By Guido on
How much time did you spend thinking about the impact your print layout has on your profit margin the last time you did the book design for your print-on-demand book? The answer is probably none at all. Many self-published authors are all too happy to jump in with both feet to create their own print layouts for Createspace or Ingram.… Continue reading "Increase your profit margins with tighter layouts"
By Guido on
For the past weeks, I’ve been slaving over the upcoming release of my book “Zen of eBook Formatting.” With the help of my beta-readers and friends, I’ve been able to clean up the book, tighten it up a good bit and rewrite a bunch of odd passages. It took much longer than I had anticipated, but I think it was… Continue reading "“Zen of eBook Promotion” has a release date"
By Guido on
While you are reading this, Amazon is silently rolling out Kindle Format X (KFX) to supplant the previous KF8 formatting. You may have noticed the little “Enhanced Typesetting” entry on their Kindle book pages, which, when set to Enabled, indicates that the new format is in place for that particular book. Naturally, the new features will be visible only on… Continue reading "The horrors of Kindle Format X"
By Guido on
With the lowering of the barrier of entrance, self-publishing books has become the norm rather than the exception. Something that was traditionally handled by big, lumbering publishing houses or by individuals with a lot of money, has now become a reality for anyone. It no longer has the stigma of vanity publishing, but has instead evolved into a perfectly viable… Continue reading "What is the real purpose of a book cover?"
By Guido on
I recently had to switch to TextMate 2 because I had upgraded to OSX 10.10 Yosemite, and my trusty old version of TextMate was no longer fully operational. Some of the bundles I am routinely using when formatting eBooks crashed Ruby, making them useless. One of the features I constantly use is the “Wrap Each Selected Line in Open/Close Tag” command from… Continue reading "Teaching TextMate a new trick"
By Guido on
Over the past weeks I’ve been reading a number of non-fiction eBooks—don’t ask me, why, it just happened for some reason. The interesting thing is that I noticed a number of recurring eBook formatting problems that permeated virtually each one of these books, and I thought I’d touch upon the subject for a change. The problem in question revolves around… Continue reading "The case of disjointed word pairs – eBook Formatting Tip"
By Guido on
For all my author friends and visitors, today I have an announcement that is slightly different from my usual formatting posts. I would like you to check out a brand new website called Covertopia.com! As the title suggests, it is a website specializing on covers. Selling book covers, to be more specific, and if you want to be exact about… Continue reading "Look no further for pre-designed or custom covers! Covertopia.com is here!"
By Guido on
By now, I am sure you’ve heard that every device in the market has its own little quirks. Whether it’s not scaling images correctly, ignoring transparency, overlooking style settings in certain tags or some other weird behavior, the process of formatting ebooks across platforms is anything than straight-forward. Today I want to direct your attention to one issue in particular,… Continue reading "Custom fonts in iBooks"
By Guido on
On many occasions I’ve kept repeating that it is generally not a good idea to use word processors to export eBooks directly, and whenever I make that statement I am frequently greeted by push-back from authors who are perfectly happy doing it because it works for them. I guess the operative phrase here is, “works for them.” Exporting a clean… Continue reading "An example of Scrivener breaking your eBook output"
By Guido on
In recent days I’ve been visiting a number of message boards related to the indie author community. It is something I had not done in a long time. In over a year or two, in fact. The other day, however, I decided to take a look at some of the forums I used to frequent and realized that the amount… Continue reading "Whether it’s for Kindle or ePub—why you should never use an exporter for your eBook formatting"
