Vellum is a tool that creates both ebooks and print books from a Microsoft Word .docx file. You can export to this format from Scrivener and other tools. If you work directly in Word, you can create a Vellum template using Vellum’s custom styles. This will reduce the amount of work you need to do…
Beveling and embossing is a way to create shading and simulate shadows that make your text look three-dimensional. Here’s the same text without and with beveling/embossing. And here’s a close-up so you can see how different the same text can look. Prerequisites You have Photoshop You have an existing text layer in a .psd file….
Ablurb is a simple tool that allows you to preview the formatted description (blurb) for your book before making it live on Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). If you’re comfortable with HTML, you might not need to see a preview. If you don’t regularly write HTML, or if you just want to verify that what you…
Ellipses are used to indicate ‘omissions’ of words, sentence, thoughts, etc. Overview There are a number of different ways in which ellipses can be used, and there are a variety of often conflicting style rules/recommendations on how ellipses should be formatted. This post covers the basics – there are lots of situations where ellipses can…
It’s generally pretty easy to figure out which words to capitalize in a story title, but every once in a while there’s one word you’re not sure about, or else you’ve had one of those days where you keep making simple mistakes and you just want a sanity check. 🙂 Capitalization rules There are a…
YASIV is a free tool that allows you to look at the popularity of and connections between books based on reader purchases on Amazon. YASIV stands for “Yet Another Similar Items Visualization.” What exactly does this tool do? Here’s a screenshot to help illustrate why this is so cool. I searched for The Faerie Summer,…
Instafreebie allows you to run giveaways while collecting email addresses from everyone who enters a giveaway. Authors can also team up and put together group giveaways. Your authro p One nifty feature of Instafreebie is that your author profile page exists even if you don’t have an active giveaway – and you can create your…
Here’s an example of a situation where you might want a border around an image… This is the very first book cover I ever designed. I spent hours and hours picking the artwork, font, and colors, ordered a paperback proof, made even more tweaks, and then I finally published it. I’m not sure how long…
There are lots of reasons why you might want to make the background of an image transparent. Perhaps you have an image with a white background that normally appears on a white page, but you know it might appear on a page where the background is gray. Or maybe you’re combining multiple images into one,…
Managing your Instagram account via your Facebook page links your two accounts. Note that it does not mean your Instagram posts will show up on Facebook – that’s a completely separate topic. Prerequisites You have an existing Facebook page (note that you must be an admin or editor of this page). You have an existing…
