A - Z BLOG CHALLENGE

A is for A- Z blogging, but A is also for ANNOUNCEMENT!

And I have a big announcement. All through March, if you purchased MY ZOMBIE DOG from Amazon,  or if you blogged about the book, you could enter my competition to WIN a KINDLE!!! Yep, and if you're lucky enough to be in the US, that's a KINDLE FIRE. For the rest of the world it's a KINDLE 3G. So now all I have to do is generate a random number from random.org:

And that lines up in my spreadsheet with...

TAMMY MARTIN is the lucky winner! And Tammy is a US resident so she gets the KINDLE FIRE!

I'm actually jealous because Amazon doesn't send the Kindle Fire to Australia.

I'm not sure if Tammy reads this blog, so I'll email her about the good news.

A-Z Blogging

Tips for posting everyday (with one day's rest a week) in April:

• Short and Sweet - save the long detailed posts for later. Bloggers have a LOAD of posts to read through. 1 simple message for each day.
• Turn off Word Verification - seriously, you don't need it and it takes more time for people to comment. With so many blogs to visit, I won't have time to persevere with word verifications.
• Visit lots of new blogs - No one expects you to get to all the blogs every day, so mix it up a bit, try some new blogs you've never visited before.
• Be Positive - Leave encouraging remarks, don't nitpick because someone posted their letters out of order or missed three days. Support each other and enjoy the support you get in return!

There were 'rules' floating about that you need to post to a specific schedule and everyone must take the same days off. Not gonna happen here folks. I will post 26 times this months, every letter of the alphabet in order, but I'll take off a day when I need it and post on a Sunday if I feel like it - schedules just make things too complicated to be fun. And it should be fun, so if you get behind and just post 3 letters at once - I'll cheer you on!

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KINDLES FOR KIDS

Most writers that frequent the blogworld would be familiar with Danyelle Leafty, YA author. You might have seen her awesome new series on fairytales, beginning with the gorgeous CATSPELL.

But, did you know about her very generous ambition to donate Kindles to Kids? I love any cause that combines children and literacy so please go check it out at her site. You could even win some good prizes for yourself. You'll find details at this link:

DANYELLE LEAFTY

I'm probably not going to get any more posts in before the big A-Z Blog Challenge, where I will be crazy enough to blog every day, but on my first post for April I'll announce the winner of the KINDLE FIRE or KINDLE 3G. This was part of the MY ZOMBIE DOG Kindle release promotion. You just buy a copy of MY ZOMBIE DOG or blog about the book or the competition and you get an entry. If you want to try a last minute entry then see the details here:

WIN A KINDLE FIRE

My girls at PAPER DOLLS will be attempting the A-Z Challenge for the first time. They are going to try and do a book review for EVERY letter of the alphabet. You can check them out and cheer them on at:

PAPER DOLLS

Good luck with all the competitions and challenges!

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Why You Need Your Head Shot

MY ZOMBIE DOG has officially launched for the Kindle version and the paperback version will be along soon! To celebrate, you still have about 10 days to win a KINDLE! This is open international, so get your entry in! It's very easy, you can buy the book (love you!) or blog about the book or blog about this competition. You also get an extra entry for tweeting.

Go HERE to find the entry form. HURRY, ends 31st March (Aussie time).

Now about author head shots. Do you have one? Is it professional looking or some family pic that gets blurry if you try and make it any bigger than 5cent coin? It doesn't matter if you're published or not, you need to create an image that you want people to associate with you. 

If you can go and get a professional head shot, then good for you, but if you can get a professional look nowadays even with your iPhone.

Don't want a double chin? check out this professional photographer's advice on how to look your best in that head shot:

It's all about the Jaw from Peter Hurley on Vimeo.

Lighting is also important, outside is good, or use a floodlight shone up and towards you to light up your face. Most indoor lights hang from the ceiling so it tends to leave shadows under your nose and chin.

The smile? There's lots of different opinions, some people swear you need to show teeth and others prefer a more demure smile - you know which looks best on you. If you do go for the closed mouth smile, just part your lips ever-so-slightly so you can blow out a breath while smiling, this stops your lips from looking tense and your smile from looking fake.

My biggest weakness is getting bored with my pic. It's best to keep something familiar because it becomes branding. Here's a pic I had taken last year, now to get those books in the background I had to casually lean my arm on the fireplace shelf, which required squatting to be the right height!

But this is what I usually look like in photos (Zoe is a lap dog wannabe):

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Create a book trailer in 9 steps

For the release of My Zombie Dog, I wanted a cool book trailer, so I figured - how hard can it be? It wasn't too hard at all, now you can make one too!

book trailer...

I made my book trailer in Keynote and my daughter (now 14 - happy birthday Emily!) made hers in Powerpoint, so I'll show the steps to both programs along the way when they differ.

Your storyboard might look like this.

1. Plan your trailer. There's lots of styles, you can use still images (that's what we did), you could just use text, or you can try reading an excerpt or having a fan post a review. We'll look at using still images for now. So make some notes or do up a storyboard on some paper. Think about imagery, symbols you might include (e.g. gun for crime novel, or just drops of blood) this is easier than finding several pictures of people, also consider the colour scheme to suite your genre (purple for fantasy, black for crime, green or silver for sic-fi, these are not rules but just think what might suite your book).
2. Search for images. I use Shutterstock because they are so easy and have a great range of pictures. You might want to try free pictures (make sure you have a right to use them) or take your own. You can often find free images on Flickr. Don't jump in and pay for pictures until you are ready to finalise your book trailer, use the watermarked ones first. This will save you dollars if you change your mind.
3. Set up your presentation file. You can use Powerpoint or Keynote. There are probably other programs you can use too (some people like to use movie making programs). For each image or message, you'll need to insert a slide. Don't go too busy with the borders or themes. I stick to plain black or white as my background. Make sure you save each step of the way so you don't lose your work.
4. Layout your text and pictures. Make changes until you are happy with the design. Your end result will hopefully be one minute or less, so you don't need too many slides. Inserting pictures is easy, but a tip is to make sure you save the picture to your computer before inserting it into your presentation. Cut and paste from websites does not aways work well. You should have a picture of your book, or your book cover as well. This is the most important image and needs to be up the most often, or at least for the longest time.
5. Check other trailers for inspiration, just search 'book trailers' on YouTube - there are gazillions. 
6. Add audio. Soundless clips on YouTube get boring quick. You can get royalty free music from several sites, I use Incompetech. Download the soundtrack you like and it will appear in your iTunes or main music files. Now, with Keynote your presentation will last as long as the music plays. You can edit the music file, but because I'm lazy, I just picked a music file about one minute long. The music comes in themes, so pick something that suites the genre of your novel. To insert the file in Keynote you just click the media button at the top left and the inspector button next to it. In the inspector box, click audio, then in the media box, pick your song and just drag it to the empty box in inspector. If that sounds as confusing as I think it does, go here to see an image. For Powerpoint, click Insert - audio - audio browser, that opens your media box, choose your music from the list and click and drag it to your first slide. This will open a toolbar for music across the top of your slide, under Audio Options - Start, choose Play Across Slides. Powerpoint tends to leave a picture of a speaker on your slide, so to hide it send it to the back of a picture.
7. Time your slide show. This is easiest in Keynote, when you export the file, choose Quicktime and here you can choose Playback Uses: Fixed Timing, you will be asked how long you want each slide. For images only, about 3 seconds is plenty, for text though, you might want 5-6 seconds. Unfortunately every slide will play the same length, so if I want some to play longer, I simply duplicate them and have the identical slide play twice, so if you set for 3 seconds, those will appear to play for 6 seconds. In Powerpoint you choose Slide Show - Record Slide Show, and you simply click to change the slides as you see fit while it records these times. You can redo until you like the result.
8. Save as movie file. As I said, in Keynote this is export and choose Quicktime, in Powerpoint you Save as - movie. Make sure you save it where you can find it again.
9. Go to YouTube and choose Upload, simply upload your file, this can take quite a while, don't panic, let it do its thing! Here is the book trailer Emily made for MY ZOMBIE DOG (Emily did also use Photoshop to edit the photos where you see the chomp, and to create the zombie dog):

If you've found this helpful then please share!

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Book Launch - WIN A KINDLE

MY ZOMBIE DOG has officially launched for the Kindle version and as this is the first book I've launched, I'm taking notes of my progress and promotions for this release. As you may know there is a giveaway with this launch, for every person who purchases the book, or simply blogs about the book or the contest, they go into the draw to win a KINDLE! This is open international, so get your entry in!

If you would like to enter, simply go to the last post to find the entry form HERE.

I've posted about creating a professional book cover, and when the competition is over I'll share all the data on how I formatted my ebook.

In the meantime, I've signed up for the following reading challenge - how could I resist? 

And I'll leave you with the book trailer for MY ZOMBIE DOG (I'll tell you how to make those soon too - promise):

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