Whenever we start work formatting an ebook, one of the first things we ask for is the front cover image. And now and then, after we have asked for the cover the response we get is “Amazon say you shouldn’t include the cover in your book.” And the author is correct 🙂 . If you hunt around on the Amazon site, you will find the sentence “When you publish or republish your book, we will automatically add your cover image to the inside. Do not include your cover image in your manuscript file.” This section is often quoted on forums
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With Christmas fast approaching, we wanted to let you know what our schedule here at Polgarus Studio will be. 🙂 Please note that while this is our current plan, if we get inundated with manuscripts we may need to alter things (just to be fair to the people who have sent their books in already). We will be closed between December 22 and January 1 (inclusive) – if you email us during that time, you probably won’t get a reply until January 2nd. We are accepting books as normal that come in via the website without any prior notice until the end of Friday
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After seeing several thousand books pass through our doors, if there’s one page in books often overlooked, it’s the “About the Author” page. Sometimes the page is just very short – maybe a single sentence. But other times the page is left out entirely. This is a mistake! Your author page is the best place you have in the book for connecting with the reader and making them realize that you’re a real person who (hopefully) they like enough to want to read your next book. It’s also the perfect place to collect everything about you, and how to find
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A very common question we get asked is “what page/trim size should I use for my book?” There is a very simple (but useless) answer – there is no correct answer! Now that I’ve got that out of the way, allow me to expand a bit 🙂 What I mean is that there is no “you must use this size” answer. There isn’t a formula where you plug in some numbers and get a result. All we can do is give you some guidelines, and then let you make the choice that feels right to you. The four most common
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A common misconception we run into about Smashwords is that they require authors to upload a Word file if you want to sell your book with them. It’s not surprising this belief is out there – once upon a time your only choice was to upload a Word file, and Smashwords always mention it first as the way to upload a book to their site. That requirement changed at the end of 2012 when they added the option to upload an epub. On first glance, this was great! No more having to deal with the “Meatgrinder” software that causes headaches
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Happy New Year! We hope that 2017 is a great year for your writing (and for you and your family in general 🙂 ) We are back from our Christmas break, and ready to get back to work! Obviously we have a bit of email backlog to go through, but we should catch up in the next couple of days.
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