From Stress to Success: The EasyCatalog Solution for Publishers
If you work for a publisher who utilizes catalogs, you surely understand the stresses that come alongside creating them, including making sure all the necessary information is included AND up to date, along with managing the never-ending design and printing processes, while pulling your hair out in copious amounts.
We at Firebrand Technologies are dedicated to making publishers’ lives easier, especially when it comes to creating catalogs! EasyCatalog is a third-party plugin for InDesign that we can integrate with both Title Management Enterprise and Title Management Lite (NEW!) to help publishers easily create catalogs and save countless hours of work. Before we get into the many benefits of this feature, let’s start small by talking about the basics of Book Catalogs and some best practices to keep in mind.
Here are some basic elements that are often included for books in a print catalog:
- Title and subtitle
- Author name
- Cover Image
- Description
- Author Bio
- BISAC
- Pricing Information
- ISBN
- Page count
- Season
- Trim size
You might also consider adding these to your catalogs for some extra “oomph”:
- Related titles, along with their cover images and ISBNs
- Author photos
- Glowing review quotes
What Is EasyCatalog?
EasyCatalog is a third party plugin from 65Bit Software that can be integrated with Title Management by our Professional Services team. It connects the product information entered in Title Management to your Adobe InDesign application.One key benefit of EasyCatalog is that your data is kept in sync with Title Management, eliminating human error and the need for endless fact checking.
So how does it work?!
Once you create your template on InDesign, it’s as easy as drag and drop! With EasyCatalog, you can populate multiple pages for multiple records, all at the same time! Data will update seamlessly with the synchronization function, and the plugin will notify the designer of any information that has changed on Title Management but has not yet been updated in the catalog.
Instead of endless emails to the designer regarding changes with the pricing, description, cover image, etc., those changes made in Title Management will automatically populate and eliminate the worry of errors after printing is completed.
EasyCatalog is not just for catalogs, either! The sky’s the limit! A few of our publishers also utilize EasyCatalog for fancy tip sheets and marketing reports, or anything else that needs to combine the data in Title Management and the design capabilities of InDesign. Be creative and take full advantage of the software!
Naturally, to utilize this feature, you must have a copy of Adobe InDesign. You will also need the EasyCatalog plug-in, Pagination Module, and XML Data Provider from our partner, 65bit Software. Firebrand is a reseller of Easy Catalog, and our clients get a 10% discount off EasyCatalog’s retail pricing. The total cost of these three applications comes to about $2,200 per copy of InDesign the tool is being installed in.
EasyCatalog comes with many tutorial videos and documentation so you can master its features quickly. As part of the configuration and setup fee, we will also provide training to help you get started and to go over any questions and concerns you may have.
Interested in learning more and downloading EasyCatalog for Title Management? Email the support team today!