I’m pretty excited. Not quite as excited as the day I went down to East West Bookstore on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan to see my book Body Types on a bookstore shelf for the first time. That was pretty awesome, even if Jill had to rearrange the stock a bit to show the book to its best advantage.
And that’s what I’m doing this weekend. I’ve been working with a terrific blog designer, Matt Cheuvront to show my blog to its best advantage. Matt’s not only a web designer and an online marketer, he’s also a world-class blogger himself, so he really knows what works. Check out his Life Without Pants blog for a compelling Gen Y read. Good stuff.
When I started The Book Designer I invested in Thesis, a theme built for extensibility and to be search engine friendly.
Matt’s put a new suit of clothes on my Thesis foundation, and I think you’ll like the change.
We’ve built some new functionality into the blog, and I’m working to make the information that people request most often instantly available, without having to dig through archives with hundreds of posts.
If you see a “men working” sign once in a while over the next couple of days, you’ll know we’re deep in the trenches, up to our knees in cables, pipes, switches and other inter-tube plumbing.
In the meantime, here are some of the articles I’m working on for The Book Designer in the coming weeks:
- More followup on how nonfiction authors can use keywords to gain readers for their work
- The real difference between printers and publishers
- Solving the curse of auto-leading
- Using Microsoft Word Styles to ease formatting
- Amazing—and amazingly easy—new ways to get your book into ePub format
- Interviews with several very successful self-publishers
- Book reviews, fonts and typography, organizing tools, book design elements, and a whole lot more.
Here are a few links of things I’ve been reading that I think you might enjoy:
What Publishers Today Can Learn from Allen Lane: Fearlessness
by James Bridle on Publishing Perspectives
Is It Really Possible to Create the Change You Want in Your Life?
by Yaro Starak on Entrepreneur’s Journey
How Social Media is Changing Publishing
by Michael Stelzner on Social Media Examiner
Finally, I’ll leave you with this video I came across a while ago. It’s French, and remember while watching it that it is a fantasy, a speculation on one possible future.
By way of Piotr Kowalczyk.
Please leave a comment and tell me what you think of the new design, or anything else for that matter.
And thanks for reading!
This post contains affiliate links to Amazon.com
Hi, I found it by going into the archives, it was a post from March.
Thanks for this site, it is such a support for getting a grip on the nitty gritty issues that you usually only learn through trial and error.
sarah
Hey Sarah, glad you found what you were looking for. In the blog redesign, the Articles page has run into some problems and we don’t have it back up yet. That’s usually the best place to find articles since they’re all listed in one place. Also I’ll probably put the category list back up, it was another victim of the move. But thanks for your interest and if you can’t find something, just leave me a note and I’ll be glad to help out!
Thanks so much Joel, for taking the time to reply. I’ll be referring to your site frequently in the coming months. I realize it is a work in progress, so will look forward to the category list if you put it back. Thanks for the tip about ‘Articles’ as well, and for being so accessible.
Dear Joel,
I’ve got a publisher for my book and am designing it myself in InDesign, a great arrangement for me.
Your site has been a help on several issues, but I am finding it hard to navigate if one needs to refer to a specific post. The one I am looking for had to do with preparing photos for printing, what the best dpi would be etc. Where can I find it?
And it would really be helpful to be able to search the site in categories, such as Design, printing, type, content, etc.
thanks, Sarah
Whoa!
Nice new page Joel.
Very clean and comfortable to navigate around.
*not to say that your old layout was not good*
:-)
Hey, thanks Vincent. Got some fine tuning to do and still cleaning up some of the infrastructure, but I’m pretty pleased with it myself.
Very entertaining video…beautiful setting…bright future.
Vincent, I thought that film was actually pretty well done, and it doesn’t seem so farfetched now, does it?
Thanks for your kind wishes.
I watched the entire short film. I love the concepts of the thin digi-books.
10 years ago people would call it ludicrous. Now, we all just wait, anticipate, and expect.
Looking forward to your “new” look to your site Joel.
:-)