Happy Monday, everyone! I had a great weekend and I hope you did too. The 90+ weather kept us mostly indoors, though. I heard that 40 states will have temps over 90 this week. Ouch! Anyway, on to publishing info.

• I have a couple of book design/layout links. First, from The Book Designer, a tutorial on layout for PDF files. PDF files are used for many publishing purposes these days, so it could be vital for some projects to know how to work with them.

• Do you dream of seeing your work in actual print format? Or maybe you’d like to grab some of the 60-70% of sales that still go to books-on-paper. By using print-on-demand publishers, you can produce a print book yourself but it helps to know how to design for POD publishing. It is a different skill set than designing for ebook publication. So Robin Sullivan at Write To Publish supplies video tutorials to teach you POD design techniques. Good stuff that I’ll be using myself.

• And I’m going back to Robin again for a guest post she wrote for Michael Hyatt’s blog. This one is for all the writers out there who love to write, but hate having to market themselves. Robin (who has been on fire lately as you can tell) gives you Five Steps to Building a Platform when you hate selling yourself. I know there are a lot of writers who can relate to this problem, so make sure you check out what Robin suggests for the shy ones among us.

• We’re all trying to figure out best practices for using blogs and social media to connect with readers and potential friends. Phil Mershon, writing for the Social Media Examiner, pulls together information from two new studies to examine what the data says about blog posts, Facebook, and Twitter, and how best to use them to generate traffic and sales. This is easy-to-read post has graphs and highlighted takeaway points that make clear how to proceed with a social media strategy.

• And in today’s news, Amazon announces that they will allow students to rent textbooks for any period of time from 30 to 360 days. In some cases this could save significant money. But Casey Johnston at Ars Technica argues that in some cases buying used can still be cheaper. So do your homework before you leap.

I wish we’d had e-versions of textbooks when I was in school. I bet nobody misses lugging around those big, heavy backpacks full of books.

That’s it for today, folks. I’m working on the cover design for the chicken book, so maybe I’ll have a design post up later this week. Have fun and stay out of the heat!