Practical Advice to Help Self-Publishers Build Better Books
From the category archives:
One of the projects I’m working on is a memoir of growing up in Johannesburg, South Africa. It’s a very personal but fascinating look at childhood in another time and place, and I’ll talk more about this book when it’s published, but it’s a great example of setting up a straight narrative book page layout.
In [...]
We haven’t seen much of the Apple iPad yet, and the screen shots we have seen show that the fonts for the Apple iPad are perhaps not all they might be.
What do we know? Apple, as far as I know, has issued only the one press release on the day of the product’s announcement, January [...]
One of the great pleasures of being a book designer is getting to work on books by my friends. There’s a unique form of collaboration that happens when I work with someone I know well, and the book usually shows the result of this process.
In 1999 I had the pleasure of helping my friend Gary [...]
The typefaces we use for books are a real contradiction. They can be so quiet you just don’t notice them. But if you enlarge the letters, you can see right away that they are full of idiosyncrasies and flourishes.
Display typefaces, on the other hand, announce themselves to the reader in no uncertain terms.
In most nonfiction [...]
I’ve been talking off and on for the last few months about the eventual demise of the book as the primary conveyer of what we probably should start calling “text.”
When E.M. Ginger said that we probably haven’t seen a book on an e-Reader, and we may never see one, I had to agree.
I don’t [...]
This seems to be a week for letters. Yesterday, in response to an inquiry, I decided to respond with as much detail as possible about what I do, how the process works, what it costs, and what clients can do to control that cost. It seems to me like a basic communication to have with [...]
In an earlier post about the parts of a book, I briefly discussed the title page:
Title page—Announces the title, subtitle, author and publisher of the book. Other information that may be found on the title page can include the publisher’s location, the year of publication, or descriptive text about the book. Illustrations are also common [...]
It’s the eve of the long-awaited announcement from Apple about its e-reading / kindle-killing / publisher saving / book destroying tablet computer.
In the Twittersphere, the feed has been lighting up with people reporting from Digital Book World in New York, and everyone is looking to the future, trying to discern the horizon line somewhere [...]
