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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
 

Going Digital? Don’t Make These Ebook Errors

by Matt Cavnar
Bowker | Mon Jun 17, 2013

Ebooks have revolutionized self publishing; opening the door to authorial success for anyone with a keyboard and an Internet connection. A myriad of marketplaces, each with their own special requirements, can raise some complications for the first-time digital author. So when first putting a title up for sale, it’s critical to make sure your ebook renders well across all devices. Save yourself from nasty comments criticizing poor formatting by easily avoiding these three big errors (learned through Vook’s own experience creating thousands of ebooks):

Error #1: Only designing an ebook for a specific device

Inside Publishing
Design & Production
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The Zen of Technology

by Nick Ruffilo
Bowker | Tue Jun 4, 2013

Nick Ruffilo is CTO of Aerbook, a cloud-publishing venture that specializes in creation, conversion, marketing and sales of digital books. At his personal website, he offers what he calls "The Zen of Technology", a portion of which we're occasionally running at SelfPublishedAuthor.com.

Today's Zen of Technology is... Focus.

Focus is they key to getting things done. Like the rays of sun lighting up a piece of paper on a beach in the middle of the summer - focus helps to define purpose. Left for the entire day, the paper will simply have been illuminated and will remain warm. But, with the right focus, the sun can turn that piece of paper into a blazing fire in a matter of seconds.  Sometimes you can achieve the type of focus you need on your own, and sometimes - like in the case of the sun - you need the help of the right tool.

Inside Publishing
Design & Production
Getting Started
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eBook Conversion and Distribution Webinar

by Laura Dawson
Bowker | Tue May 21, 2013

Digital Conversion Laboratory is hosting a webinar on Wednesday, May 22, at 1 p.m. Eastern time. Laura Dawson from Bowker and Devorah Ashlem of DCL will be guiding authors through the process of converting and distributing ebooks. These are best practices regarding formatting, metadata, communication with vendors, and error correction.

Update: Here is a link to the webinar.

Inside Publishing
Design & Production
Distribution
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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
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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
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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” .

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Design & Production
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Getting Started

Create a Culture of Quality in Your Publishing Company

Thu, November 13

How to Write a Business Plan as Narrative (Part 2 of 2)

Wed, September 10

A Novel Planning Technique for Book Publishers (Part 1 of 2)

Fri, September 05

Do You Have the Write Stuff?

Wed, September 03

Today's Great American Novel (Part 2 of 2)

Wed, August 20

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