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Book Design Resources

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Copyright free images, sounds & music. Booktype. About BookRix. BookRix is a free self publishing platform that offers eBook distribution services to independent writers. Our users can share their writing, connect with other readers and discover new stories and authors – all in one place. Upon registration, a new account profile will be created for you. Your personal profile can be customized to your liking and is equipped with all the tools you will need to create your own eBooks, list your favorite literature, promote yourself as an author and publish your work to major online shops. Technology is constantly in motion.

Over the years it has changed the way we play our music, watch movies and discover new content. BookRix was the first book community to give their writers a platform to promote and sell their work on the web as a published eBook. BookRix is free - plain and simple. . - Publish your eBooks and take pride in your accomplishment - Distribute and sell your eBook on major online shops and earn money. ColoRotate: Colors come to life in 3D. You CAN design your own book cover (well, maybe): Here’s how. Posted on Oct 11, 2011 | 13 comments I’m pretty proud of myself. I tend to be cheap and only pay for something I can’t do myself, so when I do I expect quality. I mean, I wax my own eyebrows because I’m too cheap to pay anyone else to do it, so why not create my book cover? Well, I’ve learned that there are some things I can do, and some things I just can’t. For my upcoming serial novel Two Moons of Sera (coming November 1!)

In order to make your own cover there are a few things you must have: A photo editing program that can utilize layers (if you don’t know what layers are, skip ahead to the “find a designer” section).Legal rights to ALL of the images you intend to use.A tech-savvy self-taught attitude. Let’s go through these a little slower. This is an important point. You may not – I repeat – you MAY NOT use any picture you find on the internet for your book cover. Designing a book cover is an investment. If you answered yes then you are ready to go. Top 10 Best Resource Guides for e-Book Authors. The new world of e-book publishing promises almost-instant gratification at virtually no cost. It seems that authors with a manuscript in hand can glide nonstop to great sales, wealth and fame, probably before lunch.

At least that’s the way it seems sometimes. Unfortunately it can be tedious searching for the resources you need when you decide to publish your book as an e-book. I’ve been researching for my series of reviews of e-reader apps. As usual, I’m gathering links and resources as I go, keeping in mind this very task. I assemble lists of links in Evernote, one of my favorite tools for research. So far, these are the best resources for e-book authors I’ve come across. To save you the time of looking up all these resources, just bookmark this page and you’ll be able to come back to it when you’re ready. Ed: I’d like to keep growing this list and updating it. More Free Resources Formatting for Kindle, Guido Henkel’s 9 helpful blog entries. Ebookninjas.com weekly e-book podcast. Book Design Basics - Dashes, Hyphens and Dots. I par­tic­u­larly like this sec­tion on dashes, hy­phens and dots be­cause it goes be­yond ty­po­graphic aes­thet­ics to ex­plore how we can com­mu­ni­cate more ef­fec­tively as writ­ers.

The sub­tle in­tri­ca­cies of hy­phens and dashes af­fect all au­thors whether they type­set their own books or not. Know­ing how to punc­tu­ate cor­rectly em­pow­ers you to con­trol em­pha­sis and han­dle chal­leng­ing sen­tences that con­tain par­en­thet­i­cal asides, omis­sions or in­com­plete thoughts. Here, good ty­pog­ra­phy is an ex­ten­sion of good writ­ing. Many writ­ers are un­aware that the sim­ple dash comes in sev­eral fla­vors.

Be­cause dashes are often used as al­ter­na­tives for other types of punc­tu­a­tion, they are ex­plained here in con­text with the marks they sub­sti­tute for. Book De­sign Tip: The Hy­phen Dash The hy­phen dash is used to split words across a line break or to join two words into one. The waves glowed blue-green in the trop­i­cal sun. Book De­sign Tip: The En-Dash. Book Design Basics Part 2: Optical Margins, Indents and Periods. Part 2 of Fun­da­men­tals of Book De­sign ex­plores op­ti­cal mar­gins, para­graph for­mat­ting and spaces. Read about mar­gins, lay­out and lead­ing in Part 1. The self-pub­lish­ing rev­o­lu­tion is (aside from the In­ter­net) the great­est thing ever to hap­pen to free­dom of speech and ex­pres­sion, but self-pub­lished books are widely stig­ma­tized as poorly pro­duced.

Why? Be­cause they al­most uni­ver­sally are. After all those hours writ­ing and edit­ing, why not pro­duce a book that con­veys your good taste, at­ten­tion to de­tail and care? Book De­sign Tip: Op­ti­cal Mar­gins Op­ti­cal mar­gins are one thing you won’t get your word proces­sor to do, but with a ded­i­cated type­set­ting pro­gram like Adobe In­De­sign, you can im­prove the look of your book de­sign with a sim­ple but un­der­used fea­ture. Let’s look at an or­di­nary block of text (from Oliver Twist by Charles Dick­ens). No­tice how all the punc­tu­a­tion stays strictly within the bound­aries of the text box. Ever! 1. Book Design Basics Part 1: Margins and Leading. Book de­sign is a lost art. Though book de­sign dis­cus­sions usu­ally focus on cov­ers, con­sider how much more time a reader spends star­ing at the text. An el­e­gant book block is just as im­por­tant.

Decades ago, pro­fes­sional trades­men prac­ticed the fine art of type­set­ting. Today, book de­sign is often ex­e­cuted (pun in­tended) by am­a­teurs. As easy as it is to set type, many fine points of ty­pog­ra­phy are com­monly over­looked. For­tu­nately, for the de­sign-aware, dig­i­tal tools like Adobe In­De­sign make it pos­si­ble to pro­duce pages that as­pire to the old stan­dards of hot metal type. Sac­ri­fic­ing com­fort­able mar­gins is un­for­tu­nately a good busi­ness de­ci­sion, even if it’s a bad de­sign de­ci­sion. For­tu­nately, self-pub­lish­ers don’t have this prob­lem be­cause print-on-de­mand (POD) al­lows for the pro­duc­tion of one book at a time. Book De­sign Tip: Mar­gins Line Width is an­other im­por­tant book de­sign con­sid­er­a­tion. The J.A. Drawing tool - DrawIsland.

Book Design Basics Part 1: Margins and Leading.