Another TYPEFLOW update

August? My last update was AUGUST?

Well, I’ve been busy. Business just keeps getting bigger and bigger and better and cooler. TYPEFLOW has essentially tripled its business in the last two years.

This’ll be quick, because I have to get back to the cool stuff, but—

This week I’ve been working on a bunch of children’s and Young Adult books for Scholastic (fiction and nonfiction, novels and picture books, print and ebooks), wrapping up two print/ebook combinations for two indie presses (design and production), and publicizing Typeflow’s second book of original short fiction (concept, editorial, design, production, and everything else). I can’t share the Scholastic stuff—the biggest actually is kind of a big deal; I’ll tell you about it after it’s out, if I remember—but here are some of the other things that filled up February:

The Muffia

Client: Water Street Press
Genre: Fiction
Formats: Print and ebooks

I’ve designed and produced the interiors of all four of the books you’ll see at their website. (Not the covers; just all the interior work.) This one’s a romantic thriller with a big vibrator angle, so here’s what I did for the chapter openers:

Yeah, I know. I’m very ashamed of myself.

Ride 2: More Short Fiction About Bicycles

Client: Typeflow
Genre: Fiction
Formats: Print and ebooks

The first RIDE did nicely and got noticed; the second one’s now out. (The blog’s here, with print and ebook ordering links, author interviews, and all that stuff. The call for entries for RIDE 3 will happen soon.)

I did both the cover and the interior on this one, with art by Taliah Lempert.

The Forgotten Gift

Client: Elden Nelson (Fat Cyclist)
Genre: Fiction
Formats: Print and ebooks

Because of the bicycling connection, when Elden wanted to publish his late wife’s YA fantasy novel, he emailed me. I took on the project and introduced him to Jenn Reese of Tiger Bright Studios, who did a knockout job on the cover. (I do covers—here are a few—but I knew she’d do this one way better.)

Click to download a PDF of Jenn’s cover and the first few pages of my interior:

(And there are some more teaser pages up at his blog.)

So that’s the quick version of what TYPEFLOW was up to last week.

Maybe it won’t be another six months until the next update—or maybe it will—but if it is, that doesn’t mean things are slow here. It means there are so many cool book projects flooding the gates that I don’t realize how long the blog’s been updateless. If you’ve got a book project in mind and you like what you see here, drop me a line. You might be the reason for the next six months of silence!

A Typeflow update

The reason there’s not much new here isn’t that nothing’s going on; it’s that a huge amount is going on, and updating the company blog isn’t as high on the list as doing the work.

I’ve taken on a large client (Scholastic Books), and I’m doing a lot of work for their trade department. Children’s books and fixed-layout books haven’t been part of of Typeflow’s skill set–but they are now!

My schedule is settling down again. Please drop me a line if you’ve got a project you want to get going.

A few recent cover designs

Three recent projects, for which I did both cover and interior designs. I’ve been so busy, I don’t even have time to tilt these and give them drop shadows.

New fiction anthology: RIDE—SHORT FICTION ABOUT BICYCLES

This is Typeflow’s first original book, a collection of short stories with only one thing in common: Bicycles.

(Why bicycles? We like bicycles.)

In printed books, color interior art is expensive—which is why you almost never see it. In an ebook, though, you can go full-color without any added costs. So each of these stories gets its own full-color “internal cover.”

The printed version has the individual story covers too, but with black-and-white versions of the interior art. (Full-color cover, though.)

Reviews of RIDE have been showing up on popular bike blogs (like this one), and sales have been steady since it came out. We’re kind of thrilled.

RIDE 2 is now in the works!

Recent nonfiction

I’m very pleased to be working with WriteWorks Publishing on their entire 2011/2012 line.

One of the books I’ve done for them recently is Shelly Lowenkopf’s The Fiction Lover’s Companion, a 594-page reference book for readers and writers.

In the Kindle and epub versions, you’re able to click on terms to go to the entries for those terms. Print technology can’t quite do that yet, but the same terms are rendered in small-caps in the print version, so the user knows there’s something interesting to read about them.

One of the dangers of book layout is that it’s easy to get distracted by good content. In this case, it paid off: One of the entries helped me nail the climax of my short story for RIDE (coming in 2012).

Click the image for high-res.

Welcome to Typeflow

This is where I’m supposed to give you a bunch of enthusiastic ad copy—but really, all I want to tell you is that while we’ve all been holding down day jobs and writing books—the one at top left is mine—my day job has been graphics production, and now I own a company that makes ebooks.

Typeflow is my company. You send a Word or RTF file all proofed and ready for publishing, and you get back a really nice ebook in formats for Kindle, Nook, iBooks, etc., with professional typesetting, chapter headers, up-caps, run-ins, and other pro touches as part of the basic package, which costs $350.

That’s the price for a novel up to about 80,000 words. (Other forms—nonfiction, anthologies—vary too much to standardize, but drop me a line.) It doesn’t include cover concept and design from the ground up, but it does include cover layout if you already have art and an idea—which is how those covers up there came to be.

See the “Services and Rates” tab at the top of this page—and then call me, drop me an email, or message me on Facebook.

keith@typeflownyc.com 917.370.8219

Two recent jobs

Recent ebook fiction:

Recent POD nonfiction:

Coming soon: seven ebooks for Fidelis Morgan—including her “Countess” series!