I self-published a learn-to-code book and made nearly $5k in pre-orders

Re:I self-published a learn-to-code book and made nearly $5k... by limedaring on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @06:40PM (#9848595)

I have a graphic design degree and room editorial design at university, so I definitely had a leg up there. I indeed used indesign, a lot of stuff I remembered but I also touched up on it by taking some skillahare classes on laying out books.

Indesign is very powerful, and ergo a little intimidating. For a newbie though, it shouldn't take that long to get a handle on it (by doing some tutorials and whatnot) but harder would be learning about typography and getting an inmate feel for good editorial design. Not something that can be taught in a day, unfortunately. Still, I recommend skillshare, they have a lot of great design tutorials.

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Re:I self-published a learn-to-code book and made nearly $5k... by elsjaako on Wednesday July 08, 2015 @11:15AM (#9852062)

Do you have an opinion on LaTeX? I'd be interested to hear about it from someone used to publishing technical work in indesign.

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Re:I self-published a learn-to-code book and made nearly $5k... by limedaring on Wednesday July 08, 2015 @12:06PM (#9852524)

I have heard one datapoint from another author that publishing in LaTeX has been nothing but pain (I think in mostly in regards to creating the eBooks). That said, the formatting in InDesign was kind of a pain on its own (it kept adding "typographers" curly apostrophes which would break the code), but I'd probably still choose that over LaTeX.

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Re:I self-published a learn-to-code book and made nearly $5k... by limedaring on Wednesday July 08, 2015 @04:57AM (#9850539)

Just saw the typo, sorry! I meant, "I have a graphic design degree and took editorial design..."

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