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Subscribe to Font Design & Typography On-DemandWe will aggressively work to help you determine what you want to make available and what services would help you the most in our joint pursuit of the widest possible sales. We will share any ideas we have with you.
You will have your work available immediately at a variety of locations and in various formats—as soon as the artwork is finished and any required proofs are purchased.
Yes, depending on the format and venue. Lulu, CreateSpace, and Smashwords all offer free ISBN numbers under their name as you publish the pieces. If you want your own, you'll have to purchase them—and that will cast a couple hundred dollars or more.
In most cases they are promoted and distributed by you. The companies just make them available to the larger retailers. Lulu and CreateSpace get the books on Amazon.
With CreateSpace you can get pro distribution to other online retailers and to libraries by going "Pro" for $39 a year). Pro also enables you to buy cheaper and get larger royalties.
With Lulu, you can buy the Extended Reach distribution that is free and gets you to Amazon. They also have professional marketing packages for two to three thousand dollars.
iPad aggregator: You can also get a free ISBN for your validated ePUB documents to place the ePUB on iBookstore. They can use ePUBs from InDesign as long as they validate.
An online PDF library set up to distribute PDFs to be read online.
They need HTML, CSS, and unwrapped graphics. They also sell in the UK.
No ISBN required. They can use the ePUB generated for Lulu, but they need a new cover image and so on.
Smashwords has a premium status where they'll give you an ISBN and send your book to the iPad bookstore. All ebooks on Smashwords are converted from Word files with very limited formatting options.
We just started using Google Books. They build theirs off PDFs. That takes a long time. No results yet.
With Zazzle gift production, it's available on their site and all promotion and marketing is up to you.
Copy: We produce a pdf exported out of InDesign CS5 for the content. Though they don't require it, our experience suggests that it needs to be flattened and exported as Acrobat 4. Beyond that, we use 300 dpi CMYK PSDs for bitmap images (someRGBs have slippedthrough and caused no problem, but we are parnoid about stuff like that), and vector PDFs from Illustrator or InDesign for the other graphics.
Cover: PDF exported from InDesign in Acrobat 4 (no transparency).
You can quickly convert Lulu's printable PDF by getting rid o much of the front matter, adding a color cover first page, and converting the graphics and styles to color (RGB).
Copy: They are much more fussy. In several cases, we've had to convert all graphics to bitmap to make them work. They flag anything less than 300 dpi — even screen captures. It's an automatedprocess for them, and you will get no satisfaction trying to ask them how to fix things. They usually simply do not know.
Covers: They require a Photoshop PDF—flattened )no transparancy or layers. We design with InDesign, export as a PDF, rasterize in Photoshop at 300 dpi RGB, flatten the image, and Save As Photoshop PDF. Nothing else works, unless you work in Photoshop and try to do you type there also (which is a very bad idea typographically).
Copy: They basically do not handle graphics. Files are Word documents with very rigid and very limited formatting requirements. You can insert jpeg graphics, but they require low-resolution, small pixel dimensioned art. 5 MB limit for file size.
Covers: A JPEG or PNG with limted pixel dimensions.
Artwork: Large 300dpi RGB PNGs. They can handle transparency.