You may have seen social media flutterings about AuthorsDB, a website that lets you enroll your books and/or your writing services in their free database and get…(sigh) free exposure. Yes, for free. Totally free. What’s the catch? Glad you asked. Well, there isn’t really much of one that I could see, even after employing Rich Meyer’s due diligence procedures. The philosophy of the site, however, reminds me of my local food coop, where you get a discount equal to what you choose to put in: slicing cheese, tagging tomatoes, putting up flyers all over town, or working the cash register. Continue reading “Does AuthorsDB Fit into Your Marketing Basket?”
Tag: google+
Google+ and Facebook Just Got BIGGER!
Two changes occurred last week in the two biggest social media platforms.
You might have noticed that your cover photo on Google+ is all messed up. They have recently changed the dimensions, allowing you to add bigger pictures. It’s really simple and worth the few minutes to fix the profile.
Get to your Google+ page by logging into Google and clicking your name in the upper left-hand corner. From there, click on your current profile picture in the upper right hand corner and select “view profile.” Immediately, you’ll see the problem: the new over-sized photos are 2120px by 1192px, leaving you much room to play. Continue reading “Google+ and Facebook Just Got BIGGER!”
Social Media Survey
Most of us spend a good chunk of our time interacting with the world through social media. Various platforms abound and new ones seem to bubble up to the surface almost daily. Many people use multiple platforms, but we suspect we each have one that is our favorite. Hopefully, we spend the most time on the social network that gives us the biggest return for our investment of time and energy. We’d like to know which platform that is for you.
Tell us, from among the choices listed, which is your preferred social media platform:
Loading ...Your Own Graphics Factories
One salient fact about doing graphic design–in this case making your logos and covers and other pictures writers need to go with their thousand words–is that you need to have a graphic program to do it with. This is actually not a problem, but it’s not hard to run into advice and situations that make it seem like a problem. As with so many other things that writers have to learn aside from writing these days, a main issue is knowing what to avoid.
As promised, I’m going to tell you about the programs to do this stuff with, and a bit on how to maximize your use of them. The programs I suggest are all free, or at most very cheap. Let me say a word about programs that aren’t free and cheap. The first thing you always hear when asking about doing your own artwork (or googling for suggestion on how to do something) is Adobe Photoshop. This is a professional program that costs anywhere from $300 to $1000. Most would say that getting what you need runs around $700. That should be enough to convince you to skip it and look elsewhere. But it’s worse than that. It’s a hard program to use, and is set up kind of awkwardly and bassackward. I used to use it and considered it a pain in the butt. For awhile I only used it to bevel type and the “smudge” tool. Now I don’t even have it installed. Almost anything you need to do can be done easier with free programs, and often better. And PS has some glaring problems for people like us. For one thing, its vector structure makes it really bad at shrinking picture size. As one example of what I mean, on Paint.net I can just keep hitting Ctrl Z (just like in all Windows programs, notice?) and delete changes one by one, all the way back. In Photoshop you get one “redo” then have to go into the history and fool around with that. Not a huge human sacrifice, sure, but something you have to learn. There are big thick books on how to use Photoshop. It’s got learning curve like Rosie O’Donnell has hip curve. Continue reading “Your Own Graphics Factories”