Damsels get in it all the time.

People pay extra to have it done to their furniture.

And the government tries bailing out cities stuck in it.

But what about fonts? Yeah, even they can join in on the distressing action.

Don’t worry, it’s a good thing. We’re talking about distress as a design feature. And with a half-dozen options available, you won’t find a more unique, vintage and grunge-like font than Yellow Design Studio’s top-selling font, Veneer.

Veneer Font Family Screenshots:

Veneer Font Family Highlights:

• Hand Crafted
  Machines can be evil. Arnold Schwazenegger and the future taught us that in Terminator. That’s why Veneer is something special, because it was hand-crafted with a real vintage and detailed appearance.
• 8 Vintage Fonts
  With this Mighty Deal, you’ll get 8 unique fonts in the Veneer Font Family. From lightly distressed to heavily distressed, you’ll soon own: Veneer, Veneer Italic, Veneer Two, Veneer Two Italic, Veneer Three, Veneer Three Italic, Veneer Extras, and Veneer Extras Italic.
• 38 Icons
  Done in the same vintage style as the Veneer fonts, you’ll get 2 distressed styles of icons. Add some artistic fun to your already killer design with graphical icons that include items from weather, weapons, designs and more.
• Mix and Match
  Each letter has 6 distress options to choose from, with three options for all other characters. With specific distress actions on a letter basis, you can mix all sorts of Veneer fonts together in one project to create a realistic letterpress type.
• Go Big
  Thanks to the incredible detail in these Veneer fonts, they won’t just work at normal size, these high resolution letterpress fonts work great at very large sizes too. So use them on a variety of projects including posters, T-shirts, signs and more.
• Desktop Fonts Speak Your Language
  Compatible with PCs and Macs, the Desktop fonts come in .OTF format and support a ton of languages. Besides English, languages supported include: Afrikaans, Albanian, Basque, Bemba, Bosnian, Cornish, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Faroese, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, Ganda, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Kinyarwanda, Luo, Malagasy, Malay, Manx, Morisyen, North Ndebele, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, Nyankole, Oromo, Polish, Portuguese, Romansh, Sango, Shona, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Swiss German, and Zulu!
• Web Fonts are Multilingual Too
  Delivered in .eot, .svg, .ttf and .woff formats, Webfonts do not include any opentype features. They are, however, subsetted for a reduced file size and they support the standard Western languages. Languages include: Afrikaans, Albanian, Basque, Bemba, Cornish, Danish, Dutch, English, Faroese, Filipino, French, Galician, Ganda, German, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Kinyarwanda, Luo, Malagasy, Malay, Manx, Morisyen, North Ndebele, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, Nyankole, Oromo, Portuguese, Romansh, Sango, Shona, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Swiss German, and Zulu.

Pricing:

It’s not just the style of Veneer that’s vintage! With this Mighty Deal, you’ll be getting this collection of 8 Veneer Fonts at a price from yesteryear!

Normally, the Veneer Font Family sells for $39 (Desktop or Web Font versions), but for a limited time only, you can get the entire collection as either Desktop of Web fonts for just $9! OR get both the Desktop and Web Font versions together for just $16!

Click the “buy” button to choose your preference and add some authentic, vintage style to your projects.

How many of you know the proper way to approach a diet? Many people don’t, which is why they fail to work. There’s a specific mentality you need to have in order to get through a diet successfully, and it has to do with what you believe about the permanence of your current situation. When starting a design project, whether for yourself or for a client, there will inevitably come a time when it will stop being as fun, and you’ll have to rely on a form of willpower to see you through to the end of it.

Where does that willpower come from? Well, if you’re anything like me, it comes from looking ahead – you stop and consider what will be waiting for you at the horizon. Whether it’s fame, riches, or enough beer money to last you through the end of the week, something drove you to begin the project in the first place, and that same something is going to be your motivation when things get boring or unpleasant. After all, that unpleasantness is only temporary, and the reward you get afterward is much more significant than the momentary pain.

It’s the same way with dieting. Many people get stuck in the middle of a horrible diet, start hating their lives, their spouses, their dogs, and their squeaky tennis shoes, decide that it’s too much to handle, and quit.

They forget that it’s all temporary.

Today, I’m going to talk about the diet-like phenomenon of working for low pay.

Better Than Cash

Many people, myself included, continually advise other designers to stay far away from shady clients who want you to do thousands of dollars of work for mere hundreds (or even mere tens). Let’s be clear, here: I’m in no way changing my position on that topic. Creative professionals in general are some of the most ripped-off service providers in the world, in large part because of the misinformed mentality that our clients have about what our work is worth. I firmly believe that all designers should charge exactly what they’re worth and nothing less, not to cheat the client, but to legitimize the industry.

However, there’s an upside to working for discounted rates (and yes, sometimes even for no rates at all) which can deliver a much higher value to a freelance designer than a mere flat paycheck. Why? Well, when you work for a fee, you get paid that fee, and that’s it. There are usually no other forms of compensation available, which, to many established freelancers is no problem. We’re not running charities here, after all. But if you’re nearer to the beginning of your career, there are other things you can negotiate from your low-paying client that are many times better than money.

What’s better than money? Referrals, for one. I know designers love to mock clients who promise them “exposure” or other such nonsense – we all know that it’s BS and carries no real value for us. No one’s going to look at a beautifully designed business card, brochure, website, or presentation and think “by golly, I’ve just got to find out who that designer is!” (Maybe we think that, as geeky designers, but trust me, normal people couldn’t care less.).

So “exposure” is worthless as a bargaining tool. Referrals, on the other hand, are worth their weight in gold to a freelancer at any stage of their career. When a paying client introduces you and your work to another potential paying client – a real person with real money and a real network – it can carry your career to heights you never could have imagined had you just gotten a flat check.

You certainly can and should be negotiating for as many genuine referrals as possible when you work with low-paying clients. They are a great way to boost your client base, and also to narrow down your career focus, since most referrals will be for potential clients in the same industry as your current client. As I’ve written about before, this is an optimal way for designers to work and collect valuable knowledge of the specific industries and markets they serve.

Taking It Off the Table

When you work for a lower rate, you’re essentially providing a service at a discount. Just like an internet service provider or phone company might offer customers a free trial period to entice them to buy, you as a freelancer can harness the power of free or cheap to up-sell your services to higher paying clients. However, there’s a trick to doing this correctly so that you don’t end up getting screwed. It has to do with removing certain deliverables and negotiating non-monetary compensation from your clients so that they always take you seriously as a professional and never attempt to get more than what they’re paying for.

Some people think that working for free or for very cheap is always the same as working on spec. This is most certainly not the case, and here’s why: when you work on spec, you’re providing the same level of service that you ordinarily would charge for. This is bad. Really, really bad.

Designers who do this are not only devaluing their work, they’re also stunting the growth of their entire careers. When a client realizes that they can get thousands of dollars worth of work from you for mere hundreds, there’s a mentality that develops in their head about you, and about designers in general. Basically, they start to believe that your work just isn’t worth thousands of dollars, and you will be forever branded as a cheap, low-end designer.

This is not what you want. When you work for a low rate, make sure your clients know that they’re getting the “free trial” – a stripped-down version of your services that carries heavy restrictions and which requires them to provide you with value beyond just money. If you quote a client a certain price, and the client is unable to pay it, the next price you quote should reflect a lesser amount of work. You client should get what they pay for, in other words. And for free work, it’s important to make up the difference very heavily in referrals and other networking opportunities. Never work for free for a client who is not well-connected or unable to provide you with a list of referrals – there’s absolutely no value in it for you and you’ll end up in the low-end pile indefinitely.

The key, like being on a diet or pushing yourself to finish a long, tedious project, is to think of free or low-paying work as a temporary arrangement, rather than an indefinite circumstance. If you give it all away for free or for very cheap, or you continue working for low rates for longer than is necessary to build your client network, your clients will never consider you for higher level work. Why would they? If you’re lodged in the client’s mind as a $200 designer, why on earth would they automatically think of you when they have a $5,000 or $10,000 project? It’s just not going to happen.

On the other hand, if you’ve been providing your client with an appropriate amount of work for that $200, and they know you’ve been holding back on certain deliverables, they’ll be much more likely to consider you for higher paying work. Why? Because they know they’re not currently getting the best of what you have to offer, and the value you’ve been providing them so far (assuming you’re doing an excellent job) will give them the confidence to trust you with high-level work.

What Do You Think?

How do you approach jobs that pay less than your standard rate? Is there a technique that you’ve found helpful to keep yourself out of the low-end pile?

You might also like…

You could also browse our Freelance category, or view all of the articles from Addison Duvall.

It is a popular trend at the moment to use almost full-page high resolution super-large images on your portfolio. Which does work effectively as it focusses the user on your best work and clearly highlights how good you are as a designer. So, it looks great and it works great. But, those images are absolutely killing your homepage’s loading speed.

Normally, common practice would be to place all non-essential larger images at the bottom of your page’s HTML so that they will load last, after the rest of the HTML content.
However, this isn’t always possible, because:

1. Sometimes you need to put your portfolio in the middle of your page, relative to other inline elements.
2. You may have some crazy-cool jQuery effects that only launch when your page is fully loaded – which means users will be left waiting to see them until your overly large images load.

Why Does It Matter?

1. Google takes loading time into effect when it is calculating your search ranking.
2. Mobile devices can be sensitive to page-loading times as they often have much slower connections.

The Fix

You can trick your browser into loading your big images after the entire page is loaded. It does sound a bit crazy, but it’s not really…

How it works

We’re going to remove the images from the HTML, then put them back in using jQuery. Simple as that.

This will allow the images to load after all of your other content has finished – PLUS, there’s an important added benefit: search-engines measure your page-load speed by what’s in your HTML, not what jQuery loads after the fact. That means that when Google measures your site’s loading speed, the page speed result will look significantly better.

This is how to do it:

Firstly:

Remove all of the big images from your HTML (my images just happened to be in an unordered list):

Secondly:

Add a jQuery snippet that will add them back into the HTML, after everything else on the page has loaded:

[js]
$(window).load(function(){ // This runs when the window has loaded
var img = $(“ “).attr(‘src’, ‘YourImagePath/img.jpg’).load(function() {
$(“#a1″).append(img);
// When the image has loaded, stick it in a div
});

var img2 = $(“ “).attr(‘src’, ‘YourImagePath/img2.jpg’).load(function() {
$(“#a2″).append(img2);
});
});[/js]

Lastly:

Check your site out and measure the page loading time.

BOOM! It’s fast!

Your big images should load last, and your content should load FAST (awful rhyme, I’m sorry). I cut the loading time of my site’s content in half just by using this method.

Theoretically, you could remove all of the images from your page and put them back using jQuery, which could make your page appear to be even faster.

Just to prove that this technique does work, here’s the live demo:

Slower Page (loads in about 1.5s)Faster Page (loads in about 0.3s)

Happy coding!

If you are a fan of the Game of Thrones books or television series (who isn’t?) then we have an awesome gallery for you today.Clearly a huge fan, LiquidSoulDesign has dedicated himself to illustrating a…

Here at Speckyboy we do love our free resources. But, there is one resource we love above everything else, and that is free icon sets. And today we have another fantastic selection for you today.

As you would expect all of the sets below have been professionally designed and are perfect for any project. You will find web icon sets, glyphs, pictograms, mini-icons, social service icons, a few new iOS 7 icons sets and plenty more in-between.

Here they are:

Simplicity Vector Icon Set (50 Icons, PNG & PSD)

Vectory

One day at our modest design agency, we raised our rates.

Like, astronomically. I’m talking about a 500% increase, out of the clear blue.

And it was scary as hell. But guess what? It worked.

This is our story.

Our initial business plan for Madtown was based on a simple numbers game, as it is for most young design agencies.

We figured that if we charged $2k/website and designed five or six of them a month, we’d be running one hell of a successful design agency. Plus, we could charge each client $25/month for hosting, giving us ongoing residual income. We even had a plan for growth, which involved hiring a business developer and paying him 25% commissions.

In our first few years, we got a lot of business, but not as much as we’d anticipated. We strategized, we planned Adwords budgets, we came up with all kinds of nifty little ways to boost our income. But we were never truly profitable.

It wasn’t an SEO problem, if that’s what you’re thinking. We ranked first for all of our keywords for several years. It didn’t matter-we were still unable to achieve the workload volume our entire business plan hinged on.

Before the start of 2012, our team sat down to talk about what it would take to turn Madtown into a profitable design agency. And that’s when we took the biggest risk in our business’s young life. We raised our rates. A lot.

The Idea

Around the time of our life-altering strategy session, I came across a blog post by Blair Enns, from his website Win Without Pitching. If you’re a young designer or a small design agency, Enns’ manifesto
is a must read. But this particular post specifically discussed premium pricing and how it improves commitment with clients.

When you’re doing websites at $2k a pop, you don’t get much commitment from your clients. They’re just not financially invested enough to be emotionally invested. They’re flaky, they beat you up over price, and they make it clear that you’re low on their priority list.

They also don’t see you as a big-time designer, so they’re more likely to walk all over you. These are the clients who request 1,000 changes to their sites, including changes that make no business sense or that completely reverse a previously requested change. You know them: the clients who suck.

After reading Enns’ manifesto and thoughts on premium pricing, I brought his ideas to our team, and we made the change the very next day. From that moment forward, we were charging $10k minimum on all of our projects.

I know this is a very scary proposition for most. Like I said, we were scared as hell. I mean, we had families, bills, and business expenses to take care of, just like everyone else.

But we did it anyway. And it worked.

How We Pulled It Off

We knew we weren’t going to be able to raise our rates that significantly without changing a thing about our services. To get the $10k clients we wanted, we had to up our value.

We realized that, in today’s business environment, designers aren’t just being hired to design-they’re being hired to bring new perspective to business problems. Businesses don’t just need new websites-they need new strategy, delivered through their websites.

And there was our value.

Instead of just making cool-looking websites, we started tackling business problems. We created an entire diagnostic progress, through which we’d learn as much as we could about a business and then present a plan outlining how that business could overcome its problems and move forward. We started charging $5k as a flat fee for this service.

In addition to giving us a foothold into a more premium market, this new service allowed us to take the time to get to know and understand our clients’ businesses. It also got our clients more invested in the process, which resulted in smoother, more successful projects.

Here are some other things we did:

• Defined and implemented a design process, start to finish, that we followed with every client.
• Focused on working with only a small number of clients each year.
• Stopped writing proposals. We haven’t created a proposal in almost two years now, and the amount of time and energy we’ve saved is astronomical.
• Started building our expertise in thought leadership and contributing regularly to the market conversation online.
• Eliminated all the clients who did not fit our new pricing model. (If they didn’t value our expertise, they had to go.)
• Identified any deficiencies in our expertise and resolved them immediately.
• Stopped letting clients dictate our process or design choices.

The Transformation

I know. At this point you’re thinking, “That actually worked?”

And the answer is yes. Within the first two weeks, we secured a project worth not just $10k, but $20k-our largest ever. We were also saving tons of time and money by not writing proposals or pitches, chasing after businesses we never had a chance of getting under our previous business model. (One of our huge lessons learned was that if someone really wanted to work with us, they wouldn’t bother with the proposal writing process. And there was no need to waste our time on people who didn’t really want to work with us.)

By the end of 2012, Madtown’s revenues were up over 100%, and we’re going strong into 2013.

More Money, More Pressure, Better Results

It’s basic human nature: someone who’s paid more has more incentive to perform at a higher level.

The designers who are willing to slash their prices to win clients are only in it for the money. Whether their clients grow as successful businesses isn’t really on their radar.

But when we charge a premium, it’s not about the money anymore. It’s about creating something great for our clients-something that will transform their businesses.

Now that I’m paid a rate I’m happy with, I feel more pressure to perform exceptionally well for my clients and make sure they are getting real results.

Save Yourself: Raise Your Rates

Looking back, I don’t understand how any designer can get away with charging $1-2k for a website.

If a typical project takes 100-200 hours, that’s only $10-$20 an hour. When you’re working for yourself, you can’t just charge the hourly rate you might get if you worked for someone else. You have to charge enough to take care of expenses, education, and healthcare, grow the business, and make a profit.

Profits are the true validation that your business is successful. If you’re only making enough to break even each month, you’re just one bad client away from going broke.

So please: take a leap of faith and raise your rates.

Of course, you can only raise your rates successfully if you are willing to turn down business. And yes, it’s definitely scary, but the rewards are plentiful.

These days, I turn down 90% of our potential business. Even if people can meet our minimum financial requirement, I’ll turn them away if they seem difficult to work with. In web design, as in so many other businesses, the best results come from an exchange of services between two parties that are well matched. As much as I want to be the right fit for my clients, I also want them to be the right fit for me.

Give your design company the best shot at success by charging what it takes to do it right. Ditch the disrespectful, cheapskate clients who pay you unsustainable rates, and you’ll discover a whole new sense of satisfaction in your work. You’ll also discover that, suddenly, you’re doing the best work of your career.

It is that time of the week again, a chance for you to sit back and enjoy some of our favorite web and mobile designs from this past week. And of course, don’t forget to click the ‘Change Viewport’ button to explore each site in detail.

Squarespace

Networking is an awkward word. It connotes connecting with people in an impersonal way in order to get something out of the connection. On the surface,that’s ok, but there’s more to networking than finding people who will help to advance your career.

That’s why I’m a bigger fan of “relationship building” than “networking.” Yes, it’s a matter of semantics, but it’s also an important distinction. Relationship building means you’re meeting people who can potentially be helpful for your career but who are also interesting in their own right.

You’re willing to get to know them and help out when you can, even if you don’t ever get anything out of the relationship. You probably will, but that’s not the point. The point is meeting new people, and then seeing if there’s any way to help one another out in the future.

So I prefer talking about relationship building more than networking, but no matter what you call it, networking or relationship building is important for every freelancer (which you can learn more about in these posts: 8 Networking Skills Every Freelancer Needs to Have and Networking for Designers 101: How to Network Properly).

Why?

Because who you know determines largely who you’ll work for. When people you know need design work done, they’re inclined to work with people they already know, and when their friends need to get design work done, they’re likely to recommend the people that they know.

Image Source: My Smart Technology via Shutterstock

So freelancers benefit from getting to know more people. The more people they know, the more work they’re likely to get, and the more times they’re likely to get referred. It’s as simple as that.

But there’s more to building relationships than just handing out business cards. That’s the kind of networking that’s annoying. Yes, more people will know you exist, which is a good thing, but a relationship isn’t being built, and it’s very likely the card will get dropped into the nearest trash can.

Instead of busines-card spamming, freelancers should focus on building relationships. They should focus on meeting people who potentially can hire them for work and who can refer them to others to generate more work. They should focus on getting to know a smaller group of people who will become an active part of their client and referral network.

Yet there’s something else to consider: how to connect with people online. With so many freelancers working remotely, it’s not easy to meet new people andmake new connections. You may be working from home for most of the week with few opportunities to meet new people. That’s why today’s freelancers need to perfect the art of building relationships online.

Surprisingly, it can be done.

If you’ve found yourself in the boat of needing to building relationships online, here are seven things to keep in mind.

Tip #1: Say hi

The first step is to introduce yourself. If you don’t say hi, people won’t know that you exist. And in the same way you say “hi” to introduce yourself in a coffee shop or at a conference, you can say “hi” to people online by sending e-mails or tweets. Here’s what it can look like:

First, you start reading a famous entrepreneurs blog. He seems really busy, but he would be a great person to get to know. After you get over the thought that he wouldn’t want to hear from you, you reach out and send him an e-mail.

The first one is a simple introduction to let him know that you admire his work. Now he knows that you exist and that you like the stuff he does. He also may check out your website that’s attached to your signature or view your Twitter profile to find out more about what you do.

As long as you aren’t annoying and don’t ask for anything in the first e-mail, most people won’t mind that you’re saying hi and getting in touch. In fact, they may be flattered, which leads us to the next point…

Tip #2: Send compliments

The next thing you want to do is stay in touch by complimenting them on the things they do. If you really like an update they make to their website, let them know. If you think a new project they’re working on is amazing, again, let them know.

You never want to be obseqious by being overly complimentary, but you do want to reach out and compliment them on good work and things you’re impressed with. The point is to find a way to stay in touch without being annoying. If you get in touch to ask for something, that’s annoying. If you get in touch to provide a compliment, that will be appreciated.

The more you contact them, the more they’ll be reminded that you exist, and the wider the door will be opened for the time you do actually ask for help,advice, or work.

Tip #3: Get “coffee”

The next thing you can do is ask to go out for the digital equivalent of coffee. In the real world, you can actually go out and get coffee; in the digital world, it’s more likely that you’ll hang out on Skype or conduct a call via Twitter.

Unless the person is really busy, there’s a good chance they’ll have time to talk, especially if they’re a peer. A lot of people try only networking with famous people, but they obviously won’t have a lot of free time. If you reach out to talented peers who aren’t famous, there’s a better chance they’ll have time for a call and will be interested in “hanging out.”

But don’t let this deter you from ever calling up someone famous or really busy (and by famous I mean a somewhat well known online entrepreneur and not Tom Cruise). I’ve had success getting through to CEOs and entrepreneurs who are really busy but happy to help young entrepreneurs and business owners out. However, if you do decide to ask to get coffee with someone in this category, it’s best to have a specific question in mind. Maybe you want to learn more about their business or you want advice on how to grow yours. Either way, famous people are likely to commit if you have something specific you’re askingabout.

Tip #4: Offer help

The obvious thing to say at this point is that you need to follow up. But again, that’s obvious. You definitely need to follow up and say how much you appreciated the call, but you also need to continue to stay in touch. One way to do this is by offering help.

Maybe you notice something’s not working on their site so you let them know. Maybe you realize they’ve made a typo on their homepage so you reach out so it can get fixed. Or maybe you read an article that’s perfect for them and will help their business. All of these are great ways to stay in touch and to let them know you still appreciate what they do and that you want to help them succeed.

The fine line here is that you need to make sure what you’re doing isn’t annoying. Correcting things too frequently or too strongly will be obnoxious. You don’t want to over use this as a way to stay in touch, but if something big or obvious comes up, make sure to reach out and let them know you’ve got their back and you’re happy to help out.

Tip #5: Send referrals

Another great way to stay in touch is to send referrals. Not only are you hoping the person you’ve met will be able to send business your way, but you also want to be a contributor to the relationship and send business their way as well. You can e-mail them directly about business opportunities, or you can refer people and ask them to mention that you put the in touch.

Sharing content is another way to send referrals. Whenever you share something, you’ll spread content that was painstakingly created and send more visitors to your friend’s site. Eventually, the person you’re building a relationship with won’t necessarily owe you, but they’ll appreciate your support and be more likely to help out in the future.

Image Source: Abstract City via Shutterstock

Conclusion

No matter what you eventually decide to do, the most important thing to remember is that the point of networking is to meet people, to get to know them, and to build arelationship. Once you like them and they like you, there’s a better chance you’ll find ways to help each other in a mutually beneficial way.

It’s also important to realize that people can only know and help so many people at a time. The number of relationships any one person can manage is limited. Thus, if you reach out to really busy people, they may not actually have time to get to know you and send business your way, but if you reach out to someone who’s not as busy, they’re more likely to be flattered and to be interested in learning more about you.

For most freelancers, it’s more valuable to build a smaller network of people that are really interested in what you do and are invested in your success than chasing after thousands upon thousands of Twitter followers. You’d be surprised what developing real relationships with 15 to 25 people can do for your business.

If you have any questions about online relationship building, feel free to leave them below. I hope this post has been helpful and look forward to discussing it in the comments.

Isn’t it funny how a simple font choice can completely change how a reader interprets what they’re reading? No matter what the actual context, if a font is harsh and angular, it can evoke an aggressive tone. Soft and rounded and it exudes gentleness. So if you’re looking for a nice friendly font, with a unique yet familiar feel, take a look at the Korpo Serif Family.

Korpo Serif Family Screenshots

Korpo Serif Family Highlights:

• Friendly Font
  Designed by Mateusz Machalski, Korpo Serif is a real friendly font based off of the Serif font style, giving off an Egyptian or slab style in feel.
• Choice of 10 Variants
  Choice from 10 different font styles: Korpo, Korpo Italic, Korpo Alt, Korpo Alt Italic, Korpo Bold, Korpo Bold Italic, Korpo Alt Bold, Korpo Alt Bold Italic, Korpo CAP, and Korpo CAP Italic. You have the option to purchase each style individually or to get the whole family.
• Multiple Glyphs
  Each of the 10 variants comes with two different “a” and “g” glyphs per style. Korpo also contains Small CAPS in two of its styles for some interesting results.
• Perfect for Headlines
  With a low contrast and high x height, Korpo Serif is a perfect font choice to use with longer text pieces as well as headlines.

Pricing:

The full Korpo Serif Family font family, which includes all 10 styles, normally sells for $150 (Desktop or Web Font versions), but for a limited time only, you can get either the Desktop or Web font version of the entire Korpo Serif Family for just $27! OR get both the Desktop and Web versions together for just $37! That’s almost 90% off the regular price!

Or, if you’d prefer to purchase just one style, you have the option to get each style individually for just $7, for both the Desktop + Web font versions together, instead of the regular price of $50 – a savings of 86% off the regular price!

Click the “buy” button to choose your preference.

Gone are the days when publishing houses were the gate keepers of the book industry. We are in the midst of a revolution. The book industry is being turned upside down. If you have a message to convey to the world, the time has never been better to do so. The Internet has provided everybody with a stage and a mic. How large this stage may stretch or how big the speakers will become is entirely up to you.

Image Source: E-book Reader via Shutterstock.

This article is intended towards those who are in some sort of online business like bloggers, website owners, freelance writers, etc. But even if you are a newbie to the online world and are contemplating writing an e-book, you will find some useful tips in here as well.

1. Work Once, Earn Forever

There are few businesses that allow you to earn forever by working only once. Writing a book is one of them.

Once you have written an e-book and uploaded it to the necessary online stores like Amazon or iTunes, you don’t have to do any more writing. Whenever somebody buys your e-book the money will automatically be credited into your account. And this will continue happening forever and ever. (Okay not actually forever; only until the author’s copyright expires but that is usually more than the author’s life. In fact even after the author dies, there are provisions that the author’s family may receive the royalties.)

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I must mention that although you won’t have to do any more writing after your book is completed, but you may have to do marketing if you want to sell more copies. So it’s not like, write a book, upload on Amazon, and sit back while the cash flows in. You should do some book promotion.

But still it cannot be denied that books grant you an evergreen income. William Shakespeare is not alive to do any marketing yet his books sell like hot cakes.

2. No Costs Involved

Writing an e-book is free. You just have to write it in a text editor like Word, format it for the website you are intending to sell it on, and then upload it. Online stores charge nothing for accepting and adding your e-book to their library. (If any site does, don’t use it. Most probably it’s a scam.)

If you have written your manuscript with a pen on paper and you want to hire someone to convert it into a digital format, or if you don’t know how to format it for the online store, you may need to hire an editor for that.

But if you are a savvy, publishing an e-book is free of cost.

3. You Can Add the Term “Author” to your Resume

It is not that only the traditionally published people that have the right to call themselves authors. Oxford Advanced Learner’s defines an author as “a person who writes books or the person who wrote a particular book.”

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So if you have written an e-book you can rightfully call yourself as an author, a word which will make a stronger resume and cast a good impression in your job interview.

4. You Will Become an Authority

If you want your book to sell a huge amount of copies and if you want to be read, you must do enough research about the topic on which you are writing. This research can take many forms – reading books, reading news reports, reading blog posts, searching encyclopedias, interviewing academics, watching documentaries, etc. In all this process you will gain a lot of knowledge and wisdom and this will happen even if you already know the topic. It’s a different thing to know a topic, it’s different to actually sit down and write a long, serious, coherent piece on it.

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Also, you will begin to command more respect in society because of being an author and if your book is good and is getting positive reviews you will be treated as an authority in your niche.

5. You Can Discuss the Topic Completely

Blog posts are good to read for fixing minor problems like how to install WordPress on a webhost or how to exclude your own visits from Google Analytics. But they do not have the space to discuss bigger issues like provide you with a complete guide on how to blog. E-books are the way to go for such complete analysis.

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Blog posts provide you with only pieces of the complete puzzle. An e-book, on the other hand, provides a complete solution.

This is what Darren Rowse was referring to when he said:

“The Digital Photography School blog is a ‘how to’ type blog that gives free tips on how to use cameras — but many of the topics our readers want to learn about are a lot bigger than we could fully cover in a single post.
For example, a topic like ‘Portrait Photography’ is fairly large — a single post might cover one aspect of it, but to cover the topic comprehensively, an eBook of 20,000+ words is going to serve readers a lot better.”

6. E-books are More Secure and Won’t Die Off Like Blog Posts

Trina Holden makes a very good point about why you should write e-books:

“Blog posts have a very short life span. No matter how much work you put into that post, it’s going to eventually get bumped into your archives. You can try to resurrect it, but it’s still just a blog post that people are going to have to be willing to follow a link trail to read.
On the other hand, a book is not so easily lost. It can live right in your sidebar with a cute graphic, be shared regularly with other bloggers via reviews or giveaways, and be easily linked to in current posts.”

Agreed that there have been cases when a blogger suddenly starts getting large traffic to one of their older blog posts but such things only happen occasionally. What usually happens is that the activity on a post dies off exponentially after its publication. Perhaps the main reason is that in a blog, articles are arranged chronologically with the latest one going on top of the page and the older ones being pushed down.

But that doesn’t happen with e-books for the reasons mentioned in Trina’s quote.

Also e-books are more secure than blog posts.

You put in a lot of time and effort in writing your blog posts but what if your servers couldn’t handle the load of the traffic and your site goes down? What if a hacker inflicts your site with a virus?

These may seem like wild ramblings but these incidents have really taken place and affected many bloggers.

But e-books remain secure from these mishaps. If your site goes down your e-book will continue to sell in online stores and readers who like it can pass it onto their friends through e-mail attachments, etc.

7. E-books Can Be Taken Anywhere

Again e-books have an edge over blog posts in that, once downloaded, they don’t require an Internet connection to read them. Therefore you can carry them in your tablet to any place you like.

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In fact if you are on a holiday, lying on a beach and sun bathing, what will you prefer to read? A novel in your favorite genre or a blog post on how to install Google Analytics?

8. You May Find a Publisher

Yes publishers are no longer the gate keepers, yes you don’t need them to publish your book but for many writers getting a book deal with a reputed publisher is the holy grail of their career. Just imagine the feeling of walking into the best book store of your town and seeing your books stacked on their wooden shelves.

But getting a book deal with a good publishing house is very difficult nowadays. If you want to get published by a big publisher and have tried hard for that but everyone has rejected you then the wise thing to do is instead of running around finding publishers, divert your energies towards self publishing it as an e-book. If your book really has the potential to sell, and if you are even decent at marketing then your e-book will sell. As Seth Godin said, “Ideas worth spreading, spread.”

Once your e-book starts selling a decent number of copies it will become very easy for you to land a book deal as publishers are always looking out for books that sell. In fact there have been cases when the publishers themselves have contacted successful e-book authors instead of the other way round.

Amanda Hocking is a classic example of an author who struck a book deal with Macmillan, after selling more than one million (yes!) self published copies on Amazon.

I hope at least some of these tips have inspired you to write an e-book. Go and create something wonderful and when published, give us a heads up about it 🙂