The secret of typography and print is that when it is done right it becomes a medium which is ‘invisible’. When we read the printed word we, as readers, do not judge the weight of the paper, its gloss or mat surface. The font which has been used and the leading of the headers. These are all elements which a competent typographer will be more than just aware of and which he will use to create a certain effect which will enhance your brochure or leaflet, magazine or newspaper project.

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Each day of the year a new book becomes available which has been brought to the market using our Express Publishing Service. Leveraging our position as a global player in the self-publishing industry Web Direct Studio can offer to print-ready manuscripts and books global exposure through over 25,000 online and offline book outlets.

Our Express Publishing Service was the brainchild of one of our directors whose son wanted to publish a book for the fans of his jazz group without having to go to all the expense of going down the traditional “print 5,000 copies” root which would have caused problems with storage, initial outlay and distribution.

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Anyone watching old black & white films depicting the future would have noticed back then, in the days before colour television was invented that futurologists and science fiction writers were predicting the end of paper. In that black and white depicted future reading material came through television screens or mental waves or from the gods of cyberspace but it did not come on paper.

Paper somehow seems archaic, inefficient, wasteful, the preserve of those who still long for yesteryear and prize the ability to be able to hold dead trees in their hands so they can read a novel. And yet paper, which has all these drawbacks, though dying, is dying slowly enough to make it seem like it will be with us forever.

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Publishing has been in a transitional state of being ever since Stephen King released his short story Riding the Bullet online in 2000 as his debut on the Internet and an experiment and shifted in a week more downloads than any publisher could have hoped to have shipped copies in a year.

This made the publishing industry sit up and take notice (and close ranks and bury their heads in the sand as it later turned out) and just about anyone with a computer, acrobat distiller and a half-baked story to sell think that here was something which was going to level the playing field and bring everyone’s story worth telling to a deserving public.

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The success of inspirational books is measured, always, by the story of their creation and few are as inspiring as Jamie Edwards’ Mental Ketchup. A performance coach who has worked with some of the biggest sports talents in Golf and has had some notable successes with businesses, Jamie Edwards had been working on his book for some time, never quite finding the time to finish it until a computer meltdown caused the loss of many of his files and galvanized him to get working to finish his book.

Proving that when it comes to removing mental blocks and psychological barriers which stop you reaching your goals, the proof of the pudding is most definitely in the eating, Jamie Edwards, finished Mental Ketchup in almost record time and decided to get it to the market himself.

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While it’s true that you should never judge a book by its cover it is also a reality that we, as book buyers, whether we are buying print or digital use a cover the way we use packaging in other products. This means that a book’s cover is used to:

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On any given week we get between one and four requests to help someone write a book. Ghostwriting is a relatively straightforward process when it comes to creating a non-fiction group. A book, in order to be created properly, requires a certain structure and depth and requires the skills of at least one writer, two editors (a sub-editor and a layout editor), a designer (if you need a book cover) and a project manager (necessary to co-ordinate all this). The chain gets slightly longer if you also require the book to be a Print On Demand publication which will then be available on Amazon as well as other major book stores such as Barnes & Noble.

All this happens in addition to research (if your book needs extra material in order to give it sufficient spine value), any picture research that’s required (if you need to have some suitable illustrations) and the work of the print account manager who will be responsible for taking your book to print through the Book Ordering System that tracks International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs) and gets your book into the bookstores on both sides of the Atlantic.

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