Posts Tagged ‘design tips’

DIGITAL BOOKS VERSUS PRINT BOOKS All the previous posts in this series have been about producing printed books, especially trade paperbacks. But now let’s talk about ebooks. Some people say you don’t have to “design” for ebooks. Well, some people are wrong…? Right now the most popular format for download is still the PDF. This [...]

Before I get to today’s topic, I just found out that John D. Berry’s ebooks on type and design are free for download: Dot-Font: Talking about Fonts and Dot-Font: Talking About Design From here: http://johndberry.com/blog/2011/08/27/free-amusing-book/ They’re collections of his dot-font columns and might be of interest to some of you. SMART QUOTES AREN’T SMART ENOUGH [...]

Let’s start with hyphenation today. USE HYPHENATION: DON’T AVOID IT I see a lot of small press books where they try to solve the problem of a word processor’s hyphenation mistakes by just turning off hyphenation completely. Please do not do this. Remember you have justified the text on your Body Text Pages (right?). Allowing [...]

Ok, now we get to the real stuff that no one tells you. Let’s say you’re using Quark or InDesign, you’ve flowed all the text of your novel or stories into the pages, and you’re done, right? No, you’ve just started. It’s a bit like you just pulled your cake out of the oven, but [...]

Okay, so you’ve decided you’re going to design and typeset your own book. The first thing to note is that I have never come up with a way around needing either Quark Xpress or Adobe InDesign. Anyone who says you can do perfectly good, professional page layout in Microsoft Word is either lying, ignorant, or [...]

Self-publishing and niche press publishing is going through an explosion right now, thanks to the ease with which modern tech lets us produce digital books and connect with the readers for those books. However, a lot of folks, both writers and small presses alike, are pushing forward producing books with only a vague idea of [...]