Do you remember this conversation from your own school days? “Ms. Murphy, can I go to the boy’s room?” “Well, Billy, you certainly can go to the boy’s room. You know where it is, and I saw you running after Sally Ketchum today at recess, so I know your legs are working fine.” “Oh, great, […]
Self Publishing Basics
Self-Publishing Basics: A 5-Minute Guide to Copyright
Well, we’re all busy and who has time to research copyright? This is the province of lawyers, big publishers with legal departments, and plagiarism trackers, isn’t it? No, every self-publisher needs to have a bit of information on copyright and the way the law works in the United States. Okay, I promised this would take […]
Prepping Files for Book Layout: What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You
Do you know what’s inside your word processing file? Just words? There’s a lot more than that. Take this file for instance. It looks like a pretty normal Word file, just a bunch of words on the page. It’s like a lot of files I get from authors to use in producing their book. But […]
Self-Publishing Basics: Why You Need a Category on the Back Cover of Your Book
When you become a self-publisher you have to learn to think like a bookseller. That makes sense, doesn’t it? After all, you are now responsible for the sales life of your book, and the most important single thing that you need to know is how to sell your book to the person who, even though […]
Self-Publishing Basics: Book Pagination For Fun and Profit
The post continues the series begun in an earlier post, and is Part of the Book Construction Blueprint, which provides reliable guidance to anyone taking on the construction of a book that must conform to generally accepted practice. Having looked at the Parts of the Book, we have already imposed a sequence or order on […]
Self-Publishing Basics: An Unabridged List of the Parts of a Book
The history of book printing goes back to the first Bibles pulled sheet by sheet off Johannes Gutenberg’s presses in Mainz, Germany 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 […]
Does Book Design Really Matter?
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 […]
Self-Publishing Basics: 5 Layout Mistakes that Make You Look Unprofessional
Years ago my wife and I went to a wedding at a very prestigious “club” here in San Francisco. My wife looked gorgeous as always, and I wore a very nice light gray English wool suit that seemed suitably low-key. When we walked in the door I realized that I “hadn’t received the memo” because […]
Self Publishing Basics: How to Read an ISBN
Some years ago, I published a book that landed on the front page of the Sunday New York Times Book Review, which was quite a thrill for my wife and me, as we were running our publishing company from a spare bedroom in our house. Soon enough, the phone started to ring, and one call […]