Author: K.S. Brooks

K.S. Brooks is an award-winning novelist, photographer, and photo-journalist, author of over 30 titles, and executive director and administrator of Indies Unlimited. Brooks is currently a photo-journalist and chief copy editor for two NE Washington newspapers.  She teaches self-publishing and writing topics for the Community Colleges of Spokane, and served on the Indie Author Day advisory board. For more about K.S. Brooks, visit her website and her Amazon author page.

Be Ready for that Media Opportunity

One thing I’ve learned about this industry is that opportunities come up in a flash, and usually the first people to respond get them. The difference between being prepared and NOT being prepared can cost you. And it’s literally as simple as being organized.

KS Brooks Book Cover Folder
Go ahead, mouse over, see what happens.
Click once to enlarge.

I have a folder in Dropbox with all my book cover jpgs, my two author photos and a couple of other folders with high resolution versions and thumbnail size versions. (I keep it on Dropbox so I can access it from virtually anywhere. You never know when you will be asked for something!) I’ve made sure they’re all named clearly, so it’s easy for the recipient to identify. It also helps, if they don’t rename the file, with search engine optimization. It never hurts to take advantage of every opportunity to get your title in front of someone. Plus, it looks far more professional to have the book cover for Night Undone labeled as “NightUndone.jpg” instead of “niteundonecoverartsmall.jpg”. My author photo is labeled as “AuthorKSBrooks.jpg” instead of  “DSC00013”. Now, you might be thinking, I’ll just put “Author Photo” as the file name. Well, you and about a billion other authors thought that. It’s not going to make your photo easy to find. Continue reading “Be Ready for that Media Opportunity”

Basic Elements of Digital Book Cover Design

book cover examplesby K. S. Brooks & Stephen Hise.

The books that appear in features on Indies Unlimited have been through a comprehensive vetting process, a portion of which considers the book cover. In many cases, the individual elements of the cover design do not work together to convey a professional representation of the book’s content. Sometimes, this means that someone took a photograph the equivalent of a “snapshot” and inserted some plain text on top of it. This can result in a homemade look which, to readers, may scream “amateur.” While the self-published stigma is fading, indies still have to work hard to put out a good quality product. And the cover is a big part of that. The reader will keep going if the cover is anything less than catchy and professional.

We understand that many indies do not have the funds to spend on a professionally-designed book cover. At Indies Unlimited, we try to give authors the tools to do these kinds of things themselves. We’ve published a number of posts on the importance of a good book cover and even provide a resource page with tips and tools on how to design a book cover.

This article details the specific elements we take into consideration when evaluating book covers. Of course, each cover is evaluated on a case-by-case basis. But don’t take our word for any of these. Take a peek at this page filled with sample book covers and see the difference for yourself. Continue reading “Basic Elements of Digital Book Cover Design”

Tips for Using Keywords in Blog Posts

dewey cheatum howe writers conferenceAuthors, and others, have blogs and websites because they want to get the word out about whatever their passion is. What good is all that effort if no one ever sees it? Keywords, if used properly, will help get eyeballs on your work.

The key to all things keyword-related (no pun intended) is to put yourself in the shoes of the person doing the searching. What words or phrases would you search on if you were looking for the information? Think about that for a minute. Let’s say you were looking for a book on how to write gumshoe detective novels. Would you search on writing? No. You would get like a bazillion trillion results, none of which would be helpful. Would you search on how to write a book? No. Again, the results would be so broad – you’d never find what you need. You would have to search on the specific phrase of how to write gumshoe detective novels in order to get anything remotely helpful. Right? Let’s keep that logic in mind as we go forward. Continue reading “Tips for Using Keywords in Blog Posts”

Three Years and Going Strong

one million page viewsThree years ago today, the Evil Mastermind launched Indies Unlimited. Since then, we’ve had over one MILLION page views, been named as one of Six Great Blogs for Indie Authors in Publishers Weekly, and ranked as one of the top writing-related sites by Alexa.

We have evolved greatly since those early days, but never lost sight of providing free, high-quality content for independent publishers and readers. In 2014, IU instituted a stringent vetting process for books featured on the site in hopes of dispelling the myth that indie writing is inferior. We’ve added a KnowledgeBase and a wide variety of resource pages. We’re proud that readers and authors alike trust our content. We’re grateful to all of you for spreading the word about us.

Indies Unlimited is run by volunteers. Kudos to all the minions past and present for donating their time and energy to provide excellent articles, advice, and tutorials for our audience.

Thank you, everyone, for making Indies Unlimited a success and a community. It could not be one without the other. We look forward to another year filled with great things for all.