While ultimately your reader’s device and font size are out of your control, Vook does make it easy to get a gorgeously-designed digital page. This post—and the next three—will be your step-by-step guide.

Font

Vook fonts are divided into four different categories:

• Serif: These fonts are great for body text and provide a “literary” feel.
• Sans-serif: These fonts lack the curls at the ends of the letters. I might consider them for shorter blocks of text: quotes, tip boxes, captions, headers, and the like. When paired with paragraphs in a serif font, they contrast nicely.
• Display: These fonts should be used for headers or titles. Let me repeat: these fonts are not designed for extensive body text. In this category you’ll find you’ll also find decorative fonts full of squiggles and scripts. You’ll also find serif and sans-serif fonts that look good specifically in larger sizes.
• Mono: With these fonts, each letter or character has the same width as any other letter or character. Usually, these fonts are great for snippets of code. These fonts also emulate the look of typewriter text, but that kind of effect works best in print and can be hard to read on a screen for an extended period of time.

Choose a nice, legible serif font for your paragraphs. One of my favorites is Crimson, which just looks like it belongs in a novel.

Liberation Serif, the default, is another good choice too. You can never go wrong with the Vook defaults.

Amongst the eBook reading devices, support for embedded fonts is growing, so there’s no reason you shouldn’t toy around with it.

See all of our 50+ fonts.

Last week I showed you how to use quotes and tip boxes. Today’s topic is…

Captions

Did you know that captions created with Vook always stay on the same page as their images? All you need to do is let Vook know what is a caption and what isn’t.

To create a caption, highlight both your image and your caption and select “div.figure” from the Styles drop down menu. Then, highlight your text and then select “div.figcaption” from the Styles drop down menu.

In the Style editor, you can set the font, alignment, spacing, and more.

If you want to add captions to videos and audio files, do so in the Upload/File manager. They won’t show up in the Content editor just yet, but rest assured they’ll be included in the Preview file.

And that’s it. Next week we’ll cover design tips for improving readability.

With this trend, authors are increasing their efforts to reach a global audience. By making a few simple adjustments, you can write an eBook that will sell not just domestically, but internationally as well. Below are seven tips for writing an eBook that will sell around the world.

1. Avoid colloquialisms

With traditional publishing, it’s a good idea to tailor your wording to the markets that physical copies of your book will be sold in. Since you’re writing digital content, you want to make sure that readers from Argentina to Zimbabwe can understand the claims you are making, or the story you’re telling. Try to not use too many American pop culture references or slang terms. It’s helpful to write in “global English” so that non-native speakers can easily absorb your content.

2. Include international references

On the flip side, go out of your way to include references that foreign readers will understand. If you’re writing non-fiction or a guide of some sort, include case studies from multiple countries. If you’re writing fiction, consider adding a character from a foreign country who occasionally tells anecdotes that locals will enjoy.

3. Translate your eBook into other languages

This one should be a given. Not everyone reading your book will be a native english speaker. Instead of making them read in your language of choice, give them flexibility by providing as many options as possible. Romance author Barbara Freethy has been successful with this strategy:

“It’s a complicated process, but I do believe the global market is going to grow and I would love to make my stories available around the world in as many languages as possible.” (via PaidContent.org)

4. Have native editors review translations

Freethy also recommends having a second pair of eyes review your translations. It may cost extra, but your second translator could serve as an additional editor, possibly catching any mistakes made by the first person.

5. Double check meaning of symbols/images

Just like you should review the meaning of your translations, do the same for any images or symbols that you’ve included within your text. As an example, if you include a red octagon as a symbol for your readers to stop doing something, Japanese readers might not make that connection. Stop signs in Japan are actually a red triangle with rounded corners, as seen to the left.

6. Be thoughtful about cover choice

Going along with reviewing your images, spend extra time reviewing the most important image: your cover. If you use a voting system to allow people to rate possible covers (like on 99designs) send the link to as many people you know outside the country to gain a wider variety of feedback.

7. Reach out to international bloggers

After all that extra time, money, and effort you’ve put into creating a product that will resonate with international readers, you’ll want to develop your global audience. Identify influential bloggers in each market you are targeting and reach out to them. Provide them a free copy in their native language, and for extra brownie points, shoot them an email in their native language as well asking if they’d be interested in reviewing it.

What other tips would you add for eBook authors hoping to sell internationally?

Users call Vook “super easy-to-use,” but we get that not everyone’s into DIY publishing. So today we’re launching our VookMakers program.

Our VookMakers are eBook experts who will build your eBook, send you review copies, incorporate your feedback, and realize your vision. Last week, a publisher contacted us with ten eBooks he didn’t have the resources to build himself. After we connected him to a VookMaker, he had eBooks to review in a day.

With a VookMaker, you get:

• A low cost eBook solution
• High quality eBook creation
• Your eBook on sale in Amazon, BN, and iBooks
• Someone else doing all the work!

VookMaker services always begin with a consultation about your project so contact us now for a free consultation. 

You don’t even need a Vook subscription to access our VookMakers. You pay one price, one time, for one project. If you do have a Vook subscription, you’ll get VookMaker help at a discount.

This week and the next, I’m going to show you tips for unlocking the Style editor’s full capabilities for designing text—everything from setting the margins to controlling the spacing between lines. Today, we’re going to focus on tip boxes and block quotes.

Tip boxes are like callouts or sidebars inside textbooks: they visually set apart information. Tip boxes make great containers for nuggets of information, and they especially come in handy if you have a visual style you want to reuse throughout your eBook.

Create tip boxes

Highlight your text and then select “div.tipbox” from the Styles drop down menu. Your text will become a tip box. In the Style editor, you can round its corners, change the background color, and adjust the margins and spacing.

Tip boxes be can be styled very basically . . .

. . . Or more creatively.

Find detailed instructions for working with tip boxes on guide.vook.com, our online user manual.

Create block quotes

Highlight your text and then press the quote button—it’s on the top right of the Content editor. Both quotes and tip boxes allow you to fine-tune margins and spacing. Quotes, though, also offer you additional font styling capabilities:

Again, find detailed instructions for using quotes on guide.vook.com.
Tip boxes and quotes can give you both variation and fine-grained control within your eBook. If you find yourself styling text the same way multiple times throughout your eBook, consider using tip boxes and quotes to automate the process. You can find these options and more within the Style editor. Next week we’ll cover styling captions.

 When we reviewed the survey, two comments came up with stunning frequency: 1) Our users love our product. They call it “elegant” “easy to use” “incredibly well designed” and “so simple”. 2) Our users need more flexible pricing. A vast majority of independent authors and small businesses find our tool easy-to-use, but the price can be too high for their needs. On the extreme end, one responder remarked, “My brain crashed into the price and exploded.”

We realized immediately that we had to find a way to make Vook accessible to individual authors, independent professionals, and creators with smaller projects. The continual improvements, fine tuning, updates and workflow adjustments our engineers and product people make result in an ever easier to use, hassle free eBook building experience—an experience we want everyone to be able to access.

So we’re introducing the Vook Starter Account.

For a limited time, the Vook Starter Account is only $9.99 a month. You get 100 MBs of Storage Space, 1 User and all our other excellent features, including automatic distribution to Amazon, BN, and iBooks, your eBook files to distribute through other marketplaces on your own, and 100% of your royalties from the distributors (after they take their cut). We hope that you’ll find the Starter Account a cost effective way to create an eBook, experience sales success — and then look for opportunities to upgrade and produce more books with us.

You asked for it. We created it. The Vook Starter Account is ready to go. This price will only be available for a limited time—so sign up now to lock in the monthly rate.

Most popular survey words used to describe Vook.

 We really pay attention to our users and what they want. More importantly, we don’t want their brains exploding. 

Vook makes it a snap to design eBooks in both ePub and KF8 formats, because you can quickly create an eBook in either format on the Preview page.

ePub and KF8, though, support different settings in the Style editor. We’ve outlined them on the guide, but you can see what I mean simply by creating eBook previews in both formats.

Because the formats can be so different, we often hear the question: I want to style my eBook specifically for Amazon. How can I duplicate a project in progress?

Here’s how to do it in three easy steps:

1. Create an ePub preview. Make sure you select “Apple iBooks and Barnes & Noble Nook (ePub).” Click Get It to download the ePub to your computer.

2. Start a new eBook project. Then go to Upload+File Manager and drag and drop your ePub onto “Upload Files”. (Remember, Vook imports ePubs too!)

3. Delete the first chapter. Go to the Content editor and delete the first chapter—if you don’t, you won’t be able to preview this new book.

4. Change the Style to use from “default.css” to “stylesheet.css”.

And that’s it—you’re done!

One caveat: this method won’t import any videos or audio files in your ePub, so just quickly upload them again.

This tip can be used for both duplicating eBooks and versioning or backing them up. You can always roll back to an earlier version of your project by creating a new eBook, importing an earlier ePub, and then deleting the old project.

We expected a polite overview on innovation, finance and the city’s CTO (to cover the tech angle)—but instead the Mayor delivered an impassioned, metrics driven talk focused on the qualitative benefits of New York that make the city irresistible to workers, and thus excellent for business.

Bloombgerg ticked off three key New York advantages: Education, low crime, and a cultured and environmentally forward agenda that attracts innovative young people.

Facts backed him up: New York’s crime is at a historic low—last year, with 8.4 million people, we saw only 500 murders. The city has more people enrolled in college and graduate programs than Boston has people. Finally, life expectancy in New York over the last decade has gone up three years, while remaining unchanged in the rest of America.

My suspicions are confirmed: If you can make it New York you shouldn’t try making it anywhere else, because you basically should never leave.

What really impressed us was what Bloomberg cited as the most powerful New York differentiator: Diversity and immigration. He said, “As a business, you want to be in a big city, a culturally diverse city. 40% of the people you see were born outside of the United States. They come from 48 different countries. We are country that was built by immigrants, immigrants have a work ethic and a willingness to listen to new ideas that you seem to lose as you get into place. Look at the self selection process of who immigrates. You have to give up your language, your culture, your home, your family. New York is not an easy place, New York is a tough town, and it’s competitive, and people who come here are willing to try new things.”

Since Vook moved from San Francisco to New York last year, we’re proud to count ourselves as part of the next wave of immigrants who both make and are made by this city. 

Courtesy of: CreditDonkey

Have you seen any other great eBook stats lately? Send them our way!

We sat down with Jason to discuss how he does this:

Can you tell me more about your company, Movable Type Management?
Jason: The founding principle of our firm is to be as responsibly expansive as possible when representing our clients. That  means thinking as creatively as we can about what we can build for them in the digital space. There’s not a strong set of methodologies or best practices for this yet, we’re creating them as we go. Vook is giving us a great chance to experiment as much as possible to help our clients and learn what works.

What’s “just-in-time publishing?”
Jason: I actually have to credit Matt Cavnar [VP Business Development at Vook] with coining the phrase. It comes from “Just-in-time manufacturing” which is a revolution of the supply chain which allows a company to produce a product immediately based on market demand. It’s usually most proven by big factories in Japan and China. We’re bringing that idea to bear on publishing. When traditional publishers want to rush out a book it still takes many weeks. We’re trying to truncate as much as possible the time between idea and the incarnation in the market. We’re able to condense that time from weeks to hours. We see a moment in culture and act quickly to make a book just in time.

What role does Vook play in this?
Jason: One could argue that without Vook, none of this would be possible. The Linsanity book ended up netting tens of thousands of dollars in foreign and domestic sales. The school book has landed that author on NPR and other venues. Those pay-offs would be impossible without a service like Vook. Out of nothing, we produced a product that opened up all these opportunities for our clients. Before tools like Vook, this took an entire matrix of relationships — shippings, distributors, printers etc. — now we have all that in one cloud-based product, which is Vook. I also have to add the customer support is incredible. Whenever we’ve had any problem, whatever it is, we’ve gotten immediate and helpful responses.

Can you share more about one of your books that exemplifies “just-in-time publishing?”
Jason: We recently released the MM0 2024 Mets Annual for opening day. We worked with one of the largest sports blogs in the city to produce the eBook. They had a great wealth of knowledge around the Mets as well as a built-in fan base. Combine that with opening day as the catalyst and we knew it was a perfect opportunity. The whole book was produced in a couple weeks including original graphic art, biographies of every player and coach, stats, history and more. We’ve been very pleased with the outcome.

What would you advise to someone looking to follow your model?
Jason: The challenge of just-in-time publishing is that while you may have the technological capacity to produce something quickly, that doesn’t necessarily mitigate the problem of marketing and discovery. Just because you create a Jeremy Lin eBook a few days after he became a national phenomenon doesn’t mean anyone will buy it. The speed of production, while an asset and a virtue, means that you have to move at the same speed for your marketing plan. If you don’t already have a built-in fan base (like we did with the Mets book) it can be really difficult. I’d recommend looking at partnering with someone to do your marketing and publicity.

Jason and Movable Type are on the cutting edge of this movement and we couldn’t be more excited to share what they’re doing. We can’t wait to see what their next book is!