COVER DESIGN, LAYOUT & PIXEL DIMENSIONS
This is the second of my cover design posts. In my first post, a while back now, I undertook a bit of an investigation into the dimensions of book cover images that are most suitable for the largest two markets, Amazon Kindle and Apple iBooks. I’m going to elaborate on this, explaining how I’ve approached cover design and why I made the choices I made.
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EDITED
If you trawl through the reviews of sundry author-published works on venues like Amazon or review sites such as Good Reads, one of the most common complaints relates to the quality of editing. Unfortunately, your primary school teachers were right: people will judge you on the basis of your writing and typos, spelling errors, poor grammar and confused writing will make a reader think you are either careless or ill-educated or both.
TWENTY-FIVE FREE FONTS SUITABLE FOR COVERS
The font you pick for your cover is important. It needs to help convey the tone of the book, the genre and be clear enough and bold enough to be readable even when reduced down to a small thumbnail.
Today I’m going to discuss covers and design. A hugely important aspect of self-publishing is creating (or paying someone else to create) a cover that conveys what your book is about and entices readers to click it, download it and even perhaps pay for it. Continue reading
I’m going to take a short detour now to look at the development of communities of self-publishing online. In a previous post I discussed various avenues of self publishing, including print on demand and podcasting. There is an interesting phenomenon now cropping up where communities for original works are appearing, much like communities for fanfiction (FanFiction.net being the most popular example). Continue reading
EBOOK & PUBLICATION PLATFORMS
This is the second in my series on self-publishing. To begin with I wanted to have a quick look at what sorts of self-publishing options exist, both electronic and not electronic. You can read the first post in this series here.
I’m going to divide publishing options into four broad categories, outlined below: Continue reading
This is the start of a new series in which I’ll be examining self-publishing in it’s various incarnations. Self-publishing has gone from being a dirty word among authors to being the hot new thing that everyone is talking about. Only, it isn’t exactly a hot new thing. The image is a page from Charles Dickens’s manuscript for A Christmas Carol – which he self-published back in the day.