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!

Read More

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!

Read More

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):

Read More

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!

Read More

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):

Read More

WIN A KINDLE FIRE

March 1st is the big release date for MY ZOMBIE DOG and I'm promoting the book by giving away a free Kindle! (If the winner is a lucky US resident, they will win the Kindle Fire, for everywhere else the prize changes to a Kindle Keyboard 3G - due to Amazon shipping rules).

There's two ways to enter:

Buy MY ZOMBIE BOOK by clicking here and then fill in the entry form below. You will be asked for your receipt number from Amazon (it will be on the receipt Amazon email you - keep a copy of your receipt as proof of purchase if you win). Also, Tweet this competition with a link to this page and you get a second entry! You'll be asked for your tweet link, but if you're not sure how to do that, just use the hashtag #zombiedog in your tweet so it's easy to find.

or

Blog about this competition or about MY ZOMBIE DOG (you can review, talk about or interview) and then fill in the entry form below. You will be asked for your blog post link in the entry form. If you'd like an interview for your post, you can email me at charmaineclancy@gmail.com. Also, Tweet this competition with a link to this page and you get a second entry! You'll be asked for your tweet link, but if you're not sure how to do that, just use the hashtag #zombiedog in your tweet so it's easy to find.

Too easy! This competition runs from now until 31st March 2012.

You can only have one entry for blogging but if you blog and buy the book, you'll get two entries (plus another if you tweet about it!). Each entrant has the possibility of earning up to 3 entries.

Already own the Kindle Fire (I'm jealous!), it'd make a fantastic present to someone you love!

Why I'm doing this:

I love you guys and it's the blogasphere that has helped me to get serious about writing and learning the importance of a professional approach.

Also because of this book:

MY ZOMBIE DOG

On Zane’s 14th birthday he had to bury a dog. The next morning it’s in his room, tail wagging.

This is not the dog he wanted. No, Zane longed for a cool Collie or Shepard. Now he’s stuck with this scraggy, smelly undersized mutt. As if the dog wasn’t embarrassing enough, his mum wants to name it ‘Fluffy’. No way. Zane figures it dug itself out of the ground, so its name is Fossil. 

Fossil's a mean dog and will snap and bite at people... but why are those people bitten turning sluggish and craving strange food items like brains? Can Zane rid himself of this mutt and save his town from a zombie outbreak?

Now... Enter, and GOOD LUCK!

Read More

DIY Book Covers

MY ZOMBIE DOG is nearly here!

Confession: I got it wrong. I thought I should format my ebook before the cover. You can learn from my mistake. The ebook needs to be formatted when it's ready to go live, BUT, you can use your cover for promotions and marketing leading up to the release of your book. I think you should finishing writing your novel first, but then get an image to place on your blog or on other peoples blogs. Get people familiar with your book before it's released. That's why I'm posting on covers before formatting:

Book Covers for the Indie Author

I've come to see there are two effective ways to produce your book cover, the first will usually generate a more professional effect and is a lot easier.


1. Pay a professional graphic artist to do it for you.
I know, it costs money and that worries you. This is an investment in your art. It doesn't matter how good your story is, if you do not market it to your target audience in an effective manner, they will never read it. I have been interested in the blurb of books, only to dismiss them because the cover looks crappy. I know I'm not unique, there's a whole cliche supporting my view. If the cover is crappy, it stands to reason that the formatting might be crud, which probably means the writing sucks - this is the train of though of your potential customer. Give them 100% on the WHOLE package. And if you do it yourself and you struggle, isn't that a week you'll be behind in your writing? Shouldn't you be getting the next book out there too? Budgets for book covers seem to range online from $50 to $200. I have a talented graphic artist working on my covers and my website. The end result will scream 'professional'.

2. Create your own book cover.

Despite telling you my first choice is to pay a professional, I did create a book cover for MY ZOMBIE DOG. This is for the same reason I formatted the book myself. This is my first book release and I wanted to understand and experience every step of the process. In future, I'll be able to have informed meetings with my graphic designers and digital publishers. It was also curiosity - I have a philosophy in life: how hard can it be? I then proceed to discover... quite hard.

If you are going to create your own book cover and you feel you have some talent in design, composition and colour, you'll need the following:

• An up-to-date computer with reasonable speed.
• Background image
• Fonts for text
• Tagline, Title and Author Name sorted (back blurb, review quotes, ISBN and barcode for back cover if you're producing a print book)
• Program for editing pictures, such as Photoshop
• Program for producing quality print media such as InDesign
• Pool of honest people to give feedback and advice

Background image

I love Shutterstock for photos, illustrations and vectors. It does have a subscription system where you can pay to download unlimited pics for a month etc, but I just buy a bundle of 5 pics at a time. This works out to about $10 per picture and you can download it in any size from small to extra large. There are plenty of other sites, just Google 'stock photos'. When you purchase a picture you are purchasing the license to use that picture for a particular use, such as book covers, t-shirts etc. You can manipulate the picture in Photoshop and I recommend you do, if it resembles the original too much, there is nothing stopping another author using the same pic for their book. I do see a lot of book covers duplicated on Amazon.

Fonts

Surprisingly, I think this element is the most important and even more important than your cover picture. The easiest way to spot a DIY cover seems to be in the typeface. Too many authors are just throwing any old text as their title on the cover and thinking 'that will do'.

Clarissa Draper did a great series on book cover design and this is her post on fonts.

The text type will depend partly on your book's style and genre, but titles should be big and easy to read (unless you're as well known as Stephen King don't put your name as big or bigger than your title).

To read more about why fonts should be big and clear go to Joel Friedlander's:

5 Great Fonts for Book Covers

One important thing to know about those 'free font' sites, is that some of them only give you license to use the font for private use. You need to find a site that offers commercial use, a good one that still has free fonts is Font Squirrel. I think it's also polite to acknowledge the font designer somewhere in your front pages (or back pages) where you would put credits for the graphic artist who designed your cover. By receiving recognition, artists can continue to find value in offering free products.

Play with your fonts, make your title pop. You can do this in InDesign by adding a 'stroke' (an outline to each letter), outer glow (light shines from behind each letter) or a drop shadow (kind of obvious what that is). I suggest making shadows anywhere from 30% to 75% opacity, solid 100% looks a little clunky and draws attention away from the letters.

Make sure your text contrasts nicely against your background, which means you need to make sure the colours stand out against each other but also that the tones and shades are different. If your blue text is the same shade as your green background, when Kindle converts your cover to greyscale (black and white) it will not be easy to read.

Text content

Of course your title has to be decided by this stage. Make it short and snappy. There are a few examples of successful long titles, but when appearing as a thumbnail amongst many other book covers on Amazon, a snappy title will stand out. I like big titles, I like to be able to read what they say even as a tiny thumbnail. Author's names can be small, even smaller should be your tagline, which can be read when the cover is opened. Check out the size of covers on Amazon and make sure you can read your text at that size. 

Pool of honest people.

I have you. My bloggers. For my cover art for MY ZOMBIE DOG I also used twitter (you can attach pictures) and asked people to please critique the cover. Google+ was great too. I mostly use my circle of writers in Google+, but I have another circle called 'iFriends', these are all the computer, techie and graphic people I follow. I rarely post to them (they're not so interested in hearing about my writing adventures) but I did post my cover to them and got some great suggestions for changes (my name was originally thicker and stark white, but it stood out too much). People like to be helpful, but I've noticed friends (including blogger friends) are reluctant to say anything negative incase they upset you. You need to give people permission to be honest in their feedback, and when you get negative feedback you need to be genuinely appreciative of it. This is the feedback that will help you improve.

This is also where you can get review quotes for your book. I'll be asking blog reviewers soon if they would consider reviewing MY ZOMBIE DOG or hosting me on their blog to talk about the book or about writing/publishing the book.

Want to know exactly what dimensions and size file your book cover should be? This is a detailed post by Webbish Books that will explain why you need two different sized images for your book cover:

Kindle Book Cover Size

You can also see:

4 Rules for Book Covers

Ugh - I have rules about blog lengths, but today I really needed to share all this information with you, hoping that some of it will help you out in your journey to publishing your book. And feel free to add honest criticism for the MY ZOMBIE DOG book cover! It's still a work in progress (my daughter wants to add a chomp mark out of one of the letters and I love that idea).

Read More