Cook Partners

PDF Grab Bag

What can you find online? Well, using search sites such as PDF Genie or PDF Search Engine, you can find free documents like these:

• Are We There Yet? A Communication Evaluation Guide (40 pages)
• Book Selling Demand Today (19 pages)
• Global Digital Book Sales and Distribution Channel Strategies (14 pages)
• Guide to Proposal Planning and Writing (11 pages)
• Marketing and Advertising Using Google (156 pages)
• Online Communities and Their Impact on Business (37 pages)
• Toolkit for Responsible Paper Use (8 pages)
• Using Book Awards to Boost Your Book Sales (5 pages)
• Value of Online Books to University Libraries (11 pages)

You can also look for information on the publishing industry in specific markets and unearth items like the following:

• Book Publishing in Nigeria (4 pages)
• Book Publishing Market in Brazil (75 pages)
• Conditions of Private Publishing in China (3 pages)
• Uneven Distribution of Cultural Capital: Book Reading in Urban China (45 pages)
• Textbook Publishing in Indonesia (3 pages)

The length, quality, and relevance vary, as they range from white papers by private companies and associations to dissertations and government reports. Still, you might find something useful!

Use Less Ink

A Dutch company has developed a font designed to reduce the amount of ink used on a page of text. The font, available for free downloading, "is based on the Vera Sans, an Open Source letter, and is available for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux." Learn more here.

PubU Content Available Online

The Evangelical Christian Publishers Association's annual training conference for publishers, Publishing University, took place earlier this month. If you'd like to get the handouts or see some of the PowerPoints or even some video of the sessions—from workshops on such topics as leadership, international markets, effective workflow, innovation, digital content, creativity, and more—they are available here. 

Creating a Virtual Office

Momentum magazine tells "How to Create a Virtual Office," noting that "for little or no cost you can have some very powerful office management tools," including free word processing, spreadsheets, calendars, email, and more. At OpenOffice.org, you can obtain a software suite for similar functions as well, in 18 different languages including Afrikaans, Arabic, English, French, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and Russian. Also, check out the free graphics and photo programs listed here.   

Free Resources Grab Bag

Before & After magazine offers free downloadable PDFs. Available now are "Design a Logo of Letters," "How to Cool a Hot Photo," and "What's the Right Typeface for Text?"

A PC World article, "101 Fantastic Freebies," lists links to services and downloads in such categories as productivity, file sharing and storage, security, communication, and more.

To see how your book cover designs compare with those of other publishers, you can check the cover images of books displayed at an online or local bookstore. To see the reaction of prospective readers, you can poll your friends, arrange a focus group... or submit your cover to Rate My Book Cover, a web site that encourages visitors to give book covers scores from one to ten. Unfortunately, the site does not allow for comments.

Free Writers Training

Massachussets Institute of Technology. Purdue University. University of Utah. Open University. What do these universities have in common? They are among ten educational institutions offering free online courses for writers, on topics ranging from writing short stories to poetry, essays, research, and more.