Friday

Self publishing



I'm just putting the finishing touches to my latest book about watercolour painting techniques. It's a book for people who have been painting for some time and need inspiration to take a step further to a more advanced and different approach. It has now 104 pages with 207 illustrations and has been a lot of work but it's something I have wanted to get done for several years. This e-book will very soon (hopefully) be available on the net as a downloadable pdf file. Later I will be publishing it in epub format but this involves creating a new layout which has already taken me months to do so I'll wait a while with that. Here I am checking the visual appearance of the illustrations to make sure the colours are as near the originals as possible when seen on different computers. For this I am using a stationary Imac, a Macbook, an ipad2 and my old PC laptop. The 4 different results I get from these (like in a TV shop) gives me an idea of how the appearance of the images and text can vary. I had to change the colour of the whole text from the more aesthetic light grey I had given it to almost black so that it could be easier to read on an older PC.  Some of the watercolour paintings illustrated in the book can also be seen as videos on YouTube and one of the advantages of an e-book is that you can add such links but it was only after many trials and errors with hyperlinks that everything worked. Another advantage of an e-book is that the reader can zoom in on the pictures and see them even closer than I did when I painted them. This meant that all the images had to be in high resolution. So the book is now 200MB and consequently can't be sent by email but will have to be downloaded from a server, There are apparently several solutions to this, I'll get back to that problem later.

2 comments:

  1. Elizabeth, I can hardly wait! I'm really a book rather than an ebook person but I might just adjust my thinking for your book... Please put me on your list as soon as it is available.

    Thanks
    Marion (in sunny Sydney)

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  2. Well, I'm not a seasoned watercolorist, but I sure am looking forward to seeing your book! You are an inspiration!

    Stay inspired!

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