From the monthly archives:

September 2009

Two Kinds of Self-Publishers—Which One Are You?

September 30, 2009 10 comments

This post is in response to the Backwords Books call for entries for blog posts about self publishing. I encourage anyone interested in this topic to read the other entries, a diverse set of people looking at the same moment in time from completely different perspectives.—Joel As a new blogger on book design and self-publishing, [...]

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Self-Publishing Basics: An Unabridged List of the Parts of a Book

September 29, 2009 21 comments

The history of book printing goes back to the first bibles pulled sheet by sheet off Johannes Gutenburg’s presses in Mainz, German in the late fifteenth century. The first books were attempts to replicate the handwritten books of the time, which varied widely. Over the centuries publishers have gradually established conventions about the way books [...]

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Does Book Design Really Matter?

September 28, 2009 21 comments

Did you ever see the movie “Deception” that came out in 2008? No? It starred Ewan McGregor, Hugh Jackman and Michelle Williams. The cast alone should have made it a hit, but it bombed, critics hated it and audiences ignored it in spectacular numbers. Despite Hollywood’s addiction to stars and hype over content, the dirty [...]

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Real World Book Design: Designing for Print-on-Demand Production

September 24, 2009 2 comments

As the technology we use to manufacture books changes, designers responsible for creating those books adapt. Sometimes slowly. Sometimes reluctantly. But they adapt, because the new technology will eventually supplant the old technology. Today most books are still printed by offset lithography, and any print run over about 1,000 units will benefit from the more [...]

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Indie Business Memoir Scores Major Reviews

September 23, 2009 4 comments

I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area with my wife and infant son in 1993. We were glad to escape the winters in New York, and had many friends in the area. But leaving home can be hard in other ways. Growing up in the Bronx and, later, lower Westchester, we were accustomed to [...]

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