publishing Archives -

Aug 11

Publishing Perspectives: Fonts and Fashion

I’ve been thinking about fonts lately; in particular, unfashionable fonts. If you search for “bad fonts,” you will discover a core set of fonts that no professional will admit to liking. The obvious “offenders” are Comic Sans and Papyrus—they make everyone’s list. But there is surprising agreement on several more, including Copperplate, Arial, Impact, and Brush Script. Others find their way onto both best of and worst of lists. For example, Trajan, Times Roman, Gill Sans, Courier, and Helvetica.

Jun 13

Publishing Perspectives: Net Neutrality

If you’re like me, you use a news aggregator. These are sites like The Huffington Post (news and politics), sports.net (sports), and altsounds (music). Each site focuses on different topics, but they all pull together stories from various sources into a single website. Some stories are generated by the aggregator, but many are from other sources, so when you select a story you’re redirected to another site to view the story.

May 09

Publishing Perspectives: Conquering the Summit

It’s STC Summit time again, so I thought I’d say a few words about how I view the Summit as a publisher. The People Without a doubt, the main thing I look forward to is reconnecting, in person, with friends Read more

Apr 11

Publishing Perspectives: Writing a Book Proposal

As a publisher, we receive a fair number of book proposals, and frankly, most of them are pretty bad. They range from proposals for books that are clearly outside our niche to proposals that look like they were dashed off Read more

Mar 17

Publishing Perspectives: Six Steps to a Perfect Title

Are you tired of seeing article titles like Seven Secrets to Stunning Success or Ten Tips for Tackling the Terrible Twos? As much as we roll our eyes when the Huffington Post or Digg trots out another of these list Read more

Feb 11

Publishing Perspectives: The Proof is in the Printing

For several years I flew search and rescue missions with the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) in Colorado. One of our jobs was searching for lost hikers and missing airplanes. As part of our training, we learned that when you search Read more

Jan 09

Publishing Perspectives: The Year in Review

To start out the new year, I reviewed XML Press book sales for the last three years. The actual numbers weren’t a big surprise; we track sales closely. But I decided to look deeper and see what I could learn. Read more

Dec 06

Publishing Perspectives: A Tale of Three Covers

Covers don’t matter, until they do. We just released three books with three completely different covers and three different stories. Each had different challenges, and each had a new lesson. The easy one The first was easy. We continued a Read more

Oct 21

Publishing Perspectives: Wikis, Structure, and Publishing

For the last couple of years, we have been doing something that is rare among publishers. We have been developing books using both a wiki and XML-based structured writing. On the surface, these two technologies represent opposite ends of the Read more

Sep 06

Publishing Perspectives: Living in Style

The great thing about style guides is that you have so many to choose from. —Andrew Tanenbaum (paraphrased from his comments on standards). Until I became a publisher, I was skeptical about style guides. When I managed writers, my view Read more