Print and Distribute Your Book with Blurb and Reedsy

Print and Distribute Your Book with Blurb and Reedsy Print and Distribute Your Book with Blurb and Reedsy At Reedsy HQ this week, we’re taking a big step towards our goal of making it easier for authors to get their books into the hands of readers. With the announcement of our partnership with Blurb, you now have the option to seamlessly print and distribute the books you produce with the Reedsy Book Editor.As the world’s first platform for creating, printing and publishing independent books, Blurb has been a publishing trailblazer since 2006, helping self-publishing authors produce over 2 million books. With the addition of Reedsy, it’s now simpler and more cost-effective than ever to create bookstore-quality books with Blurb. If your project relies heavily on photos or illustrations, or if your printed book needs to look exactly as you intend, then Blurb is something you really need to check out.There are four basic steps to getting your Reedsy project printed and distributed by Blurb. It’s a simple, intuitive process, but it can’t hurt to be thorough . So, here we go!1. Prepare your print-ready PDFAs with all modern printing processes, your first step will always involve preparing a PDF of your book. But not just any PDF: you one that’s formatted expressly for printing. Among other things, a print-ready PDF will ensure that your colors are reproduced exactly as you intend them to be seen. If your illustrated story has a character called â€Å"The Purple Princess,† you don’t want her dress to be blue in the final printed edition.To get your book ready to print, you can either use the Reedsy Book Editor (our free formatting tool) or work with one of our professional book layout designers to prepare your Blurb-ready PDF. For more complicated visual books, we would certainly advise the latter option: just tell your designer you’re printing with Blurb and they will format your book to fit their standards.

How to break technology addiction and improve concentration - Emphasis

How to break technology addiction and improve concentration How to break technology addiction and improve concentration New research from Kent Universitys psychology department confirms what many of us already know from experience. Far from helping us become more efficient, the constant interruption of technology is weakening our ability to concentrate and slowing us down at work. With inboxes pinging and smartphones winking at us, were increasingly giving in to tempting but non-essential diversions and researchers say we could be wasting nearly one-fifth of our time in the process. No wonder so many of us are no strangers to working late. Lead us not into temptation The study came about after lead researcher Ulrich Weger noticed that his own progress at work was continually thwarted by email notifications luring him away from the task at hand. The experiment charged about 100 volunteers with reading text on a computer. During the task, they were interrupted by a one-minute verbal message, such as a phone call, and were asked to continue reading the text when it reappeared onscreen. The researchers used eye-trackers to follow the volunteers visual journey in returning to the task. Since they went back to the text at an earlier point than where they left off, each interruption caused an average 17 per cent increase in the total time to finish reading the whole passage. The study also found that it took volunteers significantly longer to read the text when it was accompanied by background speech or music. A return to concentration So, what of the resulting ideas for combating the problem? Weger suggests a daily concentration exercise, where you focus on a simple object for a few minutes. As soon as you become aware that your thoughts have drifted onto something else, gently bring them back to your chosen object. Its worth it, according to Weger: After practice, you get more competent at shielding yourself against the countless tempting stimuli in our world. Other solutions include: marking the point on the page where you temporarily stop reading (this accounted for 10 per cent of the time wasted in the study), turning off phones and email notifications, and making sure you dont sit looking out on, for example, a distractingly busy street. Burying phones in the garden and turning desks to the wall will undoubtedly appeal to some, but it probably wont work in the long run. We have a much simpler way to get the job done try some of our practical tips for beating writers block and the procrastination trap in our articles Forgiveness: the answer to writers block and Tips for breaking through the barrier. Reference: Reading resumption after interruptions: using eye movements to study the costs of interruptions during reading by Ulrich Weger.