How I Outsmarted Myself With Awesome Ebook Formatting
The top document sharing sites don't just accept your PDF file, affiliate links bristling from every page, and let you go your merry way. They know your evil tricks, and they also want to know just what it is you're posting on their sites. The churls. How dare they!
No, they do exactly what you and I would do if we were running a document sharing site and if we were smart enough to do the programming, which is to analyze the contained text to integrate into site search. Docstoc, for example, disables links when you're previewing a PDF. Scribd allows them.
As part of their PDF preview code they must also recreate the PDF text and its formatting. My ebooks are beautifully designed--and I say that with some regret. For example, any designer knows that the bigger a font is, the closer its letters should be spaced. So that's what we did with Microsoft Word.
We also used a font (Calibri) that is not commonly available on the web.
Finally, because we're generating a lot of documents, I also decided to use some of these typographic techniques on the title page of our eBook, and to emphasize type instead of graphics. Other than a small logo at the top, the page looks well designed yet it's all type. This decision of course had SEO ramifications,but it also means that the ebooks we give out as freebies look way, way better than anyone else's. I believe it makes them easier to read, and therefore more likely to spread virally. That's the theory.
These brilliant decisions conspired against me, because Calibri is replaced by some kind of ugly Ariel and the letter spacing is wrong, resulting in squashed-together letters (remember, we did the typographically correct thing and tightened up the big Calibri headers) right on the title page, which shows up first in the preview on top doc sharing sites. The logo, on the other hand, which I had shrunk to take up much less space on the page, scaled perfectly. So... too clever by half.
For this product cycle I plan to leave things as they are, testing to see if the ugliness hurts. I am guessing it won't. If people searching for material in our niche find our book on a document sharing site, it should presumably not matter if the preview looks hinky. They're in it for the content and will happily download a high-quality freebie. Stil... the ugly preview....
My takeaway is that next product cycle the free ebooks will probably return to graphics-heavy titles with text taking back seat.
No, they do exactly what you and I would do if we were running a document sharing site and if we were smart enough to do the programming, which is to analyze the contained text to integrate into site search. Docstoc, for example, disables links when you're previewing a PDF. Scribd allows them.
As part of their PDF preview code they must also recreate the PDF text and its formatting. My ebooks are beautifully designed--and I say that with some regret. For example, any designer knows that the bigger a font is, the closer its letters should be spaced. So that's what we did with Microsoft Word.
We also used a font (Calibri) that is not commonly available on the web.
Finally, because we're generating a lot of documents, I also decided to use some of these typographic techniques on the title page of our eBook, and to emphasize type instead of graphics. Other than a small logo at the top, the page looks well designed yet it's all type. This decision of course had SEO ramifications,but it also means that the ebooks we give out as freebies look way, way better than anyone else's. I believe it makes them easier to read, and therefore more likely to spread virally. That's the theory.
These brilliant decisions conspired against me, because Calibri is replaced by some kind of ugly Ariel and the letter spacing is wrong, resulting in squashed-together letters (remember, we did the typographically correct thing and tightened up the big Calibri headers) right on the title page, which shows up first in the preview on top doc sharing sites. The logo, on the other hand, which I had shrunk to take up much less space on the page, scaled perfectly. So... too clever by half.
For this product cycle I plan to leave things as they are, testing to see if the ugliness hurts. I am guessing it won't. If people searching for material in our niche find our book on a document sharing site, it should presumably not matter if the preview looks hinky. They're in it for the content and will happily download a high-quality freebie. Stil... the ugly preview....
My takeaway is that next product cycle the free ebooks will probably return to graphics-heavy titles with text taking back seat.