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 you a bunch of hand-me-down clothes that didn’t fit you and looked like something from the early ’70s, complete with sequins, would you wear them because they were free?

And second, who cares what people ARE expecting? That’s Averageville, Mediocrityland and a boring roller coaster ride to Plain Jane’s house.

Don’t JUST give people what they’re expecting! That just makes them…well…another customer

Give them MORE than they expect and you’ll make a die-hard fan who will go out and sing your praises to his friends.

So…bad idea #1:

Only ebooks that cost money need to look good. If I’m putting out a free one, it’s okay if it looks like a bomb went off at a chili cook-off.

Why a lousy, ugly or average ebook is worse for business than you think.

• They create far less word-of-mouth attention, reducing overall sales.
• Customers may trust you less and/or think you’re shady.
• A book that looks lousy also creates the apparency that its content is lousy.
• They get more refunds from unhappy customers.
• Unhappy customers now leads to fewer repeat sales in the future.
• Ugly ebooks are promoted by fewer affiliates who themselves fear returns and damage to their reputation.
• Your affiliates who don’t jump ship will also be getting more refunds.
• Unhappy affiliates now means fewer affiliates in the future.

On the other hand, here’s what a professional ebook design means for your business:

• Far greater word-of-mouth attention = more web traffic = more advertising dollars = far more sales.
• Far fewer, if any, refunds.
• Affiliates who are happy to support your product.
• Affiliates who will also happily back your future projects.
• Huge word-of-mouth between affiliates and their networks.
• Repeat customers in the future.
• Trust.
• People will know you’re a professional and care.
• Blooming friendships, networks and relationships, bringing more sales opportunities.

You must remember that the internet is one giant snowball effect. News, good or bad, spreads quickly through Internetville via multimedia channels too numerous to count. And it is permanent.

This means if you create something poor enough in quality that people want to bash you, the word is going to spread fast via blogs, videos, YouTube, etc. and your little enterprise is going to see troubled times.

On the other hand, if you create something really nice, it can similarly spread like wildfire. Chris Guillebeau’s 279 Days to Overnight Success is a case in point. Aside from being very interesting and well-written, it’s also visually stunning. That kind of combination is unstoppable, as Chris found out while his ebook was being downloaded 25,000+ times over a couple days. Did the design of Chris’s book help? Absolutely. Would it have been as highly downloaded if it had been ugly but just as well written? No chance.

And in summation

Make it look good and people will trust you and think you’re a pro. Make it look amateur and people will think you don’t care and will look elsewhere. Can you blame them?

And, lastly, if you’ve got some writing you’re about to launch and need some help with your ebook design, contact us. We’d be happy to help you out.

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 site with 17 subscribers. But within a few days the ebook had been download dozens and dozens of times and my RSS subscriber count was going out the roof.

Even better, and far more important, were the comments and emails that started coming in. Relationships were blossoming all over the place, and before I knew it I’d made fast friends with quite a lot of people. And as will happen anywhere real relationships are born, a few of those connections were very valuable and are providing income to this very day.

All of that from one 30-page ebook that I published almost two years ago to a handful of people.

Of course, I designed it myself so it didn’t cost me a dime, but even if I’d paid $500 for it, it would have been well worth the price. (Oh, and don’t worry…$500 is NOT what I charge to design a 30-page book

Now, let’s ask the obvious question. Would all that profit have happened, would all those relationships have been made if my ebook had been some hideous beast? No way in the furthest reaches of the icy plains of Hell.

So, read this and remember it well:

Every single thing you produce right now, whether it’s an ebook or something else, free or not, IS a pre-launch to any future project you have.

The quality of what you do and produce right now is a barometer and compelling factor (good or bad) for anything you sell down the road.

So, yes, be productive and be proactive. Get your stuff out there, but make it good, because people DO judge books by their covers.

And if you need help making it good, contact me and I’ll certainly help you out. You will probably get famous and end up on TV.

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 you a lot of customers either.

So I’m announcing, right here in bold type:

The Charfish Ebook and Document Design Service!

What’s the difference between your average ebook and a professional one? I’ll show you.

Here’s the average ebook:

The average ebook looks a lot like that one, right? It’s black on white and looks like the author just chose a standard Word template and called it a day. No color, no visual cues to pull the reader along, nothing. Just….blah.

Anyone can make an ebook like that. Which is exactly why you shouldn’t.

Here’s what you need, a professional ebook designed by Charfish!

Now, that’s an ebook! And those improvements are only a handful of the dozens that are possible.

We’ve got more posts, more examples and more information about this service coming up soon, but consider this our official announcement. Charfish is here, and from what our clients are saying, we’re dominating the ebook design field.

If you have any questions or any projects on the cooker, we are here for you and ready to get started on your ebook design. Contact us now to reserve a spot for the new year!

And if you want more info about our design services, Subscribe Now to get our posts hot off the press.

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. I hope this post can serve as a good introduction and an idea generator.

We’ve all seen a lot of ebooks, some good, some bad and some absolutely atrocious. The bad ones have jumbled text that can’t be read, awful color schemes (if any color at all), poor graphic choices, etc.

The good ones are visual candy. They flow well, are harmonious and balanced, and are ultimately easy and fun to read.

The Absolute Bare Minimum

Regardless of anything else that goes into an ebook, whether it’s busy or subtle or full of color, the book has to be legible. If it can’t be read it’s 99% useless. Any book that leaves my shop has the base-line requirement of being easy on the eyes.

Portrait & Landscape

These are fairly common terms that we’ve probably all dealt with at work from time to time.

Portrait orientation, say with a standard 8.5″ x 11″ sheet of paper, is taller than it is wide. Landscape, think of an actual outdoor landscape, is wider than it is tall.

Each has its own look and benefits, but I generally create ebooks in landscape format. The reason for this is obvious: computer monitors are also in landscape format. A book in landscape format fits on the screen more naturally without getting chopped off.

Fonts

Some fonts are easier to read than others, so some are well used for main body copy while others are best reserved for chapter headings, pullquotes or any brief area of emphasis.

The two basic choices for the main body copy font are serif and sans-serif. Serif fonts have little serifs, or tails, on them like the image to the left.

Serif fonts are often considered better used for body copy, as the serifs act as trails or pointers that lead the eye from character to character. This can reduce eye strain and make the reading little smoother.

On the other hand, sans-serif fonts (“sans” meaning “without”) do not have the tails.

Sans-serif fonts can also work well for body copy, but because they lack the serifs, they often appear to be closer to together and jumbled. This, if not done well, can make for eye strain and tough reading and that’s no fun. So generally the sans-serif fonts are bumped up in size a bit, to increase legibility.

Personally, I find that as long as the font size is adequate, serif and sans-serif fonts work equally well and the choice comes down to preference.

Decorative Fonts

Here’s where we get to have a bit more fun. Chapter titles, for example, can be funky or grungy or any style at all. And since they’re only used for a sentence or two and are of larger font-size, we don’t need to worry about eye strain and legibility.

The exact style of font, of course, comes down to preference but it should at least fit the subject of the book. A business book wouldn’t use a title font that looks like barbwire or graffiti, although that would be perfect for an ebook on tattoo art.

Dropshadows

Dropshadow is just a fancy word for shadow, and I’m sure you’ve seen a million examples of them online. They’re insanely popular and I’m sure they’ll continue to be until the end of time because they’re an excellent way to give depth, realism and visual interest to the page.

Since they obviously obscure adjacent text a bit, they’re reserved for larger fonts and not body copy.

Dropcaps

The “T” at the beginning of this sentence is a dropcap, so called because it drops below its own line of text. It’s a nice, elegant way to introduce a body of copy and, again, break up the monotony of a large text block.

“The First Five”

There’s probably a professional trade name for this, but I’ve always referred to it as “the first five.” Many books use this convention, whereby the first few words of a chapter are styled with bold text, a larger font, etc. When coupled with an initial dropcap, this is a really slick way to introduce a chapter.

Pullquotes & Blockquotes

The terms pull-quote and blockquote are often used interchangeably, but I generally distinguish them as follows:

A pull-quote, also called a lift-quote, pulls something out of the body copy for re-emphasis. If you’ve got a great quote or statistic you want to reiterate, you can pull it out and give it emphasis as a pull-quote. And once I pull the quote out, I’ll tweak it and play with its margins until it looks cool and fits in with the surrounding text fields.

A blockquote, while basically the same thing at heart, has a couple minor differences. First, it’s called a blockquote because it’s arranged more in a block, left-justified.

This is a blockquote.
All my shiznit is left justified, yo.
That’s how we roll.

Seems a little more blocky, yes? Little more traditional than the pull-quote. The second reason it’s a blockquote and not a pullquote is that you don’t have to pull text from the copy. You can say anything you want in a blockquote, even useless drivel like I did.

Regardless, both are usually formatted in a bigger, bolder and more interesting font, and often appear in an entirely different color. It’s a perfect way to break up the visual monotony of a long span of text and add some graphic interest. And of course it’s a great way to emphasize a point.

Folios & Numbering

A folio is a great way to mark every page with an identical symbol or brand image, like “The Next 45 Years” in the corner of the image to the left.

A folio can be page numbers, a logo, a URL or any combination of elements. One of the cool things about using folios with ebooks (which are usually .PDF documents) is that you can use them to link back to your site. That way, no matter where your book ends up, your readers will be able to track you down by simply clicking on the folio bit in the corner.

Ornaments

I love the finishing touches and ornaments and little things that really give your book personality! There are two methods I use all of the time, if the client wants them of course.

One method is to take the first letter of a sentence or title and then duplicate it in the background. But the trick is to use a more scripty or ornamental font and lighten it a bit, so it ends up as just a ghost of a letter in the background. Depth, baby, depth! Looks great and can help reduce the blockiness of the page…check it out.

The second method is to just use flourishes, ellipses and dingbats at chapter’s end. In the image to the left, that top one there is a dingbat. Yup, that’s what it’s called! Whatever you call it, they make a nice finishing touch and brings resolution to the end of the writing.

So, all in all, there are quite a few ways to distinguish your ebook from the 16,000 others that were published while I was writing this sentence. When done right with proper typography, colors and layout, an ebook can become a very special item indeed. In fact, quite a few bloggers and writers are publishing collector-type ebooks. They’ll produce a series of ebooks, perhaps one per month or season. And while each is similar, they can be individualized with different covers, color schemes or even seasonal ideas.

Special thanks to Alex Blackwell for letting me use images from the recently published ebook he and I designed. I’ve done quite a few ebooks recently, but I have to say that Alex’s book was a real treat to work on. Not only did he allow me quite a bit of artistic freedom, he’s also a top-notch writer. I highly suggest going to Alex’s site to pick up a copy of his book. You’ll be quite inspired, I’m sure. Plus, you’ll see what’s probably my best ebook design ever.

So…you want a sexy ebook? Let me know if you do and I’ll get to work on it!