Third edition of The Global Indie Author now available in Canada

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Well, after much trial and tribulation, the third edition of The Global Indie Author is out now in Canada. Readers can find it on Chapters/Indigo and Amazon.ca. By the way, that “Usually delivers in 3-5 weeks” declaration on the Amazon.ca website is nonsense; the book delivers in less than a week. The extended delivery time is just part of Amazon/CreateSpace’s strategy against competitor Lightning Source, which, incidentally, is covered in detail in the book. If you want to avoid supporting Amazon, buy from the Chapters/Indigo website, where the book is Read More …

Third Edition of The Global Indie Author is now available in U.S. and Europe

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The third edition of The Global Indie Author is out now in print on Amazon U.S., UK, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy. All other territories coming soon! eBooks are also on the way. As mentioned in my previous post, the third edition features a new cover, new subtitle — to reflect the truly global phenomenon that self-publishing has become — and a great deal of new content (over 80 pages). The technical chapters have been completely overhauled to deal with the complexities of image handling, the increasing frustrations of font Read More …

The conumdrum that is Kindle font handling

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UPDATED 11 June 2014 (NOTE: where I include code, the quotation marks should be straight quotes, not curly quotes. When I updated my WordPress site it began automatically using curly quotes, and I cannot find a way to stop it.) If you are designing a book for Kindle where the book uses only a single font, you do NOT include font definitions anymore. Amazon, in fact, now strip out such font definitions. This is because font definitions can prevent the user from selecting their preferred font. This article is for Read More …

Best fonts for Kindle?

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UPDATE: see my latest tests on fonts here. For those who read my blog post on the issue that has arisen with fonts embedded in ePubs, I make mention of using fonts for Kindle that are already licensed by them. The advantages to this are twofold: 1) You do not have to worry about procuring a font licence from the foundry that owns the font; and 2) not embedding fonts keeps your file size down, which is important as Amazon charge a delivery fee based on file size. However… The Read More …

Font foundries claiming ebook font embedding is “distribution.” Just another money grab?

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Those who use Adobe InDesign to create ePubs will know you have the option to embed fonts in your ePub document. What you may not know is that Adobe are encrypting most embedded fonts, creating an “encryption.xml” file in the META-INF folder that can cause your ePub to be rejected by some retailers and may make it fail validation. I first discovered this problem when my latest ebook, the second edition of The Global Indie Author, was rejected by Barnes & Noble for containing an encrypted file. Huh? I thought. Read More …