According to the Financial Post, "The average skimmer who picks up a book spends eight seconds looking at the front jacket and fifteen seconds skimming the jacket." You can't judge - but you can sell - a book by its jacket. Here are several suggested book jacket design techniques that the great designers use:

The necessaries for your front jacket: The front jacket should provide your book title, subtitle, and author name. Potentially, and often missed are including blurbs and/or testimonials from important people.

Think of your jacket like a billboard. The best designs transmit the book's significance at a look, with simple, uncluttered design. Unique, distinctive, bold, colourful pictures work well. But keep the graphic style uniform with the content and personality of the book. Make sure there is a fundamental focal point to your design.

I recommend using bold, distinctive typography on the front jacket. When choosing colours, consider how thesecolours will look when transferred to black and white so your jacket will reproduce well in black and white ads, catalogues, and flyers. Also make sure the font you use for the title is legible from a distance and suitable for the book's subject.

Jackets that scream "layperson" and have a "do it yourself" look make it difficult to get rid of your book at all. If you lack ability in this field, seek the services of an experienced book jacket designer. A professional designer has the creativity, skills, software, access to stock photography, and printing knowledge that will make your jacket stand out above others in the marketplace.

What should you put on the spine of your book? Your name, title, and publishing company's logo show up on the spine. Make sure the information on the spine is clean, shipshape, and intelligible. I recommend using bold, complementary lettering on the spine as well.

Important items you should include on your back jacket. Place the category name in the upper left-hand corner to help stores and libraries shelve your book properly. Write a headline that clearly addresses who should buy the book. It should be followed by sales copy explaining what the book is about. Then provide a short bulleted list of benefits to skimmers.

I recommend including no more than three testimonials and endorsements, as well as your bio and photograph. Close to the bottom, put back copy in bold. Position the price in the lower left corner of the back jacket. Also include the 13-digit ISBN number for cataloguing and the bar code in the lower right corner (below ISBN number), which stores and libraries use for scanning information and price.

Don't forget to include recognition for your book jacket's artists, photog, and/or designer.

You now have a good impression of what makes a sound book jacket design. Remember, book jacket design is a form of casing-and good packaging attracts buyers to products. That's why successful companies corporations spend $1,000,000s researching the best product packaging possible.

Born, raised and a resident in Illinois for most of her life, Valerie Connelly now lives with her husband, Michael, in Wisconsin north of Milwaukee. She divides her time between publishing, writing, teaching, painting landscapes and waterscapes, and traveling to visit her grown children.

Valerie shares her experience as a publisher:

I am a realist. As a publisher of books, this is an essential personality trait. So many of the authors I work with and for are purely dreamers that I have to be a realist. Reality has a face, and it is made of numbers ¯ mind-numbing, dream-busting numbers.

Here are some of those numbers that will boggle the mind of even the most sober realist.

At Book Expo 2007, the buzz was saying that in 2006, 280,000 titles were published in the United States alone, which meant 80, 000 more books were published in the United States than in 2005. This means that of the titles published in 2006, each title had 279,999 competitorslast year. However, only a relatively small portion of these titles actually sold books in quantities that were notable. Why? Because there were 279,999 competitors for the readership's attention, and some titles were far better promoted than others. Some had money supporting their visibility. Some had a famous name as the author. Some had a famous person as the subject of the book. Some had the power of Hollywood emblazoning their tales with films. Some were a phenomenon like we have not seen before. Of course, that phenomenon was Harry Potter. But, the fact is the vast majority of these titles sold 100 copies or less.

Now, let's project conservatively into the future. If this increase were to continue as it did just last year, adding 80,000 books to the pile of newly published books each year until 2015, by that time, each book will have 999,999 competitors, and 5,572,000 more books will have been published in the United States alone. This is simple, third-grade math.

Ms. Connelly's years as an advertising copywriter, graphic designer and print shop owner served her well as she founded Nightengale Press in July of 2003. By January of 2007 Nightengale Press has published more than 40 authors, with 57 books among them, and several more coming through the process into print every month. Nightengale Press has evolved into Nightengale Media LLC offering its authors a first class website, bookstore, marketing opportunites and more.

Read the rest of the article here.

While normally paper books and literature resources still have the greater market in terms of status and market share, publishing eBooks continue to encounter growth and technological progress that make it apparent that this type of publishing is here to stay and perhaps will accrue more strength in the future. As you probably know, the Internet is all about information and automation. Internet users want information and they want it right now. That's why eBooks are considered to be the "just latest greatest" online product. They provide web surfers with the information they desire and can be instantly downloaded.

For one thing, publishing eBooks over normally printed material has a smaller ecological upset because it does not involve the cutting down of resources. As we continue to progress technologically, and whileour natural resources continue to decline, we might eventually see a ban on printing normally and instead, all reading material will be passed through an eBook publisher.

Before that though, we already see some advantages and disadvantages in traditional printing of books to publishing eBooks. While the main disadvantage of eBooks over paperback is the fact that not all electronic books can be read by the same eBook reader. This means that you will need to have different eBook reader tools to support all types of electronic books that are published.

On the other hand, publishing eBook has many benefits, one of which is the fact that it is an affordable alternative to printing in full coloured. Some eBook formats support a full book layout, which can include images that will register beautifully on the screen of the eBook reader tool. It would cost quite a lot to print full-coloured layouts for traditional hardbound or paperback books. While in publishing eBooks, the full coloured image is rendered into the format needed and can be continuously distributed to readers without having to use a single sheet of paper or several liters of ink.

The most popular ebook formats used on the Internet are the Portable Document Format, better known as PDF, and the Hypertext Markup Language, better known as HTML.

Although both formats are highly popular, you must look at the entire picture prior to making your decision, as there are pros and cons associated with each format.

Another advantage to publishing electronic books instead of regular print formats is that you allow the reader to store lots of full-length electronic books into their handy eBook reader tools. This way, again, fewer resources are used and the book's transportability is improved. One can have a whole library in the palm of their hands with one single tool that stores and displays published eBooks. Some eBook reader tools also have provisions for a wonderful library interface to help one store and manage numerous and varied electronic books.

Another addition to its mobility is the eBook reader's adaptability to any lighting conditions. Publishing eBooks will help the reader to be able to enjoy their book even if there is little or no light at all because these reading tools always come with back lit screens. This gets rid of the need to a light source which makes the eBook very adaptable and mobile indeed.

Yet another advantage to publishing eBoooks is in giving the content several augmentations. There are some publishers and eBook reading tools that allow for formats with audio and video components, making the experience of reading eBooks even more special. This is especially helpful for publishing eBooks that are supposed to be for educational purposes.

Check out my Free eBook templates & covers for self publishing.

Via Ron Silliman comes this opinion piece from the Guardian:

Self-publication of a neatly produced, high quality (the paper is never less than 100 gram, preferably 120 gram) booklet with a smart Photoshop cover professionally folded and stapled makes a great gift, or maybe a summary of a good year at the writing group, a fundraiser for a school, or a memorial for a special person.

Why bother to go through all the heartache and hassle of fighting to get your precious memories or thoughts into mainstream publication? Your own PC, printer and digital camera are waiting to make someone's day. If you really want to go big and produce a novel, there's the internet or print on demand (no surplus stock there!).

Getting published by a mainstream company is great, but in all honesty, how many of us can reallyafford to give up the day job, even when we've signed that contract? Such a long, heartbreaking haul for what? The joy of writing should be just that - the writing.

Define your audience and publish yourself. Get your books and anthologies into the hands of people who really want to hear from you - whether it's one copy, or a couple of dozen through print on demand.

Check out the rest of the article here. An interesting perspective, nonetheless. Could it be that the joy of writing is fuel that drives the desire to write? It's this joy that sustains a writer's identity rather than the promise of being published?

I'd like to think so, but from the volume of submissions Jesse and I receive, it's likely not!

I received this via email from Gary Michael Smith and thought that people on the site migh enjoy it. I would like to introduce a book that may be a useful resource to would-be authors on this blog.

Publishing for Small Press Runs is a pioneering book promoting quick and affordable short press run book publication using the latest digital technology for producing covers and text. This 372-page guide currently is being used as the course text for a class at the University of New Orleans. For more information, see here, Publishing for Small Press Runs.

For an AuthorViews video, see here.

Imagine if you could develop a product that could be sold worldwide, cost almost nothing to create and could be shipped to your customers instantly. Don't think this is possible?

Let me introduce you to this "ideal product", also known as an ebook. Short for electronic book, ebooks took the internet by storm forming a new generation of online authors. Almost every person surfing the web is looking for information, so there's no shortage of potential readers.

Here are a few reasons why you should consider self-publishing:

• The startup cost is quite low and affordable.
• Unlike traditional books, updates can be done quickly and easily at no additional costs.
• There's no need to buy or rent a warehouse to stock your product, because an ebook is compiled into a single file that can be sold over and over again. Also, unsold copies are no longer an issue.
• After the order has been processed, the customer is redirected to a page where they can instantly download the product, day or night. This eliminates shipping costs saving you time and money. Online sales can be fully automated leaving much more time to invest in other important aspects of the business.
• Profit margins are significantly larger due to low business expenses and production costs.
• If the ebook is truly informative, selling another product would then become almost effortless, especially if a mailing list was included in the marketing campaign.

Everyday, more and more students, stay at home parents and even grand-parents are turning ideas and knowledge into a passive income stream. Some of them even go on to produce several more ebooks, or a single bestseller, and leave the 9–5 lifestyle behind for good.

If you have expertise in a certain field, whether it's guerilla marketing or cooking for kids, you too can enjoy the benefits from self-publishing your very own ebook. Put a unique twist on ways to solve everyday problems, and you could retire sooner than you think!

Would you like more information? Check out our resources here.