When it comes to publishing on the web, whether it’s websites or eBooks, typography comes pretty low down most people’s lists of priorities. As long as the words are legible, that’s good enough. Now, where’s my hi-res cover illustration and my snazzy logo?
Matthew Butterick’s here to tell us why this approach is all wrong, with his book, Butterick’s Practical Typography.
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by John C. Lipes
A review by Dave
If you’re going to teach something, you should understand it yourself first – at least to the level where you can be sure that what you’re teaching is correct. On that count alone, English Explained 8: The Adverbs doesn’t just fail, it fails with an adverb: “miserably”.
Worse still, it’s part of a series of 14. I shudder to imagine the mangled concept of grammar that any student completing the series would have.
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Those of you who follow football will be aware that the World Cup is being held in Brazil next June and July. Those who don’t may be vaguely aware that Brazil’s big, it’s got the Amazon rainforest, it produces a lot of coffee, and there’s a lot of music and dancing in Rio de Janeiro about six weeks before Easter each year.
Now, I pride myself on having a good general knowledge (or being a nasty little fact finder, as Kay calls it). And I was a bit ashamed to realise that I didn’t know much about Brazil. It’s the world’s fifth biggest country in terms of size and population, for flip’s sake. So I thought it was time to do something about it.
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If you’re a regular reader of Kay’s blog, you may remember my “spelling bee” post from a little while back, giving a couple of hints on how to avoid some common spelling mistakes.
‘Tis the season to be jolly (or it soon will be), so here’s a link to a dozen amusing Christmassy spelling mistakes that have cropped up on Twitter a few times already this year.
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Is your spelling as good as you’d like? Or do you feel it lets you down sometimes?
Before reading this article, you might like to try The Oatmeal’s Twitter Spelling Test. There’s only 20 multiple-choice questions, they’re relatively simple, and it doesn’t take long.
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Earlier today Kay sent me an email about a website auction she’d just discovered on the Flippa marketplace. Kay is not a big fan of Flippa by any means, but she follows developments on there as they’re relevant to her role as Site Admin on the Experienced-People.net forum. Today she happened to notice that someone was offering a “Top Proofreading & Editing Content Business Website” for auction, or for sale at a BIN price of $147. On looking more closely, she was convinced I would want to read about it myself.
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Everyone’s supposed to have a book in them, aren’t they? That piece of folk wisdom underlies the dream that many people have of making a living online through writing. WWWordsmith: Forging a living from online writing is here to explain how, if they’re good enough, they can make that dream a reality.
Authors Kay McMahon and Theodore Koukouvitis have teamed up again to write about the ins and outs of making money online from writing. Each of them brings their own particular perspective to bear on the online writing industry.
The result is a book that covers all aspects of earning a living online through writing. First, a brief introduction looks at the practical benefits of an online writing career, and sets the scene for the discussion of the two basic ways of making a living online through writing: writing as a job (freelancing), and writing as a business (self-publishing). There follows a look at what makes people willing to pay for writing – the needs that the writer must satisfy in order to succeed.
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You may remember from Kay’s recent post that our first eBook came out of Amazon’s Kindle Select programme a short while ago, so it was time to give Smashwords a whirl. As ever, she asked me to do the donkeywork of getting the book ready for publication.
Smashwords lay heavy stress on making sure the eBook is correctly formatted. If you don’t meet their requirements, your book won’t make it into their Premium Catalog [sic]. But if your document is well-formatted in the first place (proper use of headers, positioning of text by appropriate use of styling rather than spaces and carriage returns, etc) then it should be a straightforward enough process to get it to conform.
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