Typeflow

05/02/2025

Dear everyone who backed us at Kickstarter:

We learned a ton during just the first week of this campaign, and decided that since Kickstarter won't let you go back and edit once it launches, we would pull the plug on this one, start a new one, and ask everyone to hop over there.

So that is what we will be doing, with more marketing to bike shops and podcasts before the launch, more finished art on the Kickstarter page, and lower prices for the book.

Thank you all a LOT for your support. The reboot of THE PEDAL TURNED THE CRANK is coming! Please follow us at thepedalturnsthecrank.com to stay tuned as we get there.

Best—

Keith and Kai
thepedalturnsthecrank.com

04/24/2025

Today's LinkedIn post about my little American book/ebook company:

___

It just occurred to me that this might not be a bad thing to mention publicly.

I don't want my work as a pro-DEIA person in a DEIA-focused company to support the anti-DEIA (and that's the nicest thing I can call it) Trump regime.

Typeflow will be keeping all income from our Canadian contracts in Canada, and paying Canadian taxes on it to the Canadian government. Yes, I'm a US person – but Canadian funds will not enter the US.

This will begin with the next Canadian job that happens to come in. It will be billed in CAD and the funds will not be converted to USD or cross the border into the US. They will not be used to pay for American services. They might be used to pay for Canadian services, because I can't see any problem with that. My website needs a redesign, for example.

What else this will look like, exactly? I don't know, but I don't want my labor funding the people destroying my country and threatening my allies. I'm just trying to stay ethical and this is what I decided.

I'm also doubling up my efforts to land US contracts, since that's all I can rely on now for rent, food, utilities, car insurance, and post-apocalypse skin and beauty supplies – so if you're a US publisher looking for ebook conversions and accessibility compliance, or you know one of those US publishers, let's talk, please.

Some say we're not supposed to talk about this kind of stuff here, but if you can't violate some LinkedIn norms once in a while during a sociopathic cartoon villain's insane tariff food fight, I mean, really when can you? Life's short.

Keith Snyder
Typeflow
We make ebooks pretty good

04/02/2025

Left: How I explained the quick the flyer needed.

Right: What Khai drew.

In case I ever thought I could illustrate my own books.

(Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/noteon/the-pedal-turns-the-crank)

03/26/2025

We'd love to get to 100 Kickstarter followers for our kids' bike book before we launch in 6 days. Could you please help?

Please help us grow our Kickstarter follower count here!

03/21/2025

Awesome meeting today, talking about our April 1 Kickstarter launch of The Pedal Turns the Crank and suddenly knowing how to use two pages we have left over (because we thought of a better way to show kids which thing is the pedal…crank…chainwheel…chain…).

We're so jazzed. Please consider following us! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/noteon/the-pedal-turns-the-crank

03/14/2025

At our production meeting today, the illustrator and I agreed we're tired of not launching this Kickstarter, so launch is April 1 for the start of bike season, and the book will ship well in time for the winter holidays.

We'd reeeeally appreciate having 100 followers by launch day, so if you'd consider following us…

A fun, beautiful picture book that teaches the parts of a bicycle drivetrain while families of all kinds have bike adventures together!

02/20/2025

Typeflow believes in the right of all people to express thoughts – and also in the right of all people to decline to help express some of those thoughts.

We're book people. We stand for truth and knowledge. We decline to help express lies and ignorance.

This is v.1 of the offical company policy going up on our website today.

Are there some gray situations? Of course. Life is messy.

Will it lose us business? Of course. It already has.

Whatever. We'll deal.

02/09/2025

I want to be at Frankfurter Buchmesse this year, in a booth that says AMERICAN • WE HATE HIM TOO • YOU'RE SAFE • PART OF EVERY INVOICE GOES TO PLANNED PARENTHOOD & SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER.

For "We're living in the Upside Down" reasons, this will depend on what happens between us and Canada over the next month or two. But if all goes right, Typeflow will be there.

02/08/2025

I'm the inventor of the EPUBulator, which makes audio ebooks. (Ebooks with audio narration, also called readaloud, readalong, and media-overlay.)

This is HUMAN NARRATION, not AI. Recordings of humans reading books aloud.

The EPUBulator is the technology that puts the human voices into all of Scholastic Books' readaloud ebooks and makes the words on the page light up as they're spoken.

It's not the only such technology, but it's the only one that doesn't require you to either be a large publisher or have InDesign expertise, a Mac-only setup, and an understanding of what won't work in different types of ebooks.

I led this post by mentioning the EPUBulator's biggest client, Scholastic, but we've done ebooks for News Mag Media, Acme Books, De Marque, and others – including self-publishers.

I think this is a great thing for producers, small presses, and people (as well as anyone else who needs these, regardless of whether they're on Mac or Windows), but first they have to know it exists.

So if that's you, and you didn't know it existed, would you consider checking out the SERVICES and ABOUT tabs? You're who we had in mind when we created the EPUBulator website:

epubulator.com

Thanks!

PS And yes, it's named after the Turbo Encabulator: https://lnkd.in/efwr4Y8e

Typeflow's new online readaloud ebook maker.

02/05/2025

This whitepaper I co-created with my partner Laura at Acme Books and Tyler & Scott at Westchester Publishing Services gives both executive- and development-level people the advice they need to move forward clearly in all this recent ebook accessibility legal fog.

It's free. We just want better ebooks for people who use assistive technology.

Do we also want your accessible ebook business? Of course. But even if we don't get it, we still want better ebooks out there.

You can download it from Laura's blog https://laurabrady.ca/blog/whitepaper-epub-accessibility or Westchester's website (https://www.westchesterpublishingservices.com/request-the-guidance-on-epub-accessibility-report/).

I'll have it downloadable at Typeflow pretty soon, too, along with my own thoughts, which will have profanity in them until the final edit.

publishing

EPUB accessibility is a hot topic of conversation in many publishing circles, partly because of looming legislation, partly because digital publishing is mature and ready to deepen it’s commitment to publishing inclusively. In an attempt to clarify some of the issues around what can be a gnarly as...