Learn what goes into creating professional-looking books! Join India Amos, Managing Editor of Print and Digital Production at CN Times Books, and Allan Lieberman, Special Projects Manager, Data Conversion Laboratory, Inc., on Monday, June 30th, at 1:00pm EDT to discover what you need to know about production and design.
Whether you are publishing in print, digital, or both, this webinar will help you determine what choices you need to make for your book. We’ll cover:
If you are planning to publish an ebook, you will want it to look good, to look professional, to look like an ebook the biggest publisher would publish.
These days there are many tools to help you make an ebook, but getting a good-looking ebook isn't always so easy. This article will tell you about "markup" -- a magical substance that can either make your ebook beautiful-looking. Or ugly as sin.
Ebooks are (roughly) self-contained websites. They are made of the same stuff: HTML and CSS styling.
What is Markup?
Markup is the HTML part ... it's the text of your book, plus "tags" in the background.
For instance, here is a brief passage of text with some formatting:
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.
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.