Question: When it comes to putting out your own ebook, is a standard Word template good enough?

Answer: Hahahahahahaha!

We are continuing today with the series on ebook design. This time we’re going to discuss the bare-minimum quality that ANY ebook should have. By bare-minimum we mean an ebook that at first appearance won’t make your audience laugh or feel they’ve been ripped off.

This post is based in part on an email I received and which got me thinking. Basically, the email said:

“Look, I really just need a cover. The inside doesn’t need to be anything special because it’s going to be a freebie anyway. People won’t be expecting much.”

Mmm…no.

First off, if your friend gave …

Let me tell you a story…

At the end of 2007 I gave away a free ebook to my customers over at IgniteLiving.com, another site of mine. At the time, the site was only a couple months old and had exactly 17 RSS subscribers.

My plan was to offer a great ebook that would attract some visitors and possibly some business. So, I wrote the book and designed the hell out of it. I gave it a slick cover, nice fonts and typography, a cool color scheme and made it available for free download.

When the post went live, a whole lot of nothing happened. Which is sort of what you’d expect of a …

Ebook designs are nothing new to this site. We’ve been doing them for a while and have had pretty extraordinary results. But at first glance, you might not even know we do ebook design here, what with all the talk about web design.

But the truth is, ebooks are our specialty.

Now, if you’re anything like me, you’ve bought a few ebooks and downloaded even more free ones over the years. With all this exposure, I bet we could agree on this fact:

All ebooks are not created equal

The vast majority of ebooks I’ve seen are either hideous or just adequate. Very very rarely have I seen one that was professional enough, in my opinion, to market.

Well, hideous doesn’t work. And just adequate isn’t going to earn …

Having a nice looking ebook increases the chances of it being read by a factor of one gazillion.

Lately, I’ve been doing more ebook designing than any other type of work and it’s been a total blast.

But I’ve noticed a few questions keep coming up over and over in regards to technical terms, layout ideas, etc. I’m going to cover some of those basics in this post, both for general education purposes and also as an aide to potential clients as to what kinds of things are possible with their own books.

A couple of the things I’m going to cover are very basic common terms from the world of print. Well, basic to some people, but brand new to many others. …