Bad Markup and How to Fix It
There are a number of problems that pop up consistently in self-published ebooks, where outputs just don't look as people expect. Very often, these problems are due to "bad" styling markup that has crept into the editing interface, often coming from MS Word, or from the user just doing a few things wrong.
Here is a quick list of the most common problems we see with users of Pressbooks, and how to fix them:
- Styling headings with Bold instead of Heading tags
- Not using blockquotes for letters, quotes etc.
- Forcing certain kinds of paragraphs not to indent
- Not using correct list formatting (for bullets & numbers)
- The dreaded MS Word
<span> tag
- Funny spacing
- Paragraphs not being separated properly
Heading styles
DONT: Style headings with Bold instead of Heading tags.
As the publisher, you are responsible for producing a quality product at all levels: writing, editing, design, printing, customer service and marketing (pricing, promotion and distribution). Poor quality – whether in product and service – can destroy a publishing venture over time. Negative word-of-mouth communication, whether in person, in blogs, in discussion groups and forums, or through social media spreads quickly and is difficult to overcome. While you cannot control what others say about you on these media, you can control the source of their pleasure or discontent by maintaining high levels of product and service quality. Here are Ten Aspects of Product and Service Quality.
Book review magazine Shelf Unbound is accepting entries for its third annual competition to crown the best from independent presses, self-published authors and publishers producing five or less titles per year. The winning entry, selected by the editors of Shelf Unbound, will be featured with runners-up in the magazine's December/January 2015 issue – read by 125,000 book. This year's competition is sponsored by Bowker, the official U.S. ISBN registration agency and creator of SelfPublishedAuthor.com.
DCL and Bowker are interested in your digital publishing plans for 2014! As the demand increases for materials of all types to be available on mobile devices, publishers, authors and documentation managers are challenged with providing a quality ebook experience while managing costs and standards.
Your participation will prove invaluable to us as we continue to provide the highest level of service and educational support in the industry while meeting your growing demands. We look forward to your feedback!
This survey will take approximately five minutes to complete and will close this Saturday, May 31, 2014 at 11:59pm EDT.
This week you may read about various events related to the happenings around Book Expo America in New York City. Some of you may have been to the event. Some of you may wonder what it is about. Others may think, why bother?
What is Book Expo America?
Book Expo is a Trade Show:
Companies who provide publisher services (our booth location is DZ2156).
This means that a lot of people are doing business. People are exchanging business cards, engaging in business development conversations, perhaps trying to sell each other “stuff.”
Book Expo is a Circus:
There are two general worlds in which we market books. The first is through bookstores and the second is to non-bookstore buyers. In both cases, you can increase your sales by giving your books away in limited quantities.
In the familiar world of trade sales, publishers know that they must give books to reviewers and as samples to get on television and radio shows. These exist in the world of non-traditional sales, too, but here there are additional reasons to consider giving books away in special markets as an investment in future revenue.
One example is to get exposure through blogs. Rather than start your own blog, find one that already exists on your topic -- one with a large following – and send the blog owner a copy of your book to review.
Publishing has changed. Authors know it. Amazon knows it. Publishers know it. But for most businesses it’s still something that is happening to someone else.
Maybe you’ve heard about Kindle Singles, or someone you know bought a self-published book on their iPad and didn’t hate it. Possibly you have a friend who is selling that novel they wrote years ago that never found a home at a big publishing house. And it’s very likely that you know at least two or three people who claim to be important bloggers.
But it’s just the beginning.
When selling books through bookstores, you sell one book to each consumer. You never know who they are, so there is no possibility of a repeat sale. One of the benefits of selling books to corporate buyers is that you cannot only sell many books to one buyer, but you can generate repeat sales from them. Here are Ten Tips for Generating More Sales From Fewer Buyers.
Kobo has announced that the Sony Reader Store will close on 16 August and that ‘soon after the closure’ Australian users will instead access its ‘comprehensive digital reading ecosystem’.
The Sony Reader Store will also close, with users to access Kobo instead, in the UK, Germany and Austria, and follows a similar change in the US and Canada in March.
In a statement, Kobo said the free Kobo App for Android will be ‘pre-loaded on select Sony smartphones and tablets’, but ‘timing and availability may vary by market and carrier’.
