Tweet Unstressed Syllables has been on something of an unannounced summer hiatus. I’ve been unremarkably busy, and our Contributing Editor has just gone and had herself a baby. But don’t think I’m done with Unstressed Syllables. In fact, we’ve got grand plans for the site that we intend to roll out this fall. We’re hoping […]
Tweet Last week I started a series on self-publishing with a little bit of advice on where to start. It was primarily a list of links to the major digital distributors. I also promised to follow up with a post on how to start. The inspiration for that one came from an email my sister […]
Tweet This week I’m describing how Consortium Books makes books. In yesterday’s post I talked about the setup — acquisitions, editing, layout, and design. Today I want to talk about production and distribution. Publishing In the olden days, the “publishing” bit involved taking an edited manuscript, typesetting it, offsetting it, then running tens of thousands […]
Tweet As promised, I’m going to tell you how we actually go about publishing a book to Amazon. I’ll save some of the “how to” aspect of it for next week, when I discuss Consortium Books processes. First, I want to describe some of my experiences with the distributors. It might help to briefly explain […]
Tweet Here we go again, diving back into Microsoft Word and the murky world of section breaks with the next-to-last week in our month-long look at professional document formatting. This week we’ve been talking about page setup, and — like headers and footers and text columns before — page setup is a per-section setting. Changing […]
Tweet I started yesterday with a story about getting the most out of every page of my scribblebook. These day I actually do something pretty similar at work, twisting and reflowing thousand-page instruction books in an effort to shave printing costs while maintaining as much usability as possible. Your tax dollars at work. Paper Size […]
Tweet I’ve waxed romantic around here before about scribblebooks, but that’s always been late in the week when I was talking to my creative writers. Scribblebooks are great for the Art School types, but they don’t have a lot of appeal for serious business writers. And actually…I complain sometimes about my day job, but I’ve […]
Tweet No, you’re not mistaken — that’s a title you’ve seen before. It was the title of the application article on my last Document Style series, and it’ll probably be the title of the third article in next week’s, too. Because that’s what we’re doing. Whether you’re trying to manage text columns, headers and footers, […]
Tweet Yesterday I told a story about Annabelle playing pretend, whether that meant announcing herself to be a ferocious dragon to scare off things that go bump, or an innocent young babe to get away with outright disobedience. Either way, there’s magic in a little bit of delusion. And if you read the article when […]
Tweet As I’m sure all three-year-olds do, our precious little Annabelle has an incredible imagination, and she puts it to great use. As a storyteller, of course, I’ve cherished every moment of that. Or…well, nearly all of them. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it here, but one of my proudest moments as a father […]
