Writing, designing, and illustrating, for creators
Are book covers dead? Check out Craig Mod’s “Hack the Cover.” It’s a great quick book. 39 pages (twice as long as his “Books in the Age of the iPad” and ten times as good). You can even read the entire book online for free. Or in Kindle format for $3.99. There are lots of …
Read the experience of a smart man (Craig Mod, MacDowell Writing Fellow, 2012 TechFellow) getting his print book converted into an eBook. I stumbled across his article “Platforming Books” from a tweet by the Director of Digital Information at the Art Institute, @lili_czarina. It’s a rather long webpage, but the main item I would like …
An experience of converting an InDesign file to ePub/mobi Read More »
Every week on Tuesday at 11am CST #ideaschat has an hour-long chat with a new topic. This week’s topic was about storytelling. Question #3 was “What makes for a great storyteller?” Thirteen people gave some great responses. Vulnerability, honesty, wit, ability to captivate, telling the right story at the right time, honesty, passion, live first …
The blogging platform of the future needs two main things. Community and topic-specific subscription. Drupal allows people to subscribe to specific topics (or categories) of posts. But drupal doesn’t have a tied-in community to their platform. In fact, it’s hard to find any blogging platform that has a tied-in community. Blogger? No. WordPress? No. Livejournal? …
Blogs need to allow people to subscribe to categories Read More »
More resources I’ve found on my second day of researching how to make eBooks from InDesign. ================ Barnes & Noble’s eBook publisher home pubit.barnesandnoble.com/ “PubIt! ePub Formatting Guide” (PDF) Download our ePub Formatting Guide for information on how best to format your ePub document. — pretty much tech specs, raw stuff. — The maximum viewing …
There’s a new publishing platform in town. It might beat the pants off wordpress, blogger, typepad, pinterest, and tumblr. It’s called “Medium” and it’s by a twitter co-founder. They state, “We’re rethinking publishing and building a new platform from scratch. This is a preview.” I’m really happy that Medium is doing two of the things …
Medium might become the best publishing platform ever, if they… Read More »
As I’m learning how to create eBooks, I will be archiving all the webpages and PDFs I read; and all the items I install. I’m hoping that as I find these resources that they will be helpful to others who are learning how to make eBooks. ================ Read Adobe’s eBook intro page. http://blogs.adobe.com/digitalpublishing/2010/03/create_epub_ebooks_with_adobe_indesign.html — Has …
Are you passionate about what you do? hexanine, an agency in Chicago, blogged, “Musing: Weave Passion into Business“: Our short musings on design, branding, business and the human condition. Sure, we all have to eat and pay the mortgage. But it’s easy to become a creative mercenary if you’re merely chasing lucrative markets or the …
Passionate about your column or about your topic? Read More »
If someone comments on your blog post, you should always try to respond. If you don’t, it shows readers that you don’t care about the comments or possibly you don’t even read the comments. [sidenote: not ALL comments by readers deserve a response; but if you have a low comment rate on your blog, you …
Here’s another problem with Google Plus. It’s a platform for posting, not reading. You can add people to your circles. For instance, someone requested that he wanted to be in my circles for: books, comics, food, Kindle, libraries, nature, photography, video games and weather. I added him to those circles. However, this person doesn’t always …
My brother Erik on Disney: I was really impressed with how every single Disney worker was incredibly kind. From the waiters to the street sweepers to the whatever else job there is-ers. And it wasn’t a “I’m being nice because i have to be nice” attitude. They seemed genuinely nice. People really, really like Disney, …
Disney should have a genius bar with Disney experts Read More »
In addition to the 11 blogs on my reading list, I am looking for more blogs about content marketing and syndication. Thanks to junta42 for listing 84 blogs about marketing. I took the top nine blogs whose focus is on content marketing and added them to my Google Reader. Perhaps these will make it into …
Content marketing blogs added to my reading list Read More »
With the speed of social media, is there much of a need for an archive? To get eyeballs, it’s all about getting people to tweet, pin, tumbl, stumble your work in matter of a day or even just in hours. You can’t even access your tweets older than a year. Which is kinda funny, cuz …
We consume 3x as much information as we did in the 60s. I’ve been thinking lately how much I input versus how much do I output. I take in lots of information, but what do I do with that information. There are three keys. 1) Production We read and watch a lot, but we do …
People, just be glad that Yahoo didn’t buy Instagram. Yahoo purchased Flickr 7 years ago for $35 million dollars. Yahoo hasn’t done anything much with Flickr. Although it would be interesting to see what would happen if Instagram and Flickr merged together. But Yahoo right now wouldn’t be the company to do it. Yahoo doesn’t …
What if Yahoo bought Instagram instead of Facebook? Read More »
As Instagram grows bigger and bigger with the inclusion of Android phones, people need better ways to manage their friends they follow. The solution? Instagram needs lists or groups. Right now I follow 100 people. I can handle the photo feed of 100 people pretty well–mostly because everyone posts just one photo at a time. …
Instagram, the wildly popular photo app on iPhones, just released an Android version. I’m kinda curious how this larger audience will affect my usage of Instagram. One of the things I liked about Instagram was that is a nice small stream of photos. If more and more people join, I’m concerned that there will be …
If you have a hard time figuring out what the story is for your product/company, try writing some facebook ads for your product/company. That will give you an idea of how to succintly describe your business in a way that captures the attention of your audience. Often we get caught up thinking about things in …
To understand your business, write a facebook ad Read More »
I was just debating if I wanted to buy a particular Kindle eBook for $9.39 (The House That Cleans Itself). Two thoughts ran through my mind as I read the first chapter for free. Is this book relevant to me? (I don’t own a house) Is this book a value? I’m not talking about the …
My initial plan with this blog was to write a post at least once a week. Right now I have nine blog posts in draft, so it looks like you’ll have some weekly content to read for awhile. 🙂 But then I also realized that I’d like to post quickie top-of-mind thoughts here too…