I have seen way too many people involved in the indie publishing scene who say, “Don’t get caught up in the whole font thing. Just use Times New Roman. It’ll be fine.” As a designer, I have to say that this borders on infuriating to me. Typography is important. It has a direct impact on how we perceive a written document, and our enjoyment of that document. Times New Roman was originally developed as a newspaper font, specifically to be economical, space-wise. In other words, to fit more content in less space. It then became popular among corporate documents. But optimal readability is not among Times New Roman’s strong points.

If you plan to indie publish in print, then it’s vital that you understand the basics of book design and layout (or that you hire someone who does). The typefaces you choose for your text and headings have a direct effect on the readability of your text (along with your margins, line spacing, and kerning). Bad typography makes your book look less professional, even if you readers don’t directly realize what it is that’s giving them a negative impression of your book.

Below are fourteen combinations, mostly made up of free fonts. Some are  more suited to one type of book or another, and have been noted as such. Others are more universal, and can be used on virtually any kind of manuscript. Read the rest of this entry »

So I kind of take the whole DIY indie publishing to the extreme compared to a lot of authors. I do my own editing and proofreading, create my own covers, and format my own books. It helps that I have a background in each of those areas, through various jobs I’ve held over the years (I copyedited for a small publisher and I’ve done some freelance copyediting; I have a background in print design for a national magazine, including cover design; and I’ve done plenty of web design and coding, so hand-coding the HTML files for formatting is easy, if also tedious). Now I realize that  not everyone is going to have the skills (or the desire) to do all of the above on their own. Personally, I enjoy doing it, and until someone complains about a lack of editing or bad formatting or a crappy cover, I’m going to keep doing all of those things myself.

But I’ve been looking for a better way to format my ebooks. While I know how to format and code by hand, it’s still a long, tedious process. It’s not exactly what I’d call “fun”. And the constant tweaking it seemed to require to get the books absolutely perfect was getting time-consuming.

I’m about to publish my first full-length novel (The Steam and Steel Chronicles have all been novellas), and the prospect of having to format an ebook roughly three times longer than the ones I’ve done before wasn’t appealing. I wanted to find a shortcut that would make it easier and faster to create perfectly formatted ebooks.

I think I’ve found the solution, and since it requires very little hand coding or other technical know-how, I decided to write up a tutorial (note: I wrote this tutorial at 1 AM, so if any of it doesn’t make sense, let me know and I’ll try to clarify). While you might not have the skills necessary to proofread your own books or design your own covers, I’m pretty confident that nearly anyone who can format a manuscript in a word processor can format their own ebooks using two simple, free tools. Read the rest of this entry »

A lot of writers, whether published or aspiring, have awful websites. I mean, as someone who writes about design for a living, and who has a background in web and graphic design (and still does side projects on occasion), it’s painful for me to see some of the sites out there that writers are using. And proud of in a lot of instances.

Now, I’m NOT going to name names here. That’s just distasteful. But I will say that probably 80% of author websites have some kind of major flaw that seriously interferes with their usability. Some are just poorly designed. Some are filled with broken links (there are some publisher sites that fall into this category, too). Some have so many Flash effects or other “fancy” things that they bog down the user’s browser and are unusable to boot.

As someone who wants to see writers succeed, and also wants to see good design on the web, I’ve put together this little guide for writers who want a website. Read the rest of this entry »

Considering this blog is “Cameron Chapman On Writing” and not “Cameron Chapman Promoting Her Books and Nothing Else”, I thought it was time to get back to writing about writing. Besides, there’s a nice, big, shiny link to where you can buy Aboard the Unstoppable Aerostat Fenris in the sidebar.

So today I’d like to talk about my strategies for revising and editing my work. Some writers have very set techniques for editing their work. Others are sort of all over the place. I like to think I fall somewhere in the middle. Read the rest of this entry »

Here we are at day 18 of National Novel Writing Month and I’m proud to say that I’m still on track to reach 50k words by the end of November. So I’m upping the ante a bit: my new goal is that I want to have this novel complete by November 30th. I’m thinking it’s going to come in somewhere around 70k words, which means I’ve got to basically double my word count for the remaining twelve days.

But that’s okay. Yesterday, using Write or Die, I managed 1,000 words in 15 minutes. If I just do four sessions like that each day, I should have no problem completing this novel. The prose isn’t perfect, but I’m so into the story at this point that what I’m writing in those short bursts is actually pretty good. I just think about it for a few minutes before I start, so I have an idea of what I want to write in those 15 minutes, and then I write. It’s been working really well so far. And if I’m even more pressed for time, I’ll do 500-word sessions (which take me about 8-9 minutes).

I’m hoping that even after NaNoWriMo is over, I can keep writing 2-4k words each day with this method. I’ve been neglecting my fiction for too long. But if I can’t figure out a way to spare a few 15-minute blocks during the day, then I don’t really deserve to call myself a writer, do I?

I recently wrote a post over on Mashable covering more than 100 authors making the most of Twitter. In doing so, I had to do a TON of research and found plenty of authors who weren’t using Twitter in the best way possible. I also found a lot of authors who weren’t using the web in the most effective way either. Read the rest of this entry »