Category: Tutorials

How-to articles for writers.

Codebreaking for Beginners

Last month I was busy making new business cards to distribute to unsuspecting tourists (see my post “Stop me and Buy One”.) I checked out what information should be on my card and having established that I needed to put some of my book covers on the back, and an eye catching simple design on the front, I discovered that I should really add a QR code. Yes, those foxed me too, but wait a minute and you too will find out that QR codes are utterly brilliant.

The QR code was invented in Japan by a subsidiary of Toyota to track vehicles during manufacture. It was designed to allow high-speed component scanning and has since become one of the most popular types of two-dimensional barcodes. QR codes then became common in consumer advertising. Smartphone users or iPad owners can install a free app with a QR-code scanner that is able to read a displayed code and convert it to a URL, which in turns directs the smartphone’s browser to the website of the company, store, product. Continue reading “Codebreaking for Beginners”

Don’t Hate Me ‘Cuz I’m Beautiful: Facebook URLs

You’ve seen them, I know you have. The ugly, discombobulated, burdened Facebook page URL that has not been properly set up.  My favorite is when someone who claims to be a social media or marketing expert sports one. “Come check out my page!” they’ll say to me, presenting me with a link that looks like “http://www.facebook.com/pages/Judy-the-marketing-pro-author/260458930631195”   Hey, Judy, guess what?  No one’s going to remember how to get to your page with a link like that. Not to mention it’s kind of embarrassing.

What can you do about it? Well, I’m glad you asked.

Continue reading “Don’t Hate Me ‘Cuz I’m Beautiful: Facebook URLs”

Banners, Buttons, And Beads

As promised, this tutorial will cover the making of buttons, logos, banners, and other graphic types needed by writers. Not as sexy an issue as covers, but very necessary. And it all applies: if you can create a cool-looking logo, you can create a cool-looking title and byline. In fact, if you examine this collection of images I think you’ll see that the difference between a “logo”, a “banner”, a “button”, and even a “title” is pretty abstract. What you’re seeing there, top to bottom, are: the title for an online serial, my personal logo I use for many things including “signatures” in mailings and forums, a custom SmashWords buy button, a dragon social media avatar, a Twitter button in custom colors, three RSS buttons to match three different sites, and a website header. All basically the same thing, using the same resources and simple skills.

And you’ll love this: it’s a lot easier to do these things. Your chances of learning, fairly quickly, to create good-looking, useful graphic doodads is virtually 100%. And there’s better news than that for those less than comfortable with all the talk of installing and learning graphics programs: you can do it all online without having your own programs, and it’s easier to do that way and at least as high quality! Cool, huh? Continue reading “Banners, Buttons, And Beads”

Tutorial Tuesday Time Out

IU Tutorials and Tools for Prospering in a Digital WorldWell hello there fans of Tutorial Tuesday. Here at Indies Unlimited, we take pride in bringing you tutorials each week to help you get more out of social media platforms, software packages, handy websites, tools, and more. You can check out past tutorials for free here. If you don’t feel like going through all the tedious and strenuous labor of repeatedly clicking that “older posts” arrow, you can check out this nifty book here.

Occasionally I’ll get messages from folks asking for tutorials on specific subjects, or I’ll write them based on queries which come up during conversations with other authors. Of course, that means we haven’t covered everything yet…

So how about we open up the comments section today and YOU tell US what you’d like to see tutorials about? Let’s not get silly here, we can’t give you tutorials on picking the right lottery numbers or on how to build a laser death ray (that’s proprietary), but we can help in author-related topics other than becoming a best-seller overnight or how to get on Oprah. And please, keep it clean, folks. Here are some upcoming tutorials: How to Create a Sell Sheet; How to Find Media Outlets; Preparing for a Radio Interview; and How to Write a Bio Blurb. We look forward to seeing your ideas. If we’ve already got a tutorial on it, we’ll let you know that, as well.