Great! You’ve gotten a potential reader to visit your book’s product page. Maybe it was your fabulous cover that intrigued them, or the brilliant title, or — hey! — maybe it was your name, you celebrity author you!
In any case, it’s now time to seal the proverbial deal. Make the sale. Get the interested customer to become a reader and, hopefully, a fan.
How? Continue reading Book Descriptions 101: Have I Got a Book for You!
Your mother probably taught you many things, among them the truism “You can’t tell a book by its cover.”
Now, while that wisdom holds in most of our lives, one place where it doesn’t, ironically, is in publishing. Continue reading Book Covers 101: You CAN tell a book by its cover
The first thing you need in order to sell your book(s) is a quality product — well-written, well-edited (not by you), and well-designed (both the ebook, the print edition, and, possible, the audiobook — not to mention the cover). But that’s not enough. If you build it, they probably will not come.
Creating books is only the first half of the job. The other half is actually making sure that you’ve created an audience who want to buy them.
Now, when I say that to new author-publishers, they immediately think I’m talking about paid ads on Facebook, Google, Amazon, BookBub, etc.
But that’s not what I mean. Continue reading Book Marketing 101: What to do BEFORE you pay for ads
From a scandal that rocked the world of digital publishing to some nice, relaxing podcast recommendations, here’s our latest weekly roundup. Continue reading Weekly Roundup — What’s new in digital publishing?
I originally published this post on Joel Friedlander’s wonderful resource for self-publishers, TheBookDesigner.com
If HTML is the blueprint, showing how an ebook (or a web page) should be laid out, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are the interior design, saying how everything should look. While that may sound superficial, in fact learning to use CSS can have a profound impact on your ebook.
This is a somewhat complicated topic, so I am going to take three posts to cover it. This time round, I’m going to show you what CSS is and how to apply it. In the second post, I’m going to look at some of the different properties that you can use to define how your ebook looks. And in the last post, I’m going to talk about how to know which rules take precedence when.
Don’t call it a comeback! Here’s the second installment in our now weekly roundup of interesting articles in the world of eBook publishing. Continue reading Weekly Roundup – 6 Fresh Topics in Ebook Publishing
This post originally appeared on Joel Friedlander’s wonderful site, TheBookDesigner.com.
If, as I keep saying, an ebook is just a website a box, then in order to know how to get in and edit your ebook, you’re going to want to know some HTML. However you choose to work on the file, knowing the basic building blocks is essential in creating a finished product that presents your book to its best advantage.
When we talk about HTML, we’re actually talking about two separate things:
As a matter of principal (both personal and professional) I spend quite a bit of my time keeping up to date with what’s new in the eBook publishing world. Having built up a relatively substantial feed to scroll through, it recently occurred to me that I’m not the only one who could benefit from a list of new ePublishing articles to peruse while I’m going about my day.
With that in mind, I’ve decided to start publishing a weekly list of recent articles I think are important, interesting, innovative, etc. Here are this week’s choices:
Continue reading Weekly Roundup: 7 Interesting Articles on eBook Publishing
Over the next few posts, I’ll be showing you how ebooks are coded and formatted. We’ll look at the anatomy of an ebook, and what makes it tick.
You’ve heard me call an ebook a website in a box. This time we’re going to talk about what’s inside the box.
First thing’s first: let me share an ebook with you. It’s the ePub file for a short story of mine called White Robes.
You’re welcome to read it, obviously, but for the purposes of this post (and the next two), we’re going to be opening up the box and dissecting the ebook.
This is the actual production file that I’ve uploaded to Amazon, by the way — it includes all of the coding and formatting that I typically include in creating an ebook. It will be the model that I’ll be using over the next few posts in discussing an ebook’s innards.
Stillpoint Digital Press’s Kickstarter campaign to complete Heather Albano’s steampunk time-travel adventure trilogy Keeping Time finished on December 20 with $3,325 in backing from 91 backers.
This enthusiastic response was over three times the amount Stillpoint and Albano’s goal.
Publisher David Kudler sent this message to the backers:
We crossed the finish line at 330% of our minimum goal.
Thanks to all of our backers — not only for supporting this project, which was a wonderful act of giving (that we look forward to rewarding!), but for sharing it with your friends.
We’ll be in touch in the coming days to get information so that we can send you your rewards. If you have any thoughts or questions, please do comment here.
Happy solstice, and happy holidays!
David Kudler & Heather Albano
PS If you missed out, worry not! You can still pre-order your copies of all three books at StillpointDigitalPress.com/Keeping-Time
“Waterloo and time travel are made for each other and Heather Albano has done a wonderful job of giving us a delightful cast of characters, tasked with stitching together the proper nineteenth century while fending off several monstrous alternatives. Propulsive adventure with historical insight.” – Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars and 2312
It’s 1815, and Wellington’s badly-outnumbered army stares across the field of Waterloo at Napoleon’s forces. Desperate to hold until reinforcements arrive, Wellington calls upon a race of monsters created by a mad Genevese scientist 25 years before.
It’s 1815, and a discontented young lady sitting in a rose garden receives a mysterious gift: a pocket watch that, when opened, displays scenes from all eras of history. Past…and future.
It’s 1885, and a small band of resistance fighters are resorting to increasingly extreme methods in their efforts to overthrow a steampunk Empire whose clockwork gears are slick with its subjects’ blood.
Heather Albano is a storyteller, history geek, and lover of both time-travel tropes and re-imaginings of older stories. You most likely know her from her game design work (which most recently included A Study In Steampunk, produced by Choice of Games, and contributions to TimeWatch and The Dracula Dossier, both published by Pelgrane Press)—but she writes non-interactive fiction too. Like the Keeping Time trilogy.
