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Silver Spring, MD
United States

888-577-9342

Stories To Tell is a full service book publishing company for independent authors. We provide editing, design, publishing, and marketing of fiction and non-fiction. We specialize in sophisticated, unique illustrated book design.

Stories To Tell Books BLOG

Filtering by Category: Book Design and Book Production Technology

Why a Book Designer?

Nan Barnes

“Don’t judge a book by its cover.” Good advice, and yet that’s exactly what we all do. Appearances matter. You know when you see a well-designed book, as compared to an amateur DIY project, in the same way you see and know the difference between a designer suit and a workman’s overalls. You may never have met me, or any other book designer, but you appreciate our work every time you browse in a bookstore or library. When you’re writing a book, you think only of the text. You imagine your text in a printed, published book. Yet there’s a step in between a manuscript and publishing. We must transform that Word document into a digital file that a printer will use. (Actually, two files – the interior of the book, and the cover.) Large publishers have an art department to handle this step, but self-publishing authors usually hire a book designer. A book designer serves two functions for a self publishing author.
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categories Book Design and Book Production Technology

Who Should Illustrate My Children's Book?

Biff Barnes

Writing a children’s book is a unique challenge for an author. Children’s books are illustrated books. So the author, from almost the moment she gets an idea for a children’s book, thinks about the illustrations which will accompany her words. For the first time children’s book author this usually raises the question, where do I find an illustrator for my book? The answer is less simple than the question. It begins with another question, where do you want to publish your book? Do you hope to sell it to a traditional children’s book publisher in exchange for an advance and a share of any earnings the book might have? Or do you plan to self publish your book and undertake the work of marketing and distributing it yourself?
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categories Book Design and Book Production Technology, Collaboration, Incorporating Photographs and Illustrations

The Look of Your Book - Design & Layout

Nan Barnes

If you have finished writing and revising your memoir or family history book, you may imagine that completing your manuscript means you're done. But authors who self-publish have a a final critical step to take before publication – book design. Book design combines decisions about elements of the book, style, organization, illustrations, layout, and cover design. The choices you make about the design of your book will give it the unique character you wish to create. Here are some of the things to consider when designing your book:
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categories Book Design and Book Production Technology

How Many Pictures Are Too Many?

Biff Barnes

It’s hard to sort through all your wonderful pictures and limit your possibilities. You want to, and you should, put many pictures in. Making your memoir or family history a fully illustrated book will give an additional dimension to your reader’s experience. A lot of people have been led to believe there is a limit on the number of photos commercial printers will include. Many big self publishing companies offer packages that limit the number of photographs. Xlibris’ Basic Package sets the limit at 25 images. The Author House Portfolio Package allows 50 images. Why? It’s easier and cheaper for them. When you choose to work with your own book designer, like Stories To Tell, to prepare your book you face no such limitation.
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categories Book Design and Book Production Technology, Incorporating Photographs and Illustrations

OCR: A Tool for Family Historians

Biff Barnes

Old documents are a common problem for family historians. At the recent RootsTech conference I spoke with several people had diaries, journals or books written by ancestors that they hoped to publish in whole or part. The question all of them posed was how to do it without having to retype the whole document. Optical character recognition (OCR) is one possible answer.
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categories About Publishing, Book Design and Book Production Technology

Soft Cover, Hard Cover, Ebook: A Case Study

Nan Barnes

Our client, Johnna, called me with a problem. We completed her book early last year, and she published it with much fanfare, making it available on amazon.com. Her friends and family all bought copies. But then her life got busy. She has kids and a job, and her book project lost momentum. Now Johnna is looking for more and better ways to get her book out to readers. But what book, exactly? Softcover, hardcover, or ebook?

Softcover: Johnna’s religious self-help book, Celestial Marriage: Reflections on Marriage and Faith, is currently published in softcover. In fact, amazon.com will only sell softcover books. Softcover books are affordable, and given that Johnna’s book is filled with beautiful photographs, full color printing was a must. Amazon’s CreateSpace prints color books cheaply enough that the cover price is affordable for buyers online. Authors can buy copies even cheaper, at cost, and hand-sell them. And it cost Johnna nothing to put the book up for sale on amazon; print on demand means the buyer pays the costs of printing and shipping, not the author.

Pros: Sell and ship through amazon, no upfront costs, authors copies are inexpensive.

Cons: Quality is low, considering softcover’s glued binding, gives the impression of a cheap, disposable paperback.

Hardcover: Johnna would love to see her beautifully designed book in a classy hardcover. This would communicate its value as a “keeper”, and would justify a higher cover price, too. Big publishers will save on hardcovers by printing thousands, using offset presses. Smaller orders from self publishers are digital, and most digital printers have a minimum order of 25 for hardcover. This means some significant money out of Johnna’s pocket. The cheapest deal we could find for her 100 page full color book was about $32 a book. That would result in an attractive book at an unattractively high cover price, so it is unlikely she could profit.

Pros: Higher quality with longer lasting binding, better paper and cover choices.

Cons: Too expensive in small qualities to sell commercially; most suitable for high end private projects.

Ebooks: Ebooks are read by more people every year, and many authors hope to reach readers who purchase books through ereading devices. And there’s the complication: which format and device? PDFs can be read by any device, but they won’t resize as an ebook will. Kindle requires their proprietary format. Apple’s iBook for iPad accepts the universal EPUB, but requires an exclusive contract. B& N’s Nook is another sales channel, but it doesn’t get as much traffic. Should Johnna pay for two or three differently formatted ebooks? How to distribute them?

Part of the answer is Johnna’s existing website. Because she is already distributing digital media, she can sell her ebook on her website. Having paid once to format it, each successive sale is pure profit. However, her site will never receive the traffic that amazon does, and since her book is already on amazon, buyers can be sent to her page, see her softcover and Kindle version, and perhaps buy both!

Pros: Inexpensive to produce, a reformat of the original book files.

Cons: Ebook prices are significantly lower; profit per book is small. Requires many sales for success.

Our conclusions: Forget the hardcover; perhaps buy a few copies for the family. Use the internet to sell and distribute both the softcover and the ebook. Offer the ebook in the common epub format on Johnna’s website, and put the Kindle version up on amazon.

categories About Publishing, Book Design and Book Production Technology

Built to Last: Archival Quality Books

Biff Barnes

When you set out to preserve your personal or family history there are a lot of ways to do it. Technology has provided a lot of tools that seem attractive: audio CDs, video on DVD, and numerous internet photo storage sites. But the Library of Congress warns that books remain the best method of preservation. Dag Spicer, curator of the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley advises, “…consider paper the archival medium.” In creating an archival quality book there are a number of things to consider to insure its longevity. Make sure that as you decide on a printer you review the features of the book they will produce for you.
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categories Book Design and Book Production Technology

Book Design and Layout

Nan Barnes

If you have finished writing and revising your memoir or family history book, you may imagine that completing your manuscript means you're done. But authors who self-publish have a a final critical step to take before publication – book design. Book design combines decisions about elements of the book, style, organization, illustrations, layout, and cover design. The choices you make about the design of your book will give it the unique character you wish to create. Here are some of the things to consider when designing your book:
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categories Book Design and Book Production Technology

Who Should Print or Publish Your Memoir or Family History Book?

Biff Barnes

What’s the best way to get your memoir or family history book into print? That’s a question with many answers, and even more people out there telling you which answer you should choose. Which one will work best for you? Begin by asking yourself three questions: • Who is your intended audience? Are you hoping for commercial success with wide distribution of your book? Or, is your goal to distribute a limited number of copies to family and friends? • How many copies of the book will you need? This will help you decide whether it will be better to use a digital printer or an offset printer. [For a discussion of the different types of printing available read our blog posts Printing Choices in Self Publishing and Print on Demand Lowers the Cost of Family History Books .] • How to plan to pay for the book’s printing or publication? When you’ve made some decisions about these questions you will be better equipped to make a choice on who you want to print or publish your book.
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categories About Publishing, Book Design and Book Production Technology

How Photos Help to Tell a Story

Biff Barnes

When it comes to placing images in your book, not all images are equal. Nor should all images be used in the same way. One of the most important things to consider in deciding how to place the images in your book is to consider the relationship of the text to the image. How do text and image work together to tell a story? Let’s look at some examples of the kinds of choices you might make in placing photos.
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categories Book Design and Book Production Technology, Incorporating Photographs and Illustrations

How Do I Find an Illustrator for My Self Published Children’s Book?

Biff Barnes

In our previous post we explored some advice to authors of children’s books seeking an illustrator.In today’s post we’ll explore the question of how to find an illustrator if you plan to self publish your children’s book. Begin by deciding how many illustrations and what size you want. Then decide on you budget for the project. Armed with this knowledge you can begin searching for your illustration.
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categories Book Design and Book Production Technology, Incorporating Photographs and Illustrations

How Do I Find an Illustrator for My Children’s Book?

Biff Barnes

In the course of editing and designing books for people we often get questions. One we’ve heard a lot lately is, “Can you help me find a good illustrator for a children’s book?” Like many things associated with creating a book, this question is more complex than it seems. To begin with, you must deal with another question: How do you hope to get your book published? Will you follow the traditional process and submit it to a publishing house or do you plan to self publish? Your answer will take you down one of two very different roads. Today we’ll focus on the road to traditional commercial publication.
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categories Book Design and Book Production Technology

Should Young Children Read Ebooks?

Biff Barnes

Matt Richtel and Julie Bosman of the NY Times reported that many tech savvy adults may love their Kindles, but For Their Children, Many EBook Fans Insist on Paper. They found that, “Print books may be under siege from the rise of e-books, but they have a tenacious hold on a particular group: children and toddlers. Their parents are insisting this next generation of readers spend their early years with old-fashioned books.” Their reasons for limiting children to paper books are based on personal feelings about the reading experience. Other than parental feelings about books is there a reason children are better off with print books than ebooks? Not really.
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categories Book Design and Book Production Technology

You Need a Good Project Manager to Get a Book Into Print

Biff Barnes

Creating a book is often viewed as if an author were some sort of alchemist transforming the base metals of an idea into the precious golden prose of a book. Let’s take a step back and look at creating a book in a less pretentious way. Creating a book might also be viewed as an exercise in project management.
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categories About Publishing, Book Design and Book Production Technology, Editors and Editing, The Author’s Craft

If You Plan to Self Publish...

Biff Barnes

“How will you celebrate family history month?” asks Randy Seaver on his Genea-Musings blog. For more and more people the answer appears to be by writing my life story. The desire to create a book is a wonderful impulse, but many of the seniors who respond to it do so with very little knowledge or experience concerning what it takes to get a book into print.
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categories About Memoirs and Personal History Books, Book Design and Book Production Technology, Editors and Editing

Your Book Deserves a Creative Team

Biff Barnes

Meghan Ward, the author of the Writerland blog, which I follow, offered some interesting and useful advice to her readers in her post 10 Steps to Becoming a Self Publishing Superstar . I was particularly interested in Step 4: “If you do decide to self-publish, you should hire a freelance editor (even if you have excellent editing skills yourself) and book designer, so that your book is as professional as it would be if it were published by one of the Big 6.” It’s something I often tell authors I talk to. If you think about it for a moment the reason it’s sound advice is obvious.
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categories About Publishing, Book Design and Book Production Technology, Editors and Editing