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.

Tutorial: Resizing Pictures

Why in the world could I possibly need to know how to resize a picture? you ask. Well, Skippy, it goes like this. A reporter or blogger or some other nice person who wants to feature your book asks you for a jpg image of your book cover – or a head shot – no larger than 500kb. But the only image you have of yourself looking all sexy and authory is 4 megabytes. So you send it anyway. BAD AUTHOR!!!! That’s a really good way to annoy someone who’s trying to help you. But…how do I make the image smaller? you say. Well, I’ll show you.  Aren’t you glad you asked?

See the cover above? The size of the original file is 606 kb. That’s over half a megabyte and still doesn’t meet the criteria of the 500kb requested by whomever. Making it smaller is very fast and easy. Go to the folder where your picture is stored. If you mouse over it, that should tell you how large the file is. (I knew you were going to ask that next. Ha!) See the photo below. Continue reading “Tutorial: Resizing Pictures”

Review Action Package!

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I know, I know: getting reviews out of readers is one of the great mysteries of our days. Why, oh why, are people so averse to posting their opinions online? You put your books out there, bared your soul for all to see – some even for free – yet these readers will not reward you with a meager review. What’s an author to do?

Don’t worry – you’re not alone. The good folks over at Stalkopedia and Zhitty Airlines have teamed up to bring Indie Authors another solution: the Review Action Package! Continue reading “Review Action Package!”

Author Tools: AddThis/ShareThis

Some people are really good at using nifty little plug-ins and widgets and what-have-you. I’m not one of those people. I do know, however, that making things easy and convenient is important. So when I saw that people couldn’t easily share my website with the click of a mouse, I decided to do something about it.

AddThis (www.addthis.com) is the “largest sharing and social data platform” per their website. They offer way more tools and data tracking information than I will ever look at. Why? Because a) I’m lazy; and 2) I just don’t care. Some people love to know how many people are sharing their web information. AddThis can tell you that. And other stuff.

So, I went and got me one of them thar AddThis accounts and started messing around. It was really easy (and actually kind of fun) to customize the sharing buttons so they’re non-invasive, yet still present for sharing. For my website, I made them teeny tiny and put them down in the left-hand corner of each page. Continue reading “Author Tools: AddThis/ShareThis”

A Bit Late

K. S. Brooks on Snow ShoesOkay, so this post is a bit late. Clearly I’ve been slacking again. Here’s a list of things I’m going to try to accomplish and/or be better at this year.

#1 – I will try harder not to stab someone when they blurt out completely useless information while I’m trying to concentrate on my writing.

#2 – I’ve learned my lesson about creative license and won’t use “matters of homeland security” as an excuse not to have dental work done. I apologize to the nice men in suits who had to come all the way out to my house to, uh, interview me.

#3 – I won’t wait until October to kick it into gear this year. Books can be written in quarters one, two and three, not just Q4 in a ridiculous marathon sprint.

#4 – I’ll actually write most of my own books myself this year. I said most. Most is a relative term. Don’t get technical on me. Continue reading “A Bit Late”