Click covers for info. Copyright (C) Rudy Rucker 2021.


Author Archive

Bookmarks For Making Ebooks and Paperbacks

Tuesday, November 19th, 2013

So The Big Aha is selling and getting out there. Nice post on it by Cory Doctorow in Boing Boing.

I’ve been working with publishing ebooks and paperback POD (print on demand) books for nearly two years now. It’s been a long learning process, and I’m nowhere near done. Like hacking my way through a jungle with a machete.

Generally, the best way to get an answer to a question is to Google search with the main words of your question and look through the links that you find. The official help files for given software products aren’t always the best sources of info.

As a public service I thought I’d make the following links available. I’ve grouped them into two sections: Epublishing and POD Publishing. I like to keep my links alphabetized, so I’ve prefixed the titles of my most-used links with “AAA.”

Last updated November 19, 2013. Permanent version of this post is online at
www.rudyrucker.com/pdf/ebook_pod_bookmarks.html

The categories listed include:
Calibre (free program for converting between EPUB, HTML, and MOBI)
Dreamweaver (Adobe program for working with HTML files)
Lulu, NOOK, and KDP (ebook distributors)
CreateSpace and Lightning (POD book distributors)
ID (InDesign, Adobe program for designing print books)
There ought to be some links for Sigil (free program for creating EPUB files), but there aren’t.

Some of my early musings on Ebooks can be found in my ebook, How To Make An Ebook. See also my series of blog posts on the same topic. I’m so worn out from making my The Big Aha, that I don’t have the energy to write a How To Make A POD Book. So for now this list of links must suffice.

Have fun. If you can call this kind of thing fun

—Rudy


Epublishing

AAA E-junkie (Sellers) – Admin
AAA ISBN My Identifiers | Bowker | Identifier Services
AAA KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing): Bookshelf
AAA Lulu
AAA NOOK Press
Adobe – Digital Editions
BARNES & NOBLE | Rudy Rucker
Calibre User Manual
Dreamweaver Troubleshooting links
ebook how to – CNET Reviews
Ebook Conversion — calibre User Manual
Ebook convert straight quotes to curly quotes
eBook Formatting Paul Salvette in Bangkok:
Ebook, making your text Kindle-Friendly
Ebook: EPUB, MOBI, AZW and PDF Formats
Ebook: Fonts used in various eReaders?
Ebook: Fonts, CSS Font Stack
EPUB A Basic Sigil Tutorial
EPUB adding to iBooks via ITunes
Epub avoid split into several html files? – MobileRead Forums
Epub Format Construction Guide – HXA7241 – 2007
EPUB Open Packaging Format (OPF) 2.0.1 v1.0
EPUB Overview — Sigil v0.4.1 documentation
ePub putting on Your iPad
Epub Reader For Windows 7
EPUB Reader Windows Software
EPUB Sigil Splitting Pages
EPUB tables MobileRead
EPUB to MOBI Conversion [Left Margin Problem] « Morning Cup O’ Joe
Font Size and Color — Support — WordPress.com
HTML – image as large as possible
HTML Anchor Bookmark Tag Links
HTML CSS Cheatsheet
HTML Fix Dreamweaver problem with large DOC import
HTML for the Kindle with Blockquote
HTML for the Kindle with Blockquote
HTML into ebook Sample Code
HTML online preview TryIt Editor
HTML td tag
ISBN buy and use at MyIdentifiers.com
Kindle Cover Size
Kindle eBook how to| Amazon Kindle 3 and Kindle DX Review and News Blog
Kindle from PDF
Kindle Guide Flags in a MOBI. “Start”
Kindle OPF, Guide
kindle-guide.pdf (application/pdf Object)
Lulu Book Distribution
PDFs splitting into multiple documents
Piracy Alert (Scribd)

POD Publishing

AAA Lightning Source Log In
AAA Log In – CreateSpace
AAA Login ISDN on Bowker
Amazon Author Central
Color Acrobat 9: Output Preview and Conversion « Layers Magazine
Color. ID PDF, Pantone colours look dull in Acrobat Professional
Color: AdobeRGB, sRGB or what?
Color: Work Process for Best Colors…
CreateSpace Bleed on Cover Template
CreateSpace Book Cost Calculator
CreateSpace Community: Creating a PDF for Print
CreateSpace Gutter Margin
CreateSpace Margins
CreateSpace Post Editorial Reviews on Amazon
CreateSpace Pre Order sales
Createspace vs. Lightning Source Costs
Createspace., Craddock’s Be Not Content
CreateSpace: Cover Template
CreateSpace: Self Publishing and Free Distribution for Books, CD, DVD
CS Entering addresses to ship to customers?
Dreamweaver: “Clean Up Word HTML” Error
htaccess file for limiting access to a directory
ID Anchor A Graphics Frame
ID Baseline Grid
ID Chapter names in header
ID crashes at startup
ID Creating book files
ID EPUB CS6 Export as EPUB
ID EPUB Exporting EPUB
ID Export to HTML
ID Fix Italic Overrides
ID Flow: Adding Text with Flow
ID Flow: Why is Smart Text Reflow so hard?
ID Headers
ID Highlight Overrides Script
ID How to Anchor Objects InDesign (not very helpful)
ID Import Graphics
ID Import Styles
ID Import Word file
ID Improve justified type settings
ID insert page spreads–Allow Pages To Shuffle
ID Justification
ID Keep Words Together with No Break
ID Keyboard shortcuts
ID Laying out frames and pages
ID Making a Book file (video)
ID Margin Sizes
ID Margins and Columns
ID Master pages
ID optical margin
ID Optical Margin
ID Page Numbering Tricks
ID Place graphics in a graphics frame
ID Print/Don’t Print Frame Outline
ID Remove Defaults and Saved Data
ID Running Header Text Variables Chap Title
ID save as Ebook
ID Suggested Layout Tips
ID Table Of Contents
ID Tabs and indents
ID Thread and Flow Text
ID Unlink a text file (the hard way)
ID Use Odd Page Break between Chaps
ID Why ugly <span> tags in EPUB Export? Local overrides.
ID Working with graphics frames
ID Working with Word and InDesign
Image Word Resize Image Macro
InDesign Page numbering
Indie Author: Lulu vs. CreateSpace: Which Is More Economical For The DIY Author?
Lightning Color Shephard New 2013
Lightning / CreateSpace Pricing: Shepard Plan B (old)
Lightning / CreateSpace Pricing: Shepard Plan C (new)
Lightning B&W pricings
Lightning Book Cost Calculator
LIghtning Color prices
Lightning cover template
Lightning Creation Guide
Lightning Source 101 (Lightning Source Inc., print on demand, self publishing companies)
Lightning Standard vs Premium Color
MONKEYBRAINS – Support – Basic Auth
Proof Better-Looking Full Justification for Paragraphs in WORD
Proof Remove dupicate words in WORD
PS Em dash and en dash in Photoshop text — Photoshop for Windows — ClearPS.com
PS Fixed size selection
Reviews (Booklist Online)
Reviews (Library Journal)
Reviews (Publisher’s Weekly)
Rudy’s Blog Making a High-Quality Picture Book
Word: Removing Unused Styles

Two New Paintings. “Eyes,” “Woman With Jellyfish”.

Saturday, November 16th, 2013


“Woman With Jellyfish,” oil on canvas, November, 2013, 24” x 30”. Click for a larger version of the painting. [I revised this painting on December 19, 2013, and the new version is shown here.]

I’d gone to the Monterey Bay Aquarium with my wife, and we’d looked a big tank of sea nettle jellyfish. I made a little photo of my wife by the tank, and at first I wanted to paint that. But in the end, the woman in the painting didn’t look at all like my wife, and the painting’s viewpoint suggests that either we’re looking out from inside the tank at the woman, or maybe the jellyfish are floating around in the air instead of being inside a tank. Once I realized the woman wasn’t going to be a portrait of my wife I gave her green hair and made her look kind of cantankerous and space-punk. Maybe she’s “talking” with that big jellyfish.

Possibly she’ll turn up in a story or novel that I write in the coming year…now that I’m done with The Big Aha.


“Eyes,” oil on canvas, October, 2013, 20” x 24”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

This was an easy painting to make—I just did a lot of eyes. I didn’t particularly try to make them scary. I was more interested in them looking alert. I had fun with the colors, getting all the shades to be fairly even intensities of mild pastel colors. I think I might do a painting of “Snouts” next, with pig-snout disks.

As always you can find more info on my paintings at my Paintings page.

Podcast #73. Talk. “Speculations on Future Computations”

Thursday, November 14th, 2013

Nov 14, 2013. Computer Science department Colloquium talk on future forms of computation. Given at San Jose State. The slides are here as a PDF file. Talk is about an hour long, with some Q&A. The first five minutes of my talk are missing from the recording.

Play

Subscribe to Rudy Rucker Podcasts.


THE BIG AHA goes live!

Wednesday, November 13th, 2013

The Big Aha
A Novel by Rudy Rucker
From Transreal Books. Paperback and Ebook. (Hardback coming soon.)
330 pages and 14 illustrations.
***
Biotech has replaced machines.
Qrude artist Zad Plant works with living paint.
Career’s on the skids, wife Jane threw him out.
Enter qwet—it’s quantum wetware!
Qwet makes you high, and gives you telepathy.
A loofy psychedelic revolution begins.
Oh-oh! Mouths in midair, eating people!
Zad and Jane travel through a wormhole—and meet the aliens.
Stranger than you ever imagined.
What is the Big Aha?
***
Browse the entire The Big Aha novel for free as an illustrated web page.
Buy ebook and print editions of The Big Aha.
More info at the website for The Big Aha.
And one more thing: Notes for The Big Aha , a book-length writing journal.

Click for a larger version of The Big Aha cover flat.


Rudy's Blog is powered by WordPress