Indie Publishing: How to Design and Produce Your Own Book

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Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2008, English

Nonfiction, Graphic Design

ISBN: 9781568987606

From the Publisher: Once referred to derisively as “vanity publishing,” self-published books are finally taking their place alongside more accepted indie categories such as music, film, and theater. Indie Publishing is a practical guide to creating and distributing printed books regardless of your background, skill set, or ambition. It will help you realize projects of every scale and budget, from the traditional bookmaking techniques used to create zines to the more ambitious industrial production methods required to produce hardcover books in large quantity. Readers are taken step-by-step through the process of designing a book to give it personal style as well as visual coherence and authority. Design principles such as scale, cropping, pacing, and typography are explored in relation to each example, along with commentary on how to create effective title pages, tables of contents, captions, and more. Indie Publishing aims to inspire readers with examples of print projects similar to those they might undertake on their own. Sample designs include a picture book, artist's portfolio, exhibition catalogue, poetry chapbook, novel, and zine. Indie Publishing addresses the important business aspects of independent publishing from how and why you should get an ISBN number to creating promotional materials and using the Internet to market your book.

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Ellen Lupton

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