Design & Production

How is your book going to look? Will you be publishing in print? In digital? What fonts should you use? What size should your print book be? What are Mobi and EPUB? Our design and production community can answer all these questions and more.

Steps in Design & Production

Choosing print and ebook layout
Choosing fonts
Adding illustrations
Using validation tools

Print, Digital, or Both?

by Laura Dawson
Bowker | Wed Mar 20, 2013

No publisher has an unlimited budget, and that is also true of self-publishers. Determining the format of your publication affects the overall cost of publishing, so it’s important to minimize your risk.

Ebooks and print books have different costs associated with them. While ebooks are cheaper to distribute because there are no physical shipments, professional-looking ebooks require additional investments that print books might not: in special formatting, adding multi-media (and clearing the rights for them), proofreading specifically for the digital product.

Inside Publishing

Design & Production

Tags:

Design & Production

Read more about Print, Digital, or Both?

Why Self-Publishing Is Harder Than It Looks

by Laura Dawson
Bowker | Mon Mar 11, 2013

There are loads of self-publishing services out there that promise a great deal of ease and speed in getting your book out there. And that’s fantastic, but many authors find that once they sign up, they’re on the hook for a lot more work than they had planned. This is because making a book is not an easy thing.

While mainstream publishing is disappointing authors in some ways, one way it’s succeeding is by printing the actual book. This is not simply as easy as sending an edited Word manuscript to a printer and magically getting a book back. There are lots of decisions and actual work that have to go into book production, and when an author is doing this herself…guess what? She’s the one who has to make these decisions and do this work.

Design & Production

Marketing & Publicity

Read more about Why Self-Publishing Is Harder Than It Looks

Digital Formats: A Lot of Options

by Laura Dawson
Bowker | Tue Mar 5, 2013

It’s one thing to decide to publish digitally – it’s entirely another to choose what form of ebook you’re going to publish. Each format has a lot going for it. And frequently publishers (and self-published authors) choose to publish in several digital formats, rather than confining themselves to just one.

The most popular ebook format is, in fact, one of the oldest: the PDF. It renders reliably on just about any device. It also can duplicate the layout of a print title. And it’s widely used in the academic market.

Amazon Kindle is the next most widely consumed. It’s a proprietary format – it only works on Kindle devices or through Kindle apps. And Amazon controls their Kindle platform in much the same way Apple controls iTunes – it’s a “walled garden” .

Inside Publishing

Design & Production

Tags:

Design & Production