Design

Articles about book and cover design, as well as design as it touches on aspects of author platform.

Writing: Front and Back Matter for your Self-Published Book

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This post by Jessica Bell originally appeared on the ALLi blog on 5/27/15.

Book promotion expert Ben Cameron always says “writing the blurb is the hardest 100 words you’ll ever write”, and many authors are also stumped when it comes to writing the front and back matter – another task that usually falls just when you’re feeling least like writing another word, after completing your book’s final edit. Coming to the rescue today is ALLi partner member Jessica Bell, also an author and book designer, with this handy summary.

The front and back matter in a book are one of the key factors to presenting a professional and quality product. If done haphazardly, it’s a sure sign in most people’s eyes that the book content will not be up to par. So please do take these things as seriously as your story.

First I’ll explain what to include, and how to order it in a paperback. Then I will tell you how to reorder the content for your ebook.

FRONT MATTER

Front matter can be subjective as it varies from book to book, but I’m going to advise you based on what I would do. The order isn’t set in stone, but it’s what I think looks the best in a paperback.

 

Read the full post on the ALLi blog.

 

Smashwords Introduces New Metadata Option for Box Sets

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This post by Mark Coker originally appeared on the Smashwords blog on 5/11/15.

Smashwords today released an enhanced metadata option for box sets. The new option will pave the way for us to make box sets more discoverable in the Smashwords store, and longer term (and more importantly), it will enable better merchandising at our retailers.

But one step at a time. First we need to collect the metadata, and that’s where you come in.

Smashwords authors and publishers are already well-versed in metadata. Metadata is data about your book. Metadata is comprised of things like book category, book title, author name, book description and price. Metadata makes it easier for readers to discover your book by screaming, “Look here! I’m what you’re looking for!”

Ebook box sets are a relatively new phenomena, and indie authors are leading the charge. Until now, metadata for box sets has been lacking. Most obviously, a box set is treated like an ordinary ebook, when in fact it’s a bundle of books either from a single author or multiple authors. Retailers have shown increased interest in box sets over the last two years, but the process of identifying them is still manual. Retailers who want to promote them, and customers who want to read them, must perform manual searches on the phrase “box set” and hope the author placed the words in their title or book description. That’s kludgey. There should be a special designation for box sets so retailers have the option to create custom virtual shelves to promote them, and so customers can easily find them.
 

Read the full post on the Smashwords blog.

 

Top 105 Blogs and Websites for Writers and Authors

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This post by Hiten Vyas originally appeared on e-Books India on 4/13/15.

Are you a creative writer looking to improve your skills? Maybe you’re a beginner novelist looking to pen your first book. You might be a blogger wondering how to make more money from your blog. Whatever type of writer you are, the Internet has some wonderful blogs and websites that provide advice, tips and inspiration to help you. This article takes a look at 105 of the top blogs and websites for writers and authors.

The blogs and websites have been categorized using the following headings: (1) Writing, Publishing, Sales and Marketing, (2) Freelancing, (3) News, Industry Analysis and Advice, (4) Blogging and (5) Writing Platforms and Communities.

There are of course more blogs and websites relevant to writers and authors. If you think you’re blog or website should also be included in this list, please do comment in the comments box at the end of the article and let us know about you, your blog, what it is about and how it helps writers and authors.

Without any further delay, let’s move onto the 105 blogs and websites!

Writing, Publishing, Sales and Marketing

1. Sameer Kamat

Sameer Kamat is a bestselling author of two books; namely Business Doctors, and Beyond the MBA Hype. He also has a website, which has a list of great articles that Sameer has written based upon his own experiences of writing books and ebooks. You can find advice on both self-publishing and on the traditional route. Many of the articles Sameer has written are geared to helping writers get published in India. These in particular, are great reads.

2. InstaScribe Blog

InstaScribe is an online app designed to help authors create professional looking ebooks. There is also the InstaScribe blog, which provides articles about ebook publishing, writing in different languages, and latest news from across the world in the areas of books and publishing. The InstaScribe blog also has some eye catching visuals in the form of inspiring quotes, and infographics in the areas of writing, and publishing ebooks. You can also read an interview with the founder of InstaScribe, Jaya Jha here.

3. Writers Helping Writers

The Writers Helping Writers blog is run by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi. The blog is packed with great articles that help you to improve your fiction writing. In particular, articles at the blog about how to create different types of characters and how to give them various personalities, traits and skills are extremely useful. Interested authors can also submit guest posts to Writers Helping Writers.

4. Nathan Bransford

Nathan Bransford is a former literary agent and author. He also runs an extremely popular blog. He writes articles giving authors advice on how to improve their writing craft, on editing, formatting and get published; both through self-publishing and traditional publishing (and its associated requirements, writing query letters, synopses, finding literary agents etc.).

5. Write to Done

Mary Jaksch is Editor-in-Chief of Write to Done (WTD), which is a huge resource for writers whose archives date back to 2008. The website is updated regularly and contains expert opinions and actionable advice on all aspects of writing including blog writing, writing sales copy, freelancing, writing novels and non-fiction. If you happen to be new to WTD, the blog is well worth a visit.

6. The Procrastiwriter

The Procrastiwriter provides articles that share writing tips to help you to improve your writing, on motivation to inspire you to write, and on how to deal with self-doubt of your ability to be a successful writer. The blog is run by Shanan Haislip.

 

Read the full post on e-Books India.

 

Keys to Writing Books for Very Young Readers

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This post by Olivia Snaije originally appeared on Publishing Perspectives on 3/25/15.

PARIS: Within a program of events celebrating French publisher l’école des loisirs’ 50th birthday, the cherished children’s book author, Grégoire Solotareff, gave a talk on Monday about how to transform an idea for a book into reality. In the tradition of Maurice Sendak or Leo Lionni (both of whom are published in translation by l’école des loisirs), Solotareff’s 200+ books for children, which he has been writing and illustrating for 30 years, continue to dwell in a magical and quirky universe. For the past 20 years he has also been the editor of an imprint called Loulou & Cie for children ages 0-4 where he has overseen the production of 400 books. It was in his capacity as both author and editor that he gave the following talk, loosely translated and edited here:

In 1985 I started publishing my books. It was lots of work at the beginning. I wanted very quickly to be published by l’école des loisirs because of its reputation. I presented my books to [co-founder] Arthur Hubschmid, and since then there have been lots of books.

One shouldn’t create books just to make them. You need to be passionate about it. At first you are shy and afraid of rejection. You’re not always confident. But you do need to be convinced about your work, you need to like it and want to do it. This is the first quality you need when you present a book to a publisher and say “This is what I do and what do you think?”

 

Read the full post on Publishing Perspectives.

 

The Ultimate Guide to Finding Images for Book Promotion

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This post by Dana Lynn Smith originally appeared on her The Savvy Book Marketer site on 2/11/15.

When someone lands on your website, book sales page or social post, you may get only a fraction of a second to capture their attention before they decide to move on. Photos and illustrations (along with strong headlines) are key to drawing the eye and breaking up large blocks of text to make it more inviting.

Carefully selected images can also convey a sense of the message contained in the text, but sometimes bloggers choose beautiful or whimsical images to capture the reader’s attention. (I ran across this gnome image while working on this article and just couldn’t resist!)

 

Copyright Concerns
Like our writing, the work of photographers and illustrators is protected by copyright. The creators of photos and illustrations can choose to make their work available to others through various types of licenses that govern how and where the images can be used and how they are compensated.

It doesn’t make sense to buy an image for every blog post or social post, but it can be a challenge to find images at no charge. Following are some tips for finding and using images in your book promotion.

Creative Commons Licenses
Many images are available free under a “Creative Commons License”. Although there is no charge for using the image, there may be restrictions on how it’s used and you may be required to give credit to the creator. See the bottom of this page for an explanation of various types of creative commons licenses.

Here are two sources of free creative commons images:

 

Read the full post on The Savvy Book Marketer.

 

How to Create Picture Ebooks for Kids

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This post by Laura Backes originally appeared on Jane Friedman’s site on 2/23/15.

Until recently, creating ebook versions of children’s picture books was something publishers reserved for their best-selling authors and illustrators. If you wanted to self-publish a picture ebook, you either needed to be a whiz at writing code, or you paid an ebook creation service to do it for you. (That said, it was possible to find a few services targeted toward publishing books for kids on Apple devices, such as Book Creator.)

Last September, Amazon released KDP Kids’ Book Creator, which allows the average Joe to create illustrated children’s books for the Kindle and upload them directly to Amazon. These books can be designed in the landscape format (to mimic the layout of print picture books) and can include text pop-ups that enlarge the text with a tap or a click, making it easier to read.

Side note: Using the KDP Kids’ Book Creator means you’re publishing through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing program. You can choose from several royalty structures within that program, and also choose whether or not to be included in KDP Select, which gives Amazon exclusive distribution of your ebook for a certain time period in exchange for marketing perks.

While the KDP Kids’ Book Creator still has a few rough spots (which Amazon is presumably ironing out in response to user feedback), it’s a good start. Those of us who have worked in children’s publishing for years recognized this move for what it was: a game changer.

Just how much has Amazon’s new free software changed the game?

 

Read the full post on Jane Friedman’s site.

 

Can You Successfully Use Word Templates to Create eBooks?

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This post by Kimberly Hitchens originally appeared on BookNook.biz on 10/5/14.

Once upon a time, (okay, about a month ago or so)  in a fit of curiosity, I decided to buy one of those advertised templates—you know the ones—make your ebook from WORD!  Why?  Because we get a lot of inquiries here.  In fact, we receive about 300 emails a day, believe it or not.  We get people asking why our services are “better” or different than what they can do themselves. A lot of what we do is invisible to the human eye.  This makes it hard to answer those types of questions without sounding self-serving.

As in, “well, gosh, we export and clean up the HTML, so that all the bad code that you can’t see with the naked eye doesn’t make your book go wonky when it’s opened on a Kindle.” This is a difficult sell, to be honest.  It’s the same difficult sell that I run into when I try to explain that Smashwords does not do the same thing that we do.  But, when you look at a sausage, do you know what’s inside it? Can you tell that one sausage-maker lovingly crafted his sausage from the BEST stuff, while the other used what remained on the floor after the first guy finished?  No, you can’t.  Not unless you already do this for a living, and if you did, we wouldn’t be having this conversation–would we?

An eBook-making Test:  Show, Not Tell.

In that vein, I decided to test what we do against those “DIY Word” templates that you can buy all over the Internet.  After all, a picture is worth a thousand words, right?  Perhaps, I thought, if I simply used one of those commercial templates, I could show–not tell–people the difference.  I made sure that I bought a well-written template, from one of the most reputable and best-known websites on the topic of bookmaking.  For both ebooks and print books.

 

Read the full post, which includes numerous images for comparison, on BookNook.biz.

 

5 Self-publishing Truths Few Authors Talk About

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This post by Dylan Hearn originally appeared on his Suffolk Scribblings site on 1/5/15.

One of the hardest thing to watch on social media is an author, usually a debut author, getting excited about their upcoming book launch and knowing they are about to get hit around the head with a hard dose of reality.

They’ve done the right things, built up a twitter or Facebook following, blogged about the book, sent copies out for review, told all their friends about the upcoming launch, pulled together a promo video and graphic, maybe taken out some adverts. The first few days after launch are filled with excited tweets, mentions of early positive reviews and chart rankings. Then, after a few days, maybe a few weeks, the positive tweets stop and an air of desperation sets in as the reality of life as an indie author hits home.

Part of the problem is that the authors most vocal on social media are those that have already seen self-publishing success. They got in early, made names for themselves through talent, hard-work and persistence, and are happy to spread the gospel of the new self-publishing utopia. They are telling the truth, from their perspective, but for the vast majority of authors the picture is very different. This doesn’t mean it’s impossible to find success with your debut novel, just that it’s rare – and with changes in the market, becoming ever more so.

In order to provide some balance, below are 5 truths I, and many other self-published authors, have experienced. This hasn’t put me off from a writing career, and shouldn’t put you off either, but at least you will be going in with your eyes open.

 

1 You need talent to succeed but it’s no guarantee

 

Read the full post on Suffolk Scribblings.

 

Increasing the “Look Inside” Preview on Amazon

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This post by Melinda Clayton originally appeared on Indies Unlimited on 1/12/14.

One of the best marketing tools self-published authors have is the “Look Inside” feature on Amazon. If things go well, your title, cover, and book description will catch the attention of a reader who eagerly clicks “Look Inside” to read a sample of your writing, and they see…

…nothing more than your copyright page and table of contents? Well, that’s not very helpful, is it? I’ve honestly never known anyone to buy a book based on the “Look Inside” preview of a copyright page. This is especially problematic if you’re hoping to send your book out for reviews or list it on a site that vets books for quality (ahem…IU, anyone?). From formatting to tone, to grammar usage and typos, the first pages of your story show it all. But what if they aren’t displayed?

Kindle Direct Publishing sets the “Look Inside” feature at 10 percent. For a novella, short story, or children’s book, that typically isn’t enough to see much, if any, of the actual story.

 

Read the full post, which includes a detailed how-to with screenshots, on Indies Unlimited.

 

How to Quickly Create an EPUB File From Word (And Then Edit It)

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This post by Jane Friedman originally appeared on her site on 12/19/14.

Here’s the situation: Your book is sitting in a word processing system (such as Word), and you’d like to get that material translated into EPUB format without using the automated meatgrinder process of Amazon or Smashwords. Let’s assume you’re not a coder or programmer, but can figure out some some simple HTML. These are the options I’ve found that don’t involve purchasing software or going through coursework to learn code. Caveat: These methods will really only be helpful if your book is predominantly text, with few images.

 

For Mac Users: The TextEdit to Sigil Method

Sigil is a free, open-source editor for EPUB (ebook) files. It’s intuitive even for a beginner, especially if you know a little HTML from blogging. To use Sigil, you can’t start with a Word file—but it can handle basic text or HTML files. So what we need to do is appropriately prepare our Word files to import into Sigil while retaining our basic formatting. This process requires using Mac’s TextEdit software, which is installed for free on every Mac.

1. Open TextEdit preferences.

2. Adjust the HTML Saving Options as shown below. Select “XHTML 1.0 Strict”, “No CSS”, and “Unicode (UTF-8)” and check “Preserve White Space.”

3. Open your Word document in TextEdit, then save it as an HTML file.

 

Read the full post, which also includes how-tos for PC users and users of other devices, on Jane Friedman’s site.

 

The Copyright Naughty List

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This post by Susan Spann originally appeared on the Writers in the Storm blog on 12/10/14.

Happy Holidays!

‘Tis the season to stay off the copyright “naughty list,” so I’m here to share a few #PubLaw tips for avoiding copyright infringement in your holiday blogging and social media celebrations!

When celebrating online this holiday season, keep these helpful rules in mind:

SONGS (AND LYRICS) ARE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

At the holidays, it’s tempting to re-post the lyrics to favorite carols or celebratory songs, either on Facebook, on a blog, or on other social media sites. Unfortunately, lyric-sharing often violates the copyright of the lyricist or songwriter, because lyrics are protected by copyright, as are novels, short stories and poems.

Posting an excerpt (no more than 2-3 lines) is often permitted as “fair use,” especially when the quoted work runs at least 30 lines. However, there is no absolute test for fair use, and no definitive test for when you’ve used too much of a copyrighted work. The legal test is “facts and circumstances,” based on several factors (so anyone who tells you “X lines is ok, but more is not” isn’t telling you the absolute legal truth.

 

Read the full post on Writers in the Storm.

 

The Making Of A Boxed Set

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This post originally appeared on SFR Brigade on 11/13/14.

Boxed sets are a popular commodity at the moment. You see them everywhere, collections of stories by a variety of authors, grouped under some unifying label. But there’s a lot of work involved in putting a set like this together. That’s why we thought we’d share our experiences and lessons learned.

Earlier in the year, one of the members of the SFR Brigade asked for volunteers for an SFR boxed set. Eleven of us promptly banded together, and our Nebula Nights collection appeared in e-bookstores in record time. Since its release at the beginning of August, the set reached #1 on Kobo and All Romance, and charted as high as #3 on Amazon in science fiction romance. The book maintained an Amazon ranking above 10,000 for most of those three months. So you could say it did well. At the end of October, our contract with the publisher expired, so we decided to go it alone, since the set is still selling quite strongly. This article is a combination of what we did, and what we learned from our experience with the publisher.

Ready to go?

What’s your goal?
There’s no point in embarking on a project like this if you don’t know what you’re intending to achieve. In creating Nebula Nights, we wanted to showcase our genre, and encourage readers to purchase more of each author’s work. In quantifiable terms, we aimed at reaching one of the major lists, like the NYT or USA Today. It’s good to dream big!

 

Read the full post on SFR Brigade.

 

Eradicate MS Nits In Minutes

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This post by Stef Mcdaid originally appeared on WriteIntoPrint in October 2012.

The hardest nits to find are the invisible ones, and for that purpose ‘Find and Replace’ is a potent tool in some respects. The simple premise is that, to remove double spaces, for example, we ‘find’ them all and ‘replace’ them all with one space in a single action.

Of course, we have to run this process more than once to eradicate multiple spaces.

But Find and Replace is also great for removing hanging spaces between periods and paragraph returns, and, more importantly, hanging spaces at the beginning of paragraphs because they will not line up with other paragraphs, should any spaces exist.

Here is a paragraph with all of these nits, but they are tough to spot:

 

Read the full post, which includes many screen shots and detailed how-tos, on WriteIntoPrint.

 

Adobe Makes Dramatic Change to iOS App Publishing Program

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This post by Michael Kozlowski originally appeared on goodereader on 11/27/14.

Adobe has been running a fairly popular service for the last few years that has been marketed towards independent authors, businesses and design studios to create enhanced eBook apps for iOS. Adobe has just confirmed that starting in May 2015, these companies will either have to find other options to publish apps, or pay thousands of dollars a month.

The Digital Publishing Suite, Single Edition puts iPad app design within reach of anyone with InDesign skills, providing an intuitive way to create unlimited apps for the iPad without writing code. This service was free to Adobe Creative Cloud members. The essence of the program was to provide an avenue to develop enhanced eBooks, cookbooks, magazines and other content using the EPUB3 framework and packaging them as dedicated apps to be sold in the Apple Newsstand or the App Store.

 

Read the full post on goodereader.

 

What If Novels Were Treated Like Business Books?

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This post by Roger Tagholm originally appeared on Publishing Perspectives on 11/13/14.

After attending the FT Business Book of the Year ceremony in London, Roger Tagholm wonders “what if novels had subtitles like business books do?”

You could call it an overdraft of words. There seems to be an unwritten rule that business books have to have lengthy subtitles that seek to explain what the book is about. The shortlist for this week’s Financial Times McKinsey & Company Business Book of the Year Award, which was won by Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century on Tuesday night at a dinner at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, afforded some perfect examples (though admittedly, not the winner). Deep breath. Here goes:

Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Suveillance by Julia Angwin (Times Books)

House of Debt: How They (and You) Caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It from Happening Again by Atif Mian and Amir Sufi (University of Chicago Press)

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (Norton)

Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull, with Amy Wallace (Bantam Press)

If novels were treated like this, we might see:

Atonement: How Making up Stories Can Make Amends for Past Wrongs and Be a Force for Healing by Ian McEwan (Vintage)

 

Read the full post on Publishing Perspectives.