You can do it yourself.
Below you'll find links to all the information about publishing that’s available on the Book Design Made Simple website, book, videos, and blog.
We gained a lot of experience from creating Book Design Made Simple. You can learn from our successes and avoid our pitfalls! We’ve written blog posts about entering book award contests and publishing a second edition, as well as explained how to get all the details you need for your copyright page.
Below are all the blog posts in the Publishing category, starting with the most recent post.
We have greatly enjoyed, and learned from, our contributions to the book design world. We’ve loved answering your questions and helping authors and designers on six continents produce the most professional-looking books possible.
However, in late October, we’ll be saying farewell to you all, and shutting down this website. We encourage you to reread the articles that have been most helpful to you. At the same time, we’ll be stopping all of our book and template sales. [Read more…]
We get plenty of queries about new editions of books. Are the changes enough to constitute a new edition? Or maybe a revised edition? Or is it simply a reprint?
The issue is partly a subjective one, but there are some conventional standards that govern the answer to this complex question.
Here’s our non-legal advice, based on experience and a bit of research. [Read more…]
Are you ready to find a self-publishing service for your masterpiece? In this article we hope to help you discover the right one for your needs, whether it’s a full-service shop, simply a printing press, or an ebook conversion. Even though—as we always say—you can do it yourself, everyone needs at least a little help getting their book out there.
Possibly the majority of new publishers go straight to KDP, but many folks prefer to avoid Amazon for their own reasons. We will focus here mostly on other well-known self-publishing services. Aside from the ones we mention, there are many more to be found online and even advertised on television. Please read our words of caution at the end of this article about all self-publishing services.
Having a style sheet for your book helps to keep spelling and punctuation consistent throughout. It usually includes a section for each letter of the alphabet, and a space for notes at the bottom. It’s easy to create one while you’re writing your book, and you’ll be able to use it for your book’s website, marketing materials, and everything else you’ll be producing as an author. Below is a template to get you started.
Back cover copy is the text that goes on your book’s back cover. Everyone judges a book by its cover (you know that!), and your front cover only gets a few seconds to grab a reader’s interest. However, once a reader picks up your book and flips to the back cover, this is your big chance to sell that book. You need to convince that reader to buy using compelling back cover copy.
[Read more…]
Self publishing is an adventure, especially when sharing the ride with a coauthor! Having a coauthor means having someone to depend on, someone to finish what you cannot, someone to push you along, and someone to come up with fresh ideas. And we think our collaboration has truly been ideal. We recently realized that it’s been ten years for us, so we decided to commemorate the anniversary with an online conversation.
In this post we feature a self-published author, Joel Rubano, who has found remarkable success through book marketing. Not only is his book selling well, but he’s made an interesting career shift, too. We hope you find encouragement and inspiration from his story, no matter what your own book project looks like. Here is Joel’s account: [Read more…]
Crop marks and other printer’s marks appear in the PDFs you send to the printer. In Book Design Made Simple, we mention crop marks exactly once and never define what they are, so we think it’s about time that we did so.
Simply put, crop marks are chop marks—they indicate where the printer will chop around the edges of the stack of printed pages to make them the correct size, and a nice, neat package for binding. [Read more…]
The advent of the internet has changed the landscape of books. Self-publishing is getting easier all the time, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. The biggest hurdle you’ll face as an online bookseller is marketing. Every self-publishing author in 2021 needs to know how to do keyword research! We’ll explain the basics of Amazon KDP ads and then show you how to find the most effective Amazon KDP keywords that will sell your books. [Read more…]
Trying to keep up with Amazon updates? So are we! There’ve been a few changes lately, so we’re discussing them here to keep you up to date. The main Amazon updates for book authors are: 1) EPUBs are replacing MOBIs for reflowable Kindle ebooks, 2) hardcover binding is now an option, and 3) A+ Content is available for your book’s product page on Amazon. Let’s break it down for you.
