN EXCELLENT ARTICLE TODAY on poster design. I mention this because authors without the trained eye of the designer make embarrassing design mistakes because this knowledge is not part of their understanding. Self-publishers must train their eyes Books like Ellen’s shown above are a real help as you expand your knowledge beyond the narrow confines of writing and editing. What writers are normally not aware of is the constant visual input which is the … Continue reading →

Guest post: Being an Author: Hobby, Career, or Calling from David G. Johnson

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I am honored today to have an article by an online friend of mine. After an exciting and varied life in many areas, including an IT executive, David, his wife, and their daughter felt a strong call to go to China as missionaries. He writes partially to support himself, but mainly because he has stories to tell, and they are excellent. For him, writing is a calling and epic fantasy is the genre. The worlds he builds … Continue reading →

Enhanced typesetting and new inaccessible Kindle format?

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Back to scratching mud Aaron Shepherd is convinced that this is true. The .kfx (which Aaron believes stands for .kf10) is a post-uploading process done to your books over the first month or two after uploading. What it means as far as he is concerned is this: In practical terms, this means there is no longer any effective way to proof your book before or after publication. You can get it looking absolutely perfect in a KDP proof, and … Continue reading →

Curation: a main focus of your blog

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Book business has a good article today entitled: Are content curators becoming more important than content creators? In many ways they are, especially in niches for non-fiction. For example, on my companion blog, Reality Calling, it’s main purpose has become the curation of Christian speculative fiction. These books are hard to find because the major book sites like Amazon, Nook, iBooks, and Kobo have no way to effectively search for them. So, my constant book reviews provide a way for … Continue reading →

Returning to InDesign CC (2014)

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Some of you have wondered why there’s been no update to CC (2015) in the book. Basically nothing was changed, I thought. So, I found no reason to update though I was using the new version for my production. It works very well. However, I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to temporarily go back to (2014) for InDesign. I’ve been working a very limited schedule lately due to other things I need to get done. … Continue reading →