Creating a memoir from old family letters and photos can get complicated. You start out with good intentions and then find yourself sorting through hundreds (even thousands) of letters and old photos trying to find a way to make a manuscript. Scrapbooking has been around for years, and it is a convenient way to take [...]
One of your final steps in the journey is the attainment of an ISBN number and a barcode. This number identifies your book’s publisher, edition, publication region, and physical properties. The barcode is a graphical representation of your ISBN and pricing information. Simply put, they are a unique identifier for your publication—no other number or media will have that exact ISBN or barcode.
Contemplate reading the latest murder mystery on the market. Imagine your emotional response to the story presented from the point of view (POV) of the husband who first stumbled upon the scene of the crime. What about a story from the victim’s perspective as they you (the reader) tell their story? Would your reaction be any different if the narrator was an omnipresent narrator with no direct ties to the characters? The point of view, or voice that tells your story, directly impacts your emotional connection to your story.
Every book is unique. The book arrangement shouldn't be. It's important that the organization follows standard publishing industry practices. Parts of a book should appear in a standard location in every book. Organizing your book using these rules makes finding things easier for your reader. For example, every book has a front cover and a back cover. Prologues and table of contents are up front, indexes are in the back, etc.
When creating an eBook or similar publication in Adobe InDesign, you may find yourself needing to make text pop just a little to stand out on the page. This is especially useful when you have white text against a medium-dark background. It’s not dark enough for the white text to be readable on its own but not light enough for a darker font. We could take the text into Photoshop and build ourselves a nice frame with a drop shadow. However, here's a much simpler way to add a drop shadow in InDesign.
So, you’ve finished your material, and you are ready to publish it. First? You need to protect it. Obtaining copyright, an ISBN, and an LCCN number is critical to protecting your rights. What is copyright? A copyright is an exclusive set of rights, or protection, provided to authors of original work to protect the use of the work by others. These rights include the control of how the work is copied, distributed, publicly displayed, or adapted.
Whether you are designing your own book in Adobe InDesign or hiring someone else to do so, understanding book design and layout terms can be important. InDesign, for example, will ask you what you want to set your trim or margin size when you start a new design. Then, if you want to find your own printer, you’ll need to understand what they mean when they ask for your trim; if you want bleeds; and, if all the images are CMYK, grayscale, or if you want to use spot color.
WordPress is an online, open source content management system. Simply put, it’s a free website-development tool. Different users around the world work continually to make it less glitchy and more user-friendly. You can get free themes (design) and plugins (add-ons that do things) that do not require any coding or extensive computer knowledge on your end. Sound good? Great! You don’t need a computer science degree to start a website. Let’s get you started with the essential tools. You can have your site up and running today.
How your story is brought from an idea to sitting on a bookshelf can vary. However, there is a common cycle that book publications often follow. These steps can be used for digital publications as well, with just a few steps removed.
Here is a list of acronyms that those people who work in publishing should be familiar with. This list is by no means complete, but it is a good start when searching for information about the industry.
