New Marketing Images.

Ebook version.

Louis Shalako



In the first three days of April, I have published two POD paperbacks on Createspace.

Engines of Creation is a collection of short stories and Blessed Are the Humble is the third full-length novel in the Maintenon Mystery Series.

When publishing a paperback on Createspace, use that link rather than the Amazon one and make sure you paste it into the appropriate field at Smashwords and OmniLit. I think you can use that on Google Books as well. (I'll have a look at that myself.)

The royalties when selling directly from Createspace are much higher than selling from your Amazon page.

When making a cover on Createspace, I use their simple free templates, or you can use their pro service or upload your own full-cover image. I use the Spruce template as it accommodates a pre-designed image with the text on there.

Because of the red-outlined trim area, and because of the limited adjustment of the image positioning, I often have to fiddle with the text and its placement. I want the author name centred up, or not jammed up against the edge of the page, and you have to keep all text 1/2" back from the trim area. It sometimes takes a few attempts.

***

As long as I was focused on making images, it seemed like a good time to upgrade the three remaining mystery titles with better covers.

The Art of Murder has the new art above. The Handbag's Tale has a new cover and so does Redemption: an Inspector Gilles Maintenon mystery.

The Art of Murder and The Handbag's Tale are free right now and readers are certainly welcome to grab one or both if they like.

'Handbag' is only a novella and there is no POD, so no problem and no challenge. But Art and Redemption still need to be upgraded POD-cover-wise.

However, the new images also upgrade the ebooks. What that means is that I have uploaded them to Smashwords, and a bit later today I'll stick them up on Amazon, Google Books/Google Play, and then OmniLit.

For OmniLit, you'll need a 200 x 300p image for their store and a 1400 x 2100p image if you're distributing to iTunes.

Either tonight or tomorrow, I'll have the Createspace PODs all fixed up. That makes 16 titles in paperback, those are all 5 x 8" books, and I have a 6 x 9" and a 4 x 7" over on Lulu.

So that's three to three and a half days of labour, to make a few simple images and load them up. That's not even Photoshop. With more complexity available, no doubt the average designer would use it, and that might take more time, not less.

***

My new 24" computer screen has easily double the square inches of area compared to the old, 18.5" monitor. Hopefully, this will make my job a bit easier.

***

Here are a couple of previous covers. The new ones are better.

A bit murky.

Free Morguefile image.

My second book cover. We've come a long ways in four years.

END

Marketing Images: a Study in Compromise

A strong image with room for the text. That's Layla, the alien girl in the book.

by Louis Shalako

For marketing images I have a few limitations. For one thing my old Pentium II computer won’t operate Adobe CS-6, (Photoshop) a major program for making book covers and all sorts of wild other images.

Staying within these limitations, I have two choices. I can farm the work of making an image out, or I can do it myself using the simplest of paint programs. The cheapest ebook cover I am aware of is $25.00 U.S. and she doesn’t include a POD cover. I would still have to acquire the original ‘clean’ image and make my own for the paperback, as similar as possible, using the paint program I have available. This sort of limits her in the fonts and effects she could use.

The snake sort of swallows its tail in that case.

It is ideal have the ebook and the paperback covers similar if not identical as it avoids confusion in the shopper’s mind when they are clicking around on the average bookstore website. They don’t just keep going because they thought it was a different title; get lost and give up.

The other option is to get a pro marketing image, by that I mean a stock image were there is no text. From a stock photo website, you pay by credit card and download a digital image.

Because of those limitations, I have no choice but to take the cheapest option anyway. If I am capable of making a halfway credible rendition of someone else’s design, I might as well have done it myself. However, the odds are they would be using Adoble CS-6 or something very much like it. It’s strictly either/or here. 

There’s not much point in me making one version and them another. It would still cost twenty-five or more dollars.

So my marketing images cost $5.65 plus whatever interest I end up paying on the credit.

The big difference in the resulting image is that I can’t meld two or three layers together. It affects the design, and so far I haven’t taken a straight shot and tried using the limited special effects that I do have. I buy a pro image and then put a title on it, the author name on it.

Sometimes there is a superscript. I only have limited fonts and I only have limited colours.

Typical POD cover using Createspace free template.

Even so, I seem to have learned a lot. If the book or story is targeted at men, put a girl on the cover, if it’s targeted at women, put a handsome man on the cover. I zoom out on the created image to see if I can read the name when the image is real small. I look for strong and dramatic images, that stand alone in the pictorial sense. They don’t need anything added.

The technology available affects the design.

Since I can’t meld layers together, I’m looking for entirely different, whole and substantial images. I’m not looking for elements or components that can be layered together, like a red rose on a white table with a face faded in above and behind, and sparkling galaxies whirling around in the background. I simply don’t have the technology. If I needed something like that and found a suitable marketing image on a stock site, I would of course buy it. If it was cheap enough.

Then I would stick my text on there and there’s my book cover. I would still have exactly the same limitations from the paint program.

This would obviously affect the branding of the works. It would be a challenge for all the different pen-names, all the genres and all the books and stories I have out there.

Just as an example, the third in the Maintenon mystery series, Blessed Are the Humble, is a pro image.

It would be nice to find a few more of the same type. First of all, I like that one. Secondly, I would prefer not to have to replace it anytime soon. I have no money to waste. It takes time to shop and time to make them. I would very much like to upgrade the covers of Redemption: an Inspector Gilles Maintenon mystery, the first in the series, and also the cover of The Art of Murder. Then there is the original novella, the one that inspired the series.

The Handbag’s Tale has been soldiering on for a couple of years now with a cover that looked okay at the time, considering my limited experience, but it clearly needs something new—something branded, something that is clearly recognizable as a mystery novel.

When you think about it, it’s like twenty-three dollars to get four new images. What I hope to do is to write quite a few more mysteries. Each of the covers must be ‘branded’ to some degree. The real killer is the time spent on a stock photo site looking for something, anything, that will work.

It’s always going to be a compromise, no matter how good your computer and your photo-shop type program. The real compromise is in the time it takes.

I have a nice little story here, it’s about 6,500 words. The image for such a product still costs the same as a full-length book. The difference is that I might spend an hour, maybe two looking for something I can use.

I spent days looking for an image for Horse Catcher, and that one ended up being a real big...compromise.

It’s just that simple: can I make this work, because it’s a good image and it fits well enough. But how will text look on there? And who is this book written for? Women don’t get turned on by other women—they get turned on by men.

If it’s an erotic or romantic story geared to women readers, then everything about that image matters. If the story is targeted at gay males, it still matters. Don’t put a hot chick in a bikini on the cover. So much of this should be no-brainer stuff but it still took me some time to get this far.

If an aircraft is a series of compromises flying in close formation, then writing a book and putting the whole thing together is a study in the art of compromise.

The Case of the Curious Killers, (iTunes.)

END

Looking for Mr. Goodbookcover

Out with the old and in with the new.

Hopefully the reader can view these images without signing up on Canstock. You can spend hours, days even, browsing for marketing or book cover images on Canstock. Luckily, (or perhaps not) there are only fifteen pages in this category. Some categories—blonde girls for example, can have fifteen hundred or more pages, each with 75 images per page. It’s a hard job sometimes, what can I say?

What does this image say about the story? This is probably the number one question. How is it relevant? Obviously, if the reader knows nothing about the book, they really can’t help me. It’s all up to the person who publishes the book.

The title of the book is ‘On the Nature of the Gods.’ I’ve always liked the original cover, but it’s a free image from Morguefile and it’s time to upgrade. I can never really tell if the book is weird western or steam-punk, but Amazon lists it in steam-punk so there you go. I tagged it both weird western and steam-punk when I published it.

Again, what does it say about the story? As for hot babes, there are a couple in the book and Hope Ng is described as a ‘raven-haired’ beauty.

Okay, now that’s one crazy-looking dude, and while it doesn’t say western, it sure says weird, which is just exactly what the book is.

Same dude. Without complex help such as Adobe CS-6, I tend to keep the covers simple. I have one layer and some text. I have seen many nice covers with the text dead front and centre. Yet I look for images like this one because I can sort of stick my text over and above, or even around it. In a year or six months from now things might be different, and I might have CS-6. In which case, I can still use the $5.65 incl. tax marketing image. Basically, this image doesn’t grab me by the short hairs and so we’ll move on.

This image sort of works, the question is what do I do with the text? There is a fair amount of blank or black space to work with.

A strong contender so far. This one resembles the Evil Dr. Emile Schmitt-Rottluff, a character in the book. Nutty as a fruitcake, that one is as steam-punk as all heck. Bold white text might show up fairly well.

I like the girl and the gun. The trouble is that background, and whether things would show up properly. It’s best not to buy an image I can’t use.

Sometimes you just want to buy an image and either write a story around it for publication, or maybe just to have it in your personal collection. As far as book covers…I don’t know, and that probably means no.

Now, I think, I’m just loitering. (Grins.) I sure would like to write a story about that one!

Blogger is being a real pain lately, so I have to format this in HTML. Talk about dedication, eh?

Or maybe I just have a little too much time on my hands, anyhow, thanks for stopping in.

End

Production Goals.

Setting some goals and getting confused.

Production goals are pretty simple things.

What would I like to make and when would I like to make it?

In order for that to happen, what work, preparation or construction, administrative or research, do I need to do and when do I need to do it?

For starters, I would like to have a completed first draft of my twelfth novel by October 1, my originally stated goal. It is true I wrote 28,669 words in thirteen days beginning Sept. 1/13 and it is also true that a novel is a minimum of 60,000 words and that my deadlines are self-imposed.

I don’t know, I think I just burned out on that one for a while.

I don’t like things hanging over my head by a thread, like the semi-famous sword of Damocles. I took the last few days to do other things. So far, I’ve upgraded the marketing image for The Clone, published Repalatron Raceway and something else, I forget what! I’d have to go look.

Force Multiplication Theory.

In terms of force multiplication theory, what you want to do is to make every soldier do double duty. Your soldiers have better weapons and better training. (You are an army of one. – ed.)

I am five people, -- ed.

You get much more firepower out of them. This is important in battle, because you want to win.

In terms of a story, by publishing it in another language, for example French, you get to use the same marketing image twice, and since they cost money, that’s a consideration. You’re also producing work faster, and publishing more often, important in gaming the ‘passive discoverability’ algorithms.

These exist in two forms, machine and biological. (Biological includes other people as well as your own internal biology. You want to improve your own performance as well, right?

The basic premise here is that the more stuff you have out, the easier it is to buy a book from you!

I kid you not, especially if you’re camping out in as many genres as you can manage.

If it took two hours to write a story, a translation takes more like forty minutes. Also, they’re not so critical—you can let them simmer on the back-burner while doing other stuff. You get to keep twice as busy, and in business as in life this is a good thing most of the time. Because some days you just can’t write and we all get that from time to time. This is a good time to develop your already existing products.

So I need some production goals. In fact, I was thinking of taking a page out of Dean Wesley Smith’s book and writing a list. Seriously, I’m going so fast here I get confused sometimes. The other day I typed the wrong author’s name into the publication data on Amazon, and to compound the error that was the wrong book file, too. I did catch it in time, so it wasn’t that serious.

It might be handy to have a list, one where you can literally line things up in sequential order and then check them off in sequential order. NASA does it, and you can too. Right?

For today, I need a blog post, and voila! One magically appeared, like it was some kind of bun in the oven whose time had come.

I need a marketing image for The Stud Farm because that one’s been around so long it’s got stretch marks on its lips…I’m kidding, ladies and gentlemen.

One more face-lift, and that book’s going to have to start looking for a good razor. That’s all I’m saying, ladies and gentlemen.

I have two more translations ready to go. One needs an ISBN, and voila! Holy Schmoley, I must have remembered to order another block of ten yesterday. Need I say more? Those two files are ready to go, with images and everything, even. I can load them up when I’m comfortable doing so, like after one more read for bits and pieces of French grammar and spelling.

Are you with me, Moriarity?

The Evil Dr. Schmitt-Rottluff sends his regards, incidentally, before I forget.

So what else do I need:

A marketing image for my third short story collection. The second one’s in the bag (Engines of Creation) and in fact that one is locked and loaded, right in the launching platform, on both Amazon and SW. The two Frenchies are not uploaded yet. It takes five to six hours to assemble a collection, format it, do the admin stuff, (ISBN and image searches) and there you have it.

 I could sure use 1,000 words on my novel today.

 A new marketing image for The Case of the Curious Killers, in fact most of the old titles.

 A POD of collections #2 and #3. A POD of Core Values, which I have never gotten around to.

 I would like to focus on short stories during November.

 Sounds to me like I’m busy enough for the next six weeks. If I can get novel #12 out, on or about October 1/13, then it’s likely to be in all or most stores by Christmas week. That’s a rational goal.

 A marketing image and ISBN for the new mystery (book #12 career-wise.)

 I probably have enough material for collection #4, but that one can wait for a rainy day.

 More short stories published as stand-alone titles.

 Figure out what the hell I’m going to do for novel #13.



Writing in Public. Dean Wesley Smith.

http://www.deanwesleysmith.com/?p=10184

Okay, I just published this, too:

The Healer. Louis Shalako

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F2JZPMM

This one is more suitable for the younger readers, as is Repelatron Raceway. When I get enough of them, I’ll link them in a series, the name of which is yet to be determined.



END

Challenges.

(Morguefile photo.)

Everyone has a different challenge, but we all have them.

Here are just a few of the challenges I face in the next few months. Yes, I have a plan, and I will win, in the long game.


Royalties.

In order to get royalties from Smashwords without paying a thirty percent withholding tax, I need an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, (ITIN.) To do that, I need a birth certificate. Then I can apply for a passport. Then I can properly identify myself to the IRS and fill out W8EN forms, etc. Smashwords would be happy to put money into my Paypal account (next quarter,) but I don’t want to pay the withholding tax.

I have some qualms about mailing a passport and birth certificate to the IRS. There must be a better way, but that’s my immediate interpretation of their letter.

I’m very stubborn, incidentally.

Of course on an Ontario Disability Pension, finding $35.00 for a birth certificate application, $15-20.00 for a passport photo, and $80.00 for the passport may be challenging. That’s because I live 35 % below the poverty line and I’m already performing the miracle of the loaves and fishes on a daily basis as things stand now.

Why I don’t use Kick-starter to get some marketing images.

If I received a gift or series of gifts via ‘Kick-Starter,’ the ODSP would see it as income. They would allow the first $100.00 and then take fifty cents on the dollar in income penalties. They are notoriously ignorant when it comes to allowable expenses or investing back into a business. They make a ruling, and then I can appeal. It takes a year to get a hearing. I do not trust the process, which takes up an inordinate amount of time and you can’t get any justice from them anyway. If I can’t pay the rent, (65 % of my income,) I end up on the street. I find that sort of thing very disruptive to my work.

Getting the electronic funds transfer capability to get small royalties from Amazon is another challenge. The threshold is only $10.00 a month, but of course banks have monthly fees. The trick here is to get an account with access to U.S. banking. The royalties have to be more than the fees, and at some level it’s just not worth it. There’s not much point in getting that account, and paying fees, until I have the ITIN, and qualify under tax treaty for no withholding tax.

Marketing Images.

In order to get marketing images, I can’t get images without money, and I can’t get money without selling books, also subject to ODSP rules. Bit of a vicious circle, eh? That’s why it’s hard to break the cycle of poverty. Unpopular subject, so let’s move on.

Pen Names.

There’s not much point in opening up four or five more Smashwords accounts, and using a few more e-mail accounts, as long as the marketing images aren’t up to snuff. But I do see a point, hopefully not too far off, when I will probably do that. I would have a pen-name for the mysteries, that makes sense, and maybe one for the WW I parody memoir. Do I really need a pen-name for horror, fantasy and science fiction? Argh. Do I get more Twitter accounts and Facebook pages and pretend to be four or five different people? Argh. More workload—that’s what I see here, with a crappy old computer and not enough band-width. Everything takes forever.

Write more books and stories.

While suffering from a singular lack of motivation, and battling strong depression, I need to write more books, taking it on faith that somehow I will find the marketing images to give them an even chance in the world. Also, I would be taking it on faith that people will do the right thing by these books, by purchasing and reading them. Otherwise it would be pointless, as selling a half dozen copies a month is a waste of time, especially if I can never see any hope of improvement in sales or even getting what small monies are due. There’s not much point in getting angry. It is a waste of time.

Submit more stories to pro magazines.

Yeah. While attempting to back up all my work on a disc, due to the incipient and imminent computer crash that I expect will happen any day, I somehow locked up all the stories in my science fiction folder. What that means is that the stories are there, I simply don’t have permission to open them. I think this happened because one folder was just too big for the disc, and yet for some reason there was no way to back out of the process. While I can recover any story e-mailed by clicking on ‘sent’ in my e-mail box, I have never e-mailed anyone my list of submissions. What this means is that I have no idea if I have submitted a given story to a given market. I would prefer not to re-submit a story someone rejected previously, as it looks like sheer cussedness or ignorance, or not being able to take no for an answer.

I guess the answer here is to write more stuff.

When I get a minute.

Less serious is the fact that my document, ‘Titles,’ just a bunch of ideas for stories that I may or may not have gotten around to doing, is also gone. Again, I’ve never e-mailed that to anyone, so it’s not backed up in the e-mails. There may be a copy of that on a disc somewhere, but like the list of submissions, which was up to #700 last time I looked, it won‘t be up to date or complete.

I suppose any idea I had once I can have again. However, there was one incomplete story in my folder, and that one had never been e-mailed either. ‘The Deposits,’ the story in question, was sort of inspired by Robert J. Sawyer, but the world may have to live without such a tribute or parody for the foreseeable future. If you would like to know what that one was about, you’ll have to pay me $1,000.00 because I’m tired of people reading my blog and then running off with all sorts of ideas, and never even giving me a mention. You know who you are.

Over the next little while, I will be using my paint program to enhance my marketing images. Adobe CS6 requires a Pentium 4 chip to operate. I'm doing the best I can with what I have.

You'll notice I don't have a 'donate' button. If you seriously wanted to help in the success of this enterprise, the best thing anybody could do is to buy a book.

More 5 x 8" paperbacks, troubleshooting.

Last night I pushed the button on the 5 x 8' paperback for 'The Case of the Curious Killers.'

Troubleshooting.

For some reason the CreateSpace automatic reviewer kept finding a problem with the formatting. It came at the end of the book, where I had a bio and URL. This was the third section of the book, written and formatted in Word. The bio was too wide, and for some reason every time I saved it, it reverted back to an unacceptable form.

After three or four attempts, I simply deleted the bio and URL. One, there is a URL in the front matter, and two, my bio is on numerous author pages, social networks and on my blog. I'm happy enough reciting it to old people at bus stops and strangers sitting on park benches. So it's not absolutely vital. Over the course of formatting, I learned that a 5 x 8" paperback in the 400-page to 600-page range requires a minimum of 0.875" for a gutter. This was the problem with that section of the book, and for some reason I was unable to fix it.

'Case' came out at 434 pages and retails for $10.99. This would generate two-something on CreateSpace and $1.74 on Amazon. If I sell an e-book of the same title, for $2.99, it generates about two dollars. That's how I set the price. I want to keep it as low as possible, and yet still make a profit. If the volume goes up, I could still reduce the prices and increase revenue. At this stage of the game, it's a good idea not to sell yourself short, and make it so that it's not worth your while or offers no real hope of future success.

That's why any sort of plan, based on knowledge, is so important: otherwise you just flounder or tread water with no direction and not much hope of survival.

Remember the best-seller, 'Swim With the Sharks?'

Sometime today, I'll get an e-mail telling me one of two things, either the book is okay format-wise, or changes are required.It's no big deal. Some of the mystery has been dispelled about the process of creating the physical product known as a book. I also have a POD file ready to go for 'The Shape-Shifters,' but I think that one can wait a couple of weeks or so.

There is a process. Once I click on 'order proof,' it's going to take a week or ten days to see the product. Then I 'approve proof,' and it takes another few days, up to a week, and then the thing magically appears in the Amazon store, linked to my e-books. And, since I have been selling and giving books away on Amazon, this means that while they don't have any ranking as yet, they are presented as if they do as an alternative format, item, or article to purchase. At last report 70 % of book purchases were still in hard form, and the sales of a title are sales of a title. A buck is a buck.

Marketing Images.

My cover for 'Case' was shot with a $100.00 camera, but the image for 'Shape-Shifters' came from Morguefile, and it was clearly shot with much more professional equipment. I'm really looking forward to seeing it. The 'Case' one required further fiddling after an upload or two, as part of the title was in the danger area. The CreateSpace process won't let you go any further until it is acceptable and within tolerance.

I use Nero Photosnap and Paint.NET when creating marketing images. With eleven titles and a few changes to the marketing images over the last couple of years, the limitations become more apparent, but in e-commerce, embossed, gold-coloured fonts lose some of their grocery-store checkout display appeal anyway. It's a learning curve rather than a spending curve.

Write or Procrastinate.

In the meanwhile, what I really ought to do is to open up the file of story ideas and produce some short stories with an eye to submitting them.

Rather than engaging in outright procrastination, I wrote a blog post instead.