Covering For Mark Williams Part 3 – Athanasios

As we head full-steam into Christmas it’s business as usual for writers, artists and bloggers.

Today one our resident graphic-designers continues his four part series on his approach to cover design, with some insights into how he developed various covers in close liaison with the authors concerned. Not least us!

Athanasios’s aproach is in stark contrast to the way many trad publishers and some small presses handle covers, where they pay no heed to the author’s ideas and present a fait accompli image the writer will hopefuly love, but may hate. If they do, tough.

One of the great joys of being indie is to have control over your book cover, and using graphic designers like Athanasios is a great joy in itself.

When the revamped MWiDP web-site finally goes live early in 2012 there will be a spot for Athanasios and our other designers to showcase their skills. Watch our for that!

Meanwhile, here is the man himself. Take it away, Athanasios!

Covering for Mark Williams – III

 

In my last two posts I related how I started commenting on book covers listed in facebook groups and evolved into redoing them. Since then I’ve worked with a few indie writers who are happily listing me as their cover artist. I’m also using it as a means to bring more attention to my own Occult/Horror Thriller, Mad Gods.

One was Joshua Corey Mays, for his fantasy work: Terra Ingonita: Book 1-The Abyss. His first cover was a concept drawing he wanted turned into something that resembled an old, tome of magic or a forgotten, forbidden necronomicon. The first image in the example shown is his first cover. The second was my mockUP of the discussed idea with the final being, well the final.

I returned time and again to IWU and ROBUST and gave my opinion on whatever cover was posted for feedback and generally enjoyed the exchange of ideas and camaraderie from all the other indie writers. Some of the covers listed only needed a little tweaking to improve them as in Apolo Drakuvich

while Mind Crafter was a complete from scratch project.

I still kept up my own writing and by late summer I finished Commitment, the sequel to Mad Gods and second in the Predatory Ethics series. Its first cover was a family portrait of an older Adam, one of the main characters of Mad Gods and Melusine Rothschild a new and unspecified ally or villain. She was from a timeless family that wove itself throughout the illuminati and Global Elite of history.

They were paired in a formal and traditional portrait used by nobility throughout the centuries but with colors and stark contrasts that were ominous and dangerous. It was in keeping with the rest of my covers at the time but when I chose to change Mad Gods I also decided to change Commitment to suit its predecessor. Now the twisted and anguished fallen angels of both were representative of the world Adam doesn’t want to be part of.

It was during this time that I was accepted into the fold of MWiDP. Once there I approached Saffina Desforges with my sideline. She looked into my work and let me try the cover for a forthcoming project of spotlighting new indie writers titled Saffina Desforges Presents.

Saffina’s request was:
One ‘Quick Kindle Coffee break reads’ and another that just says, ‘Quick coffee break reads’ We would like (if it is possible) a pile of Kindles and a cup of coffee on top as the main image and for the universal one (i.e. NOT for Kindle) a pile of generic e-readers with the coffee cups.

This request prompted this draft image:

Mark Williams weighed in:
Very interesting! I love the cup and Kindles! This could be really good with some tweaking.

Two issues: One, the lamp dominates the picture, grabbing the eye straight away, when the lamp is incidental to the image. The coffee cup and Kindles are the key elements.

Two, text. Love the text on the cup, but SDP is the big brand selling point and needs to be across top in large letters.

I love SD on the cup, coz that is just so cool, but… we need Saffina Desforges Presents (SD bold, as the brand) across top, and then the final title across bottom on table. Can’t remember what choices we had now. Coffee and Kindle obviously key. Also need to be clear these are short stories, and have Vol 1 tucked away somewhere. Or maybe Vol. 1 on coffee cup? That’s probably an ideal place for it.

Saffina added:
Completely agree with Mark’s comments. Love the theme, but the lamp needs changing (did reply previously to see if we could have a banker’s lamp, smaller, instead?) and the Saffina Desforges Presents needs to be bold text at the top. Agree that the cup is the perfect place for VOL 1 and then somewhere in smaller text (below SD presents… perhaps) A collection of Kindle coffee-break short stories?

OR as Mark says, at the bottom across the table. Would you have a play around and get back to us asap please?

And I replied:
Ok, those are great suggestions. I even found a GREAT background image that’ll invoke A LOT of atmosphere for the cover. I’m very excited about the look of it so far.

I’ll have something up for you by the end of the day. It’s 7:09 AM here in Montreal so you’ll have something back in another few hours.

Which became:

Most recently further volumes of Saffina Desforges Presents are planned and the covers for volumes 2 & 3 are slightly different.

This week I gave a wider variety of covers and the expansion of my own work. Next week will be my final week and I’ll round out my time on Mark’s blog and 2011 by some of the most recent covers I’ve done and, if the authors I’m working with allow me, some covers for books that are just around the corner.

I’m always willing to help with indie authors with their covers. More examples of my work are @: Covers For Hire or email me @: mad-gods@videtron.ca
Athanasios’s webpage is
http://www.mad-gods.com

Athanasios’s Covers For Hire page is
http://www.mad-gods.com/coverHIRE.html

Mad Gods buy pages are
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004QOA768 & https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/48579

Commitment buy pages are
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006098CSC & https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/99372

Thanks as ever, Athanasios. And don’t forget he also answers to Tom for all those who struggle with polysyallabic names!

Which begs the question why is the word monolyllabic not monosyllabic?

And that gives me an excuse to end by saying there’s another awkward question over as Saffi’s blog tomorrow, where as part of the Twelve Days of Christmas season I’ll be asking you to explain snow to someone who’s never experienced it.  There are several hundred million people here in West Africa who haven’t had the pleasure of building snowman, throwing snowballs or sledging. Pop over to Saphicscribe tomorrow to have a go.

And be sure to check out Saffi’s guests so far, too. Nick Spalding is there today – http://sapphicscribe.wordpress.com/2011/12/20/12-days-of-christmas-5-nick-spalding/ . My turn tomorrow, and there’s a great list of top names in the preceding days to catch up on as well!

 

2011
12/20
POSTED BY
CATEGORY
Mark Williams on Writing
Tech Talk
13 comments

I Haven’t Forgotten You!!!

Okay, my family descended at 3 AM last night, we just did Christmas and my house is in an uproar. My husband’s work schedule has been insane this week, so I’ve been playing catch up.

If you will bear with me, I PROMISE an amazing piece awaits you tomorrow :) My Mom is going to give me time tonight with just me and my computer, and the wait will be well worth it. My next topic is about thinking like a techie person (we’ll do iframes soon, but last week’s comments showed me I’m moving a little too fast).

 

2011
12/18
POSTED BY
CATEGORY
Mark Williams on Writing
5 comments

This Is Why Men Hate Fashion – Christine DeMaio-Rice

So what is it about women and shoes?

It would never, ever occur to me to put a shoe on the cover of a book.

I mean, shoes are what feet go into. And feet are at the other end of the body for a good reason. Bunions, blisters and broken toe-nails, ripe cheese aromas and crispy socks that can stand up on their own. Or is that just me?

Anne R. Allen has two cover artists working on her Camilla Randall Mysteries series. Though there was no exchange between the two designers they both came up with shoes…

Christine DeMaio-Rice designs her own covers (more on this next month). The big image above is a fine example of her work. And, of course, there’s a shoe in it.

Okay, it’s a book about the fashion industry. But even so… Why a shoe? Somebody explain to this ageing male brain what’s going on?!

Saffi and I have teamed up with Elizabeth Ann West to write our new China Town rom-com mystery series (Narcissus Nights due out early 2012!) and I can see already that even if there’s not a shoe mentioned anywhere (admittedly improbable, with two female co-writers dictating the storyline) there will somehow be a shoe or two on the cover. :-|

Just to add here for anyone keeping count that the China Town series will be after the first of the St. Mallory’s YA series we’re co-writing with the fantabulous teens Miriam and Charley.  So far I’ve been lucky and not seen any sign of any shoe obsessions in St. Mall’s. Are teenagers immune to such things? At what age does a girl stop wearing shoes as footwear and start wearing them as fashion accessories?

Of course, I could have asked fashion-industry insider Christine, when I invited her on to MWi to talk about Dead Is The New Black, the first of her Fashion Avenue Mystery series.

Btw, how irresistable is that title?! So irresistable, in fact, you’ll probably be wanting to head off and buy it before you read any further. You can find it on amazon.com here and on amazon.co.uk here.

I asked Christine not to mention the book and do a post on fashion instead. With plenty of images, I added.

Yeah, I was angling for an excuse to run a post with lots of pics of scantily clad top totty. But Christine saw right through me, and wrote a post on men in t-shirts instead. Cruel, or what?!

Here’s Christine.

This Is Why Men Hate Fashion

 

I’ll send three mental images your way.

1) A man slouches on a couch outside dressing rooms, waiting for his girlfriend to exit. He looks like he’d rather be dead, or chewing razor blades, or simply watching football.
2) A man in a suit, outside the bathroom. His wife exits wearing something either obscene or absurd, twirls around and says, “how do I look?” The man in question doesn’t have to answer. We know he’s in trouble.
3) A man stands stock still as a woman dresses him in something ridiculous while she squeals about how fabulous he looks.

These are all a beer commercial waiting to happen, and we have bought them in their entirety. I hate beer commercials because they play on gender stereotypes and expectations. This is a huge injustice to men everywhere, and it’s the reason most of the men in America dress like laundry sacks.

Worse, runway shows specialize in making men look like slim, asexual fourteen year-olds, while men’s magazines mention clothing as an afterthought to the barely-dressed women on the cover. The backlash is not only understandable, it’s should be expected. Fashion has been marketed as a “girl’s thing” and sports as a “boy’s thing,” and like normal human beings we follow along.

I know, you’re saying you’re different. Fine. You’re different. Are all the men in your life like you? (If you’re gay, and all your friends are gay, please don’t answer. Gay men get this right already. We need to bring the straight boys along with us, gentlemen).

So I want you all to choose a t-shirt. Go on the internet or look in a catalog with the intention of buying a nice t-shirt. I know what you’re saying. “I wear t-shirts in the yard or to hang out with my buddies I don’t want to spend a lot of money on a t-shirt.” What I’d say to that is, a t-shirt can change the way you look, and you don’t have to change t-shirts for the yard, but it’s you’re leaving the house at all, you can affect an enormous difference by not looking like a sack of crap.

First. Ladies. If you’re in on this process, stop squealing. Do not squee. Do not fawn. Do not seduce. At the first sign of any feminine behavior, you will lose his interest. This is borderline clinical. Act like a surgeon over an open heart.

Second. Gentlemen. That little twisty part of yourself that associates looking good with being less manly? Take charge of it. Go with me here. It won’t hurt, I promise.

I want to start by showing you what a t-shirt should NOT look like. I mean it’s so bad the model looks like he’s cringing.

Why is this so bad, you ask.
Why, indeed.

Look at those sleeves. He looks like a slight breeze will send him flying away. There’s a good four inches of excess fabric in there. This is bad. Worse, the outsleeves are hiking. The outsleeves are the outer edge, on the sleeve fold. Do you see how the sleeve opening angles down in toward the body? This is a no-no, and it’s making him look like a big trapezoid.

Now I’d like to direct you to the placement of the shoulders. They’re way down on his arm! Which, honestly, would be just fine if the sleeves weren’t flappy-dappy.

Which brings us to the biggest problem. Because the sleeve balance is something easy to see and obvious. But the less obvious problem is proportional. The chest fits really nicely, and when you buy something online, it’s the chest you’re buying against. You look at the chest measurements and you compare to your body measurements, and there you go! A chest that fits with these big stupid sleeves. And that’s why you need the big, shoulders, to make these two pieces to the puzzle fit together. If the shoulders were the correct size to the proportion of the chest, they’d be narrower.

But he’s wearing two different t-shirts. One fits (the chest) and one doesn’t (the sleeves).

So, why is it this way?

Part of the reason is that the customer’s gotten sloppy and doesn’t care (yes, I’m talking to you). The other reason is that those sleeves are easier to sew than sleeves that fit. In order to get the curve of the armhole to fit around the body, a bunch of cool easing and stretching techniques have to be used so there’s not four yards of fabric in the armpit. But if you make big shoulders and a straight-ish armhole, you can sew a million of them consistently and sell them for ten bucks each.

This is better. At least he doesn’t look like he’s going to fly away. The sleeve openings are level to the earth and the shoulders hit in the right place. And though the chest still fits, to be honest, the sleeves now look too small for the body, proportionally. And there are draglines on the sleeve (little vertical creases) caused by a poorly balanced sleeve cap. Fixing that is another whole order of patternmaking and sewing though, so you can ignore me.

This is the nicest-fitting t-shirt I’ve seen. The sleeves are tight, which makes it good for wearing a jacket or sweater over it, and the shoulders are just where they should be. The problem of course is that it’s generally too tight. It’s also short. You can see how high it’s falling on his crotch.

OK, so I went looking for a Guess tee, because they fit better than 90% of the men’s tees out there (disclaimer – I was employed by Guess and yes, worked on the men’s t-shirts). But this one is not good, and led me to something else I wanted to point out. When you buy a graphic tee that’s really soft and has these cool stitches and stuff, be aware they are beat to hell in the production process. Dyed, washed, printed, dyed and washed again. One medium likely won’t fit like the next medium. So you get one like this, that’s about an inch and a half too short, and the stitching on the sleeves didn’t shrink at the same rate as the rest of it – so you have these bizarre ruffle/wing things at the cuff.

OK, this one looks good. I mean I could pick it apart, but I know you guys don’t want to spend an hour in the dressing room, with your girlfriends sitting outside wishing they were watching football.

Askew images down to me I’m afraid. Still trying to blog one-handed…

I’m not going to say anything about Christine’s observation that most men in America dress like laundry sacks. As to my own fashion sense, I haven’t got any. But here in West Africa the fashion rule is simple: vibrant colours and walk tall.

In the New Year I’ll be finally beginning my West Africa blog Paradise Amid Poverty, on my life here in sub-Saharan Africa, and will be getting some great photos of the absolutely to-die-for everyday fashions that make West African women the envy of the world, and one of the key reasons I shall never leave.

Meanwhile, since Christine chose this blog to be illustrated with the male figure, I leave you with this parting image of how most men (Not me!) dress here.

T-Shirts Who needs them?

 

2011
12/16
POSTED BY
CATEGORY
Mark Williams on Books
Mark Williams on Writing
TAGS






31 comments

Capes, Calamities and Cry-Fests – Charley R. Reviews Marion G. Harmon’s “Wearing The Cape”.

One of the ways we are looking to improve the lot of our YA authors is to get their books out to reviewers who happen to be part of that reading group.  So with two teen authors on the MWi blogging schedule it was inevtable they’d be among the first to savour the delights of our YA offerings in exchange for some honest reviews.

I’m using my snakebite excuse to skip a proper intro again (Enjoy it while you can – I’ll be back to normal by the weekend!) so I’m just going to say,

Here’s Charley:

 

Capes, Calamities and Cry-Fests 

Charley R. reviews Marion G. Harmon’s

Wearing the Cape.

It took me a while to get my grubby wee paws on it but, thanks to the lovely Mark and his charitable desire to keep me from going mad by providing me with deliciously devourable literary material, I found myself curled up on my bed with the rain pounding on my windowsill on a rainy afternoon, happily ensconced in a very good book.

This book was Wearing the Cape, and I am not overdramatizing when I say it is probably one of the best Young Adult books I have had the fortune to read this year. For a start, it manages to put a wonderfully original spin on one of the oldest archetypes in the history of storylines – superheroes, in all their cape-swishing glory. Harmon has created a new, exciting, yet utterly believable world where superhuman abilities are as usual as getting up to brush your teeth in the morning. Not only that, but he manages to make sense of some of the stranger superhero customs – particularly those involving skimpy-looking outfits, which I found exceedingly amusing. Hey, even if you can flip tanks, you still want to look pretty at a party, right?
Even better is that there’s not an info-dump in sight – all the information is channelled gradually to the reader through the narrative. Though this leaves a couple of moments of confusion in the first chapter or so, it all comes together very smoothly in a short space of time, giving us the chance to focus on the plot, rather than trying to work out what the fruitcake an e-pad might be.

Speaking of the plot – Marvel, eat your heart out. Contrary to my initial worries of finding the over-ploughed plot of “take out big villain who wants to rule / destroy / redecorate the world for his own evil gains, then fly off into the sunset”, Wearing the Cape is actually very good plot-wise. It’s pacy and keeps going at a decent rate, but never compromises itself by moving too quickly and losing any of its sleek, smart humour. At the same time, it doesn’t drag too long on the philosophical or reflective moments – which are rather crucial in a story involving the supposed deaths of thousands in horrific disasters. What’s more, it’s not afraid to tell us that superheroes in the real world wouldn’t be half as perfect as it is in the comics. These heroes need attorneys, police statements, truly gruelling training, and they’re all more than aware of the necessity of good media coverage. My only nitpick with this realism is that, being set in America, there are a few phrases and customs that my poor British brain couldn’t quite comprehend.

And the plot’s not a single-direction Dobbin-the-rocking-horse affair either! The delicious twists, while I can’t say much about them without giving away huge spoilers, while not being mind-blowing, were certainly revelatory enough to make me want to happy-dance, gasp, cry and annihilate my pillow at regular intervals. Sometimes more than one at the same time. For such a brisk, well-to-do story, there are some surprisingly tragic happenings. Suffice to say, Harmon is an author who’s not afraid to show that even superheroes can suffer just like the rest of us.

However, as fantastic as this realism is, it’s the characters that, for me, made the story the little wonder it is. Our narrator, Astra, is one of the rare female characters who can pull off being a hero AND a convincing teenage girl without driving us to label her a wimpy cop-out or an overpowered (dare I say it…) Mary Sue. Astra is a very well-constructed character; she’s tough, she’s opinionated, she’ll stand up for what she believes in, but at the same time she has all the familiar insecurities of a real young woman, both romantic, appearance and esteem-related. As someone of the same gender and age-range as Astra, I found myself liking her simply because, for once, she was both someone to admire, and someone relatable – a breath of fresh air in a world of “average teenage girls” who are anything but.

And she’s not the only dazzling personality in the lineup – our “leading man” Atlas shines as a world-weary icon who, despite his “Mr Perfect” image, is beginning to wear down and crack after years of stressful crime-fighting, and the delightfully creepy and caustic Artemis is intriguing in the highest sense of the word. Even the minor characters have their own distinctive personalities, and I found myself liking them almost as much as the leads (I was head over heels for Blackstone in seconds, and still can’t decide whether I’d rather strangle or tackle-hug the arrogant but hilarious Seven). And, the cherry on the cake, we have … a complex villain! Le gasp! And, even better, the author doesn’t set us a shove-it-up-your-nose-because-I-think-you’re-a-thicko, he’s-a-bad-guy-so-you-must-hate-him situation either! In fact, I got rather attached to the Teatime Anarchist – though it was somewhat unnerved when I started to imagine him speaking with a British accent a-la-Queen-Liz.

And one last thing – there’s a cameo mention of one of my favourite bands in the whole entire world at The Fortress. I squee-d. All over the floor. Thank you, Marion G Harmon. You are awesome.

But enough of my sycophantic blithering: go forth and buy thyself a fantastic read! Realistic, heart-breaking, hilarious, thoughtful and stunningly crafted, Wearing the Cape should be on everyone’s reading list this Christmas.

As you can see, the British education system continues to produce illiterate, monosyllabic teenagers who can’t string a sentence together to save their lives.  :-)

But Charley R. doesn’t just write great reviews. She also writes great fiction. Not only is Charley, along with Miriam, co-writing with us on our new YA series St. Mallory’s, but she also has a short story in Volume 2 of the Saffina Desforges Presents anthology series, which might, if I can muster the finger power in one hand to get it all sorted, be live on Amazon this weekend. If not, some time next week for sure.

For those seduced by Charley’s homage to Wearing the Cape you’ll be pleased to know the book can be bought from amazon.com here and amazon.co.uk here. And you can find the sequels to Wearing the Cape alongside.

And the only one thing I didn’t agree with Charley on:  I’d never heard of  The Fortress, and am still none the wiser.

If you love superhero stories you need to read this book. If you hate superhero stories you really, really, really need to read this book. I loved it from the moment I first set eyes on it as an embryonic script on a peer review site at the beginning of the year. It’s one of the jewels in the indie-publishing crown.

As a kid it was my ambition to write for Marvel (or DC if  had to settle for second best), and up until this very year I’ve always had a yearning to write a superhero novel of my own some day.

Sadly that lifetime ambition evaporated in haze of shattered dreams when I read Wearing the Cape.

When the competition is this good there’s no point even trying to compete.

2011
12/14
POSTED BY
CATEGORY
Mark Williams on Books
Ones To Watch 2011
10 comments

Covering For Mark Williams Part 2 – Graphic Designer Athanasios Returns

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last Tuesday our cover designer Athanasios (who also answers to Tom, for those who like names easy on the eye and tongue) began the first of a four part series looking at what goes on behind the scenes to produce a great cover.

Just a reminder, above, of the two great covers he produced for our Saffina Desforges Presents anthology series. BTW, Volume 2 hopefully will be live this coming weekend!

More on that later in the week if things go to plan. meanwhile, without further ado, here’s Athanasios with Part Two of his cover design series. Take it away, Tom!

Covering for Mark Williams – II

I’m Athanasios, a VERY little known graphic/video artist in dvd/film production and lesser-known indie writer.

In my last post I detailed how I went from commenting about other indie writer’s book covers in the facebook group Indie Writers Unite! to redoing and improving them. I also showed the process involved in making covers and their evolution in my own books.

I was enjoying some success with the covers I’d done so I continued my promotional efforts. While telling many other facebook groups, forums and indie bloggers about my Occult/Horror Thriller, Mad Gods I also let them know I’m knowledgeable and able to do some pretty damn eye-catching and good covers for books.

One such effort bore fruit when Andre Jute at ROBUST goodreads group reposted my ad for Covers For Hire. He also gave my name to KA Jordan, a ROBUST group member who was looking for a new cover for her paranormal romance, Swallow the Moon. I went back and compiled our email exchanges and the step by step of the process.

Andre’s ROBUST Post
Athanasios Galanis will do you a basic cover for between $50 and $500, still a bargain for a guy who knows what he’s doing. Samples at http://mad-gods.com/coverHIRE.html

Kathleen’s ROBUST Post
I contacted him(?) and got a reply right off. Instead of the black cover, he said he could show me something with both characters and the bike.
I’m intrigued.

Andre’s ROBUST Post
It’s a him, all right. He’s a professional graphic designer. He creates graphic books. I thought his work would be bang in the bullseye for quite a few ROBUSTER’s books.

Then we moved to exchanges of emails.

From Kathleen:
Hello,
I have an e-book cover that will not work in a print format. So I’m looking for a cover that will work both as a paperback and an e-book.
The name of my e-book is ‘Swallow the Moon’ about a witch, a soldier, a haunted motorcycle and a mad artist.
The current cover does not lend itself to becoming a brand. It is very plain green on black. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

From Athanasios:
Well, it’s quite a literal cover.
From your description I would do a close up of the bike and do some kind of artwork directly on the bike itself.

From Kathleen:
The bike is a modern Haybusa – painted to look like an albino Burmese python.
Can you do that???
Could I afford it?

From Athanasios:
I could do that in mockUP for spec, and if you agree I’ll do it in earnest.
I can get something to you sometime tomorrow this time, just the rough idea,
Sound good?

From Kathleen:
The photo attached is roughly the same model – I can’t see if the faring is the right one.
I’ll get you a picture of a snake too and I’ve attached the book blurb.

From Athanasios:
Ok is the bike supposed to be reminiscent of a python or a cobra? I gotta know cause the faces of pythons and venomous snakes are different.
Also you were mentioning Burmese pythons before. Do you want Burmese coloring or regular python coloring, I’ve gotta know all this.

From Kathleen:
I think the Cobra Head would be the most dramatic of the two.

Based on the previous email back & forth I Googled and found references. Then I made and sent Kathleen the mockUP to give a proper gist of what I wanted to do.

From Athanasios:
Hey Kathleen. Here is a preliminary mock up of Swallow the Moon.
I hope you like it. If you’ve got any further suggestions please specify.

From Kathleen:
Wow – that is seriously moody – I love the snake pattern, the head, and the background with the moon. It should really stand out.
I like the typeface too – will work well with other books.
There is one suggestion – it’s a romance, so we should have the two of them on the cover.

From there I completed the finishing touches.

This week I shared a quick back and forth of ideas that led to a striking cover. Next week I’ll go into a wider variety of covers and the expansion of the covers for my own work.

I’m always willing to help with indie authors with their covers. More examples of my work are @: Covers For Hire or email me @: mad-gods@videtron.ca

Athanasios’s webpage is
http://www.mad-gods.com

Athanasios’s Covers For Hire page is
http://www.mad-gods.com/coverHIRE.html

Mad Gods buy pages are
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004QOA768 & https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/48579

Commitment buy pages are
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006098CSC & https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/99372

***

Athanasios will be back next week with part 3.

Meantime we’ve set Athanasios a challenge quite different from his usual fare.

Regulars will know that we’re working with two fantabulous teen writers on a new YA series, St. Mallory’s, set in a modern day English boarding school. Imagine St. Trinian’s without the innuendo and stockings, with  a dash of Blyton, Brazil and Brent Dyer thrown in.

What will Athanasios come up with? We have no idea, but are eagerly awaiting the first drafts! :-)

2011
12/13
POSTED BY
CATEGORY
Tech Talk
The e-publishing debate.
5 comments

Sunday Tech Talk with Elizabeth Ann West: Working With Images

coffee

Dump half, add milk for me please. 300 x 263 pixels left aligned wrap

Good morning! I’ve got my latte in hand, very generous on the milk part. You see, coffee and I have a tenuous relationship. I can drink only small amounts in a twenty-four period or my body rebels in a rather painful way. So, my mug is up to those of you who can handle a full cup, maybe one day I will be part of that club.

Speaking of joining clubs, if you missed last week’s column about links, what’s in them, how they work, please go visit that first before reading below. Trust me, you’ll thank me later. Then without further adieu, and our smiles and joy firmly in place, let’s learn about images, where to get them, how to control them, and how to make them.

Before we begin, let’s talk about photo albums. Images on websites or blog work in a very similar fashion.

First, you have to take the picture and get it printed. In this post, we talk about where you get pictures.

Second, you organize them into a physical photo album. For the Internet, this is uploading the picture into a folder on a server somewhere (server is just a fancy term for the physical storage space on a massive computing network that a hyperlink points to). We talk about uploading and also “borrowing” photos from other photo albums, or servers.

Finally, you drag your guests to sit down in your living room and thumb through your pictures, and talk about them! For the web, you do this when you insert a photo into a blog post and write around them!

So you have to get the photos, put them on a server (photo album), then use them in posts (“Here, sit on my couch and hear all about my vacation.”) Easy.

A Picture’s Worth A Thousand…. Look, They Make My Blog Posts More Interesting!

abstract sail boatPretty. 510 x 509 pixels center aligned

Those of us who can remember the really, really old days of the Internet (yep, I can) know that at the very beginning, it was text based. There just wasn’t the bandwidth to handle the larger file sizes of images, and as a result, few sites used them. Of course, there were also few sites at the time, but hang with me. One of the ways developers catered to those of us with a 14.4 KBps modem was with alternate text.

This tag or attribute (refer to the link post) still exists today, but we mostly ignore it. If you’ve ever uploaded an image to your blog there is a box asking for “Alternate Text.” This text is what appears if the picture cannot load for some reason.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. There are three main types of image files, or file formats. Jpg (.jpg pronounced jay-peg) is one of the most universal formats out there. It’s a file format that lets a user determine how compressed the data should be, resulting in either a highly-compressed, really crappy pixelated image, or a less-compressed, digital masterpiece.

Elizabeth Ann West

Less compressed, higher resolution. 200 x 200

Elizabeth Ann West

More compressed lower resolution, 200 x 200

By opening up an image in a photo editor (I use GIMP, because it’s free), you can change the scaling or compression rate once you save it as a .jpg to reduce the file size. This is very handy for profiles on forums and other sites. For example, Amazon’s Author Central requires author photo files to be no larger than 800 KB. My author photos were professionally taken, so the file sizes were quite large, 4 MB or 6 MB per picture (1,000 KB = 1 MB). I scaled them down (Image, Scale Image) and then when I saved them, I put the .jpg compression at about 85%.

Book Writing

Thank goodness we don't still write books by quill, nor need to use .gif for our book trailers! 112 x 105


There are many more differences in these file types, but most of it is information that won’t really appeal to you as an end user of the file. You just care about the picture showing up when and where you want it to, right?Another file format is .gif.

GIF was one of the first two types of image formats on the web. Another claim to fame is animation long before people embedded YouTube videos (that’s next week). From .gif came .png (you say Jay-peg, and Gif like the peanut butter, but not ping. It’s the letters, pee-nnnn-gee). A .png file can handle transparency, very handy for logos or images you are moving to another image and want to blend in, like say a book cover. :)

So I Searched Google for “Rose” Found One I Liked, Right-Clicked and Saved It. I’m Good, Right?

No. You’re very far from good.

As masculine and feminine I could make a rose

I know girly, but it has a bug in it at least. 150 x 100

Images, even those on the Internet are subject to copyright law just like the books and even blog posts we write. You need permission to use them. If you are looking for images to include in any type of commercial, professional work, like an author website, blog, advertisement, or cover art, you need to make sure you have a license to use the content. Take the time to read the fine print. Some royalty-free sites don’t allow you to alter an image, so it’s very important you understand what is permitted. It would be like someone asking to use your work, adding or removing a few words and completely changing your intent.

There are many websites out there with royalty-free images (we all know what royalties are, royalty-free means you pay a flat fee for the image’s use, sometimes expiring after a large number of distributions). I use Dreamstime.com because of its easy to use free database of images, and its relatively inexpensive prices if I need to buy an image. In fact, just about every image I use on my author blog (eawestwriting.blogspot.com) is from Dreamstime.

Uploading images into most blogs is accomplished with a GUI (Graphical user interface). Buttons you click on. But let’s take a look at what’s really happening, under the hood….

Cruise ship

Image used on my blog for Blog Cruise, using the URL to reference not an upload. Also clicks to that posting.


Images are files. They do not magically exist in a post when you upload them, but as their own file somewhere on the server. Blogger makes it very difficult to understand this, and it mostly looks like jibberish. For example, the cruise ship I’m using to promote the Blog Cruise I am putting together for March 2012 has this link:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ogQD4TzhNyk/TuFWbB61O-/AAAAAAAAAU8/p6FPUPm8WSk/s1600/dreamstimefree_1949431.jpg

YUCK! Now we learned last week all of that information in between the / marks are actual folders on the server where my free Blogger blog is kept. The only thing I could control is the name of the file, and I like to keep it the original Dreamstime file name so other people can go back to the source. If I had renamed it cruise ship.jpg, no one would know it’s a Dreamstime photo.

If you’re working with WordPress, or another blogging interface, you might have more control over where and how files are organized.

For example, the image of my book in 3D (a generous gift from my awesome cover artist, Melissa Oyler) is http://eawestwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Cancelled-soft-cover.jpg. That is understandable, and if I really wanted to, I could go into my WordPress files and change even how that link is developed. Why would I want to do that? Well, search engine optimization. If I wanted to be coy, I could upload the images of my book to a “bestseller” folder. Hmmm…maybe not a bad idea :)

Making Images Behave

Cancelled 3D

Gift from my cover artist, Melissa Oyler.

Whether you use the GUI uploading (and I do) it is many times helpful to change the source code to make an image behave. I learned my know-how by making changes to settings in the GUI (the easy to use uploading interface where you can set things like padding, borders, etc.) and then looking at the source code to see what changed.

Images are built on links in HTML. They start with the same <a tag. On my reader site, I have a recent posting about developing an audio book. The code for the image I use is this:

<a href=”http://eawestwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/dreamstimefree_2361569.jpg”><img class=”alignleft size-medium wp-image-247″ title=”Old headphones” src=”http://eawestwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/dreamstimefree_2361569-200×300.jpg” alt=”" width=”200″ height=”300″ />

You’ll notice that the first thing it starts with is a LINK! Now, this is NOT the link

Headphones

This is the headphones image I used on my audio book post. 140 x 210

where the picture is housed, but where the user goes if she clicks on the picture. Wheels turning yet?

You ABSOLUTELY can make images GO places. Like a page to go buy your book. All you have to do is make the first link where you want the image to point to. The next bit, <img tells the computer to specifically call up an image, how to format it, and where to get it. Notice my alt=”” is empty, shame on me. I should have put headphones or something there.

Src= is where the image physically exists on some server. This can be any image on ANY server. Now, a word of caution. When you link to an image somewhere other than your web server (or the free server you use for your blog or site) you are taxing the other server’s bandwidth. If your site gets a small to moderate amount of traffic, this isn’t too big of an issue. However, if you had an image linked to a site and your post went viral, the traffic on your site could cause problems on the other site because each and every time your page or post loads, it’s asking for bandwidth from the site hosting the image. Plus, what happens if they take the image down?

Link to the UK Amazon purchase page for "A Thousand Glass Flowers"

Button, Button, Who Has the Button?

Where it is 100% okay to link to an image on another site is when you are trading buttons. As soon as MwiDP moves to its new virtual home (I’m building it as we speak, it’s awesome) I will have buttons available of the regular columns here and for the MWiDP authors. Buttons are mostly used to advertise cooperative sales, blog hops, friends, and awards. The ONLY difference in a button’s code versus a normal image is the img src tag and sometimes, where the image points to (the first website URL in the code). You will see sites that say “Grab the code” and it will look something like the code above, except with the URL and image source of the button.

But I pasted that code into my site and it didn’t work!

I get this question frequently on Twitter and via email. If you are placing a button on the side of your site or blog, you will usually use a widget that allows HTML. Sometimes this is called a text widget. Either way, it needs to accept HTML. If you are placing a button into a post, you will need to click on the tab HTML and paste it at the appropriate spot. Once the image is inside your post, you can usually highlight it and use your GUI icons for centering etc. and it will modify the code automagically.

The Image Strikes Back!

Ever upload an image and IT’S HUGE!!!!! Happens to everyone. You have a few options. I didn’t touch on the last bit of the code above about the headphones image. Where it says Height=”300″ and Width=”200″ that is controlling the size of the image. In pixels.

What the heck are pixels? How big is one? Well, I can say a pixel is not a native measurement most of us think in. I don’t. And even then, how big a pixel even is depends on your screen resolution. I run a teeny-tiny Toshiba netbook with Ubuntu. My screen size is only about 10”. Pixels are itty-bitty for me. If you have a nice desktop with a large flat screen monitor, your pixel is bigger than my pixel.

What you need to do is figure out what different sized images look like on YOUR computer screen. This will help you in planning your blog posts and web pages for the best visual impact. You don’t want an image to overwhelm your text. To help in this exercise, I added the pixel lengths of each image I used in this post.

You can change the pixel size in the HTML code or GUI interface of your website or blog, OR you can edit the photo down to the size in a photo editor. By scaling the image down before you upload it, you cut down on uploading times and the storage space you use up on your server. Both good things. It just take a little pre-planning.

Today we nicked the surface on images. You have the basics to go find images, upload them, or hand code the HTML if you so choose. I highly recommend you at least TRY hand coding one image this week. It might be a little frustrating, but I promise once you hand code one thing, it feels amazing. And it will go a long way in your confidence to be the master of the technology around you, not letting it master you.  Gold star buttons for everyone who comments that they tried this homework assignment! :)

Come back next week and we’re going to expand on images, iframes, and some other neat gizmos and gadgets in HTML. I’ll be here in the comments, and as always available by email at eawestwrites on Google’s free email.

Shameless Plug

Yes, it's a USB plug, geeky and funny :) 150 x 100


Shameless Plug: I am now formatting ebooks for other authors. I am pleased to announce that my “techie” skills landed me a role in formatting MwiDP’s ebooks into epub and mobi as needed. I am very reasonable in my rates because it’s something I genuinely enjoy doing. If you are having trouble with a file, please let me know and I might be able to help. For more information, you can visit http://eawestwriting.com/for-authors I DO have space and time to help you get a file up in time for Christmas.

Just so you know, even we geeky types are NOT immune to frustration. This post, RIIIIdIcUlOuS in the number of pictures was an absolute beast of a mother to work on. Seriously. I had it all nice and pretty, then made a change, and everything went to hell. Took me about another hour-hour and a half to fix it. This is also Mark’s blog’s 100th post. That is a very special milestone, and I’m honored to be a part of it. But man, this post was more than a bit of a drama queen! 

2011
12/11
POSTED BY
CATEGORY
Tech Talk
15 comments

Sherwood Ltd. – New Release From Anne R. Allen

Of course, you didn’t need the arrow to know this was in some way about Robin Hood. The title said it all. But  a great touch nonetheless.

True, Robin Hood is remembered more for drinking mead than absinthe, and somehow I doubt those shoes would have suited him or his merry men. And isn’t that a typewriter in the background?

It can only mean one thing: the Manners Doctor, Camilla Randall, is on the loose again, which means blogging guru Anne R. Allen cannot be far behind.

In this latest rom-com mystery from the Blogging Doctor we catch up with Camilla in the wake of her bizarre adventures in Ghostwriters In the Sky.  But this time a penniless Camilla is heading for merry England, with a book contract and one hand and a designer bag in the other. She may be destitute, but she still has style!

Landing at Robin Hood airport (where else?) Camilla finds herself in a bizarre world where nothing is what it seems, except maybe for the smutty books her publisher produces, which are exactly what they seem.

From the blurb:

Sherwood.

The name immediately conjures up images of Richard Greene, Michael Praed and Russel Crowe. Or maybe that sly fox in the Disney version.

Only, in Anne R. Allen’s latest rom-com mystery the fox is a coyote and there’s no Robin Hood.

Or is there?

In her usual inimitable fashion Allen peels back the layers, one hilarious subplot after another, until you just never know what’s real and what’s not. Rather like the Robin Hood legend.

If you look very carefully you may just spot the Sheriff of Nottingham, Maid Marian and even Little John hidden away. But as for Robin Hood himself… You’ll just have to read it and find out.

To read it and find out you’ll need to go to amazon.com here or amazon.co.uk here.

Sherwood Ltd will be available on B&N and other platforms shortly.

2011
12/09
POSTED BY
CATEGORY
Mark Williams on Writing
6 comments

Review Wednesday – Gerry McCullough Discusses “Wendy and the Lost Boys” by Barbara Silkstone.

Another Wednesday, another review. But not just another book.

Today our resident reviewer Gerry McCullough is taking a look at the most recent book by America’s star indie-writer comedienne Barbara Silkstone.

Barbara’s Wendy and the Lost Boys is one of the finest examples of indie publishing I can think of, and has deservely enjoyed a huge surge in popularity in the US recently as word spreads about Babara’s multi-layered writing style and many-faceted humor.

But I’m in danger of pre-empting Gerry’s review if I say any more, so I’d best let the professionals take over.

Here’s Gerry.

I first came across Barbara Silkstone and her Fractured Fairytales a couple of years ago on Authonomy, when I was amused and impressed by the excerpt from her first book, The Secret Diary of Alice in Wonderland, Age 42 and Three-Quarters, which I read there. The title not only draws on Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice, but also links the book to the very funny Adrian Mole, Aged 13 and Three-Quarters which I read with joyful laughter when the series first came out, years ago.

Alice in Wonderland was probably one of the first real books I read, as opposed to picture books. (My little sister was awarded it as a Sunday School prize when she was a bit young to be able to read it, so I seized on it, read it from cover to cover, and still have very happy associations with it.) So Barbara’s book – what should I call it? A take off? A pastiche? Or perhaps a tribute? – delighted me. Her funny, feisty heroine Alice, reminiscent of Janet Evanovitch’s Stephanie Plum, was a real find, and the thriller plot was gripping and page turning.

And now, here comes another equally attractive thriller with a connection to a much loved children’s book, Wendy and the Lost Boys. Confession time – I’ve never actually read Peter Pan. (And why on earth not, you may well ask? I don’t really know!) But I first saw the Walt Disney cartoon at quite a young age and was enthralled by it. I’ve since watched it with my children and found myself still loving it. So Barbara’s new book held an immediate strong appeal for me.

Wendy Darlin, like Barbara Silkstone’s earlier heroine Alice Harte, is funny, feisty, and Stephanie Plum-like, but, unlike most of the very funny minor characters, she is a realistically drawn individual whom we connect to straightaway and for whom we find ourselves rooting throughout the book. Wendy is soft-hearted. She allows herself to be sucked into trouble with the terrible (but very amusing) villain Charlie Hook, captain of the Predator, a pirate ship in modern terms, purely because she can’t turn down the appeals for help from Marni. Wendy doesn’t even like Marni much, but she is the daughter of an old friend, and Wendy feels that she has to step in, and onto Hook’s yacht. So here she goes, plunging into a set of events which are hair raising, exciting, and laugh out loud funny; and meeting up with a set of characters whose idiosyncrasies make them by turns appealing, revolting, funny and terrifying.

Beginning with her husband Croc (Hook’s enemy – representing the crocodile in the original) and Roger Jolley (attractive apart from his brown wingtip shoes, but introducing himself as one of the dreaded SEC people) Wendy collects a number of strange and fascinating people around her. The weird array made up of Joseph, Mary, Annie, and Granddaddy Earl has to be read to be believed – if then! We are in a fantasy world, with people – at least the minor characters – who, like those of Alice in Wonderland, are caricatures, but still in some sense real and easy to relate to. But at the end of the day, it’s Wendy herself who sorts things out, solves the mysteries, and defeats the villain, while solving her own past hang-ups at the same time.

Barbara Silkstone has a real knack of not only naming her characters, but also of creating their idiosyncrasies, to fit in with her original. Wendy’s long lost boyfriend, Peter Payne, for instance, left her because he didn’t want to grow up and face the real world. But Silkstone shows us the dangerous side of this attitude, not just its attraction, unlike Barrie. And the secret of The Lost Boys, and whom they turn out to be, is both original and convincing.

If you like your thrillers to be fast moving, full of action, and with a surprise ending, this is for you. If you like your heroines warm hearted, brave, with a desire for justice but with occasional foolhardiness, this is for you. If you like a writer to be witty, skilful with words, and able to throw in the odd touch of enchantment in her descriptive passages, this is for you. (Mind you, you need to be happy with a fair bit of humour of the type not suitable for the original audience of Peter Pan or Alice, such as the recurring joke about Hook’s UpUGo, which I won’t spoil for you.) And if you like an ongoing touch of romance for your heroine, with various candidates for her affections, and a bit of a mystery as to whom she’ll end up with, resolved beautifully at the end, this also is for you.

Sound like your type of book? Wendy and the Lost Boys is definitely mine!

Thanks, Gerry.

I know you’re all dying to rush off and buy this, so let’s just add here that Wendy and the Lost Boys can be found on amazon.com here and amazon.co.uk here.

If Gerry has also tempted you to buy Barbara’s other book, you”ll find Barbara’s Alice on amazon.com here and on amazon.co.uk here. For Barbara’s  The Adventures of a Love Investigator, 527 Naked Men and One Woman you’ll need to go to amazon.com here and amazon.co.uk here.

You can find Barbara’s blog here.

*

Rather appropriately I read Wendy and the Lost Boys while stranded on a sandbank on a ferry on the River Gambia, being watched by hungry barracuda and bemused dolpins. Not to mention the mystified expressions of my fellow strandees, wondering what I found so amusing staring at this strange sheet of plastic in my hands, while everyone else was wndering if we would get home for dinner or end up as the barracuda’s dinner. Which just made the book all the more enjoyable.

Now you’re probably thinking, if I loved this book so much why didn’t I write the review myself. Well, I did put  a review on Amazon. here’s what I had to say:

This was just so much fun!

Right from the first page this story grabs your attention with laugh-out-loud one-liners that make it an embarrassment to read in public. But there’s much more than just comedy here. There is an intellectual underlay and a sharp, concise writing syle that sets this quite apart from the many other satirical / allegorical takes on the classics.

Without giving anything away, let’s just say I am in awe of the Lost Boys and the shadow problem, which a lesser writer might have reduced to farce, but here simply left me in awe.

From Barbara’s other books I had high hopes for Wendy & The Lost Boys, but this is easily the jewel in the Silkstone crown.

But be warned, this is not a book for children. This is the book where Peter Pan grows up. As does Hook, in a way JM Barrie might just have approved.

Highly recommended!

You can see why I leave the reviews to Gerry!

Next week here on MWi’s Review Wednesday it will be Charley Roberts’ turn to deliver the verdict, and on trial will be Marion G. Harmon’s superhero sensation Wearing the Cape.

For those unfamiliar, Gerry is the author of the highly-acclaimed Belfast Girls, which has had a great reception in the US and UK as well as Gerry’s homeland in Northern Ireland. Belfast Girls is available from amazon.com amd amazon.co.uk.

Gerry latest book is called Danger Danger. Available on amazon.com and amazon.co.uk.

Gerry blogs regularly here.

*

Tomorrow will be the official announcement if the release of Anne R. Allen’s latest book, Sherwood Ltd. If you like the sound of Wendy and the Lost Boys you’ll love Sherwood Ltd. Pop by by tomorrow to find out why.

2011
12/07
POSTED BY
CATEGORY
Mark Williams on Books
22 comments

Covering For Mark Williams, Part 1 – by Athanasios

Happy New Year!

No, this isn’t a scheduled post I’ve accidently published early. Just another reminder that there’s a great big world beyond Britain and the USA that we ignore at our peril.

Here in the Gambia it’s New Year’s Day, as here, like in many countries across the globe, we observe more than one calendar. And yes, we’ll also be celebrating Christmas and the western New Year on January 1st too. You can’t have too much of a good thing!

You.

Me.

It’s also winter here. I know you’re all freezing back in the UK and over in the USA and Canada (you may be faring better down under) so  I thought it fair I should say I’ve put on a short-sleeved shirt in solidarity with you all. Temperatures are unlikely to rise above 33C (91F) this week, and may drop to the low 70s F by night. But despite these hardships I somehow struggle into my “office” to bring you this latest MWi post.

And what a post!

Not only do we have now have regular slots on Sundays (tech’ stuff) and Wednesdays (reviews) but on Tuesdays we now have covers! Ebook covers, that is, beginning with a four-week series from one of our our resident covert artists, Athanasios, who’ll be taking us through the creative processes involved in putting a cover together.

Athanasios is the genius behind our Saffina Desforges Presents covers, which we are delighted with. We put forward our own ideas and he came up with something much better!

As we head into 2012 we’re really excited to have the likes of Athanasios and Elizabeth Ann West on board, because the New Year 2012 (Western calendar) will be the tipping point for publishing, when ebooks leave print standing, and the print’s spiral of decline accelerates. And the key reason for that will be enhanced ebooks.

I’ve discussed both here on MWi and over at WG2E about how enhanced ebooks will change the face of publishing beyond all recognition, and whether you welcome or deplore these developments they will happen regardless.

Whether you write straight adult fiction, YA, illustrated children’s book or non-fiction, 2012 is going to challenge and change the way you think about books, both as a reader and a writer.

Over the next four weeks we’re going to ease you all into 2012 with a closer look at the technical and artistic side of ebooks and all matters related, and as we go into 2012 we’ll show you with examples just how much and how fast things are changing.

If you missed the first of Elizabeth Ann West’s tech posts on Sunday be sure to check it out. For today I leave you in the capable hands of Athanasios (who also answers to Tom for those who find five syllable names a bit of a mouthful).

Covering For Mark Williams Part 1

 

I’m Athanasios, a VERY little known graphic/video artist in dvd/film production and until this summer I had never heard of Mark Williams or Saffina Desforges.

They were brought up when Cheryl Shireman, an online friend told me about their indie publishing success in the UK. She went on to tell me they were putting together MWiDP (Mark Williams international Digital Publishing) a consortium of sorts to publicize and bring together lesser, almost unknown, indie authors alongside big names. It sounded like a great place to be so I joined MWiDP. I’m happy to be part of their imprint in Europe and have enjoyed every experience with Mark & Saffi. It seems like the start of good things. They even respond to my direct email, pleasantly I might add.

My previous publishing experience wasn’t always so bright or pleasant. It consisted of fruitless years trying to find a literary agent or publisher for my Occult/Horror Thriller Mad Gods. It was endless queries and barren or stillborn responses to any effort I put into getting attention from traditional publishers or agents. I decided to publish through Amazon & Smashwords.

I then researched what to do and followed the requisite steps to promote. I joined KDP Forums and Kindleboards and took part in discussions on how to promote indie publishing and get paying readers for Mad Gods. There was also goodreads, shelfari and a whole catalogue of promotional sites I’ve still got on a list somewhere. I was already a part of facebook.

One day in early spring 2011 I joined a fledgling facebook group called Indie Writers Unite! It was and still remains a lively, energetic and helpful bunch of indie authors who are free and open with their help and opinions on anything and everybody. Periodically members of the group posted their covers and asked for feedback, to be honest most wanted praise or just to promote their upcoming release: both valid reasons for posting. I gave my opinion on a number of occasions and I think it improved their covers. I found it time consuming to be explaining in words what was much quicker if I just showed what I would do. So I started just taking their examples, took them apart and put them back together in ways I thought improved them.

I have been in graphics and film production for well past a decade and still pay my bills by pixel and dpi manipulation. I think I’m a credible voice on how to improve any visual element to a work. So when asked I do just that. Some of the work I helped is below in before and after form. The process took me less time than describing it.
Remember: Picture=1000 words.

After a few such instances Danielle Blanchard Benson, another fellow Indie Writers Unite! member or IWUer, told me she wanted me to redo her whole line of books: The Beautiful People. I took all the pictures and worked on them in Photoshop so they could be full page, chose fonts and text positioning that made each book look like it belonged together in a cohesive and complete series. The pictures themselves make me think of Swedish Erotica, the old, 1970s pulp porn movies so that’s what I emulated.

I experimented with different covers for Mad Gods. I began with my own version of the believed symbol of the Illuminati, a mysterious cabal of history linked to Satanism and Global Elite. I changed it to subtle represent the key characters of Mad Gods: Kostadino and his adopted son Adam. Kostadino is a descendant of Byzantine Emperors depicted by the worn and faded double-headed eagle and his cause is as lost in history as the relief floor sculpture. On top of that is the plastic covered, tin happy face button that depicts Adam who is infatuated with shows, movies, music and news. The fact that Adam is the Antichrist is subtly shown with the stereotypical symbols of Satanism on this contemporary cultural symbol.

I enjoyed doing covers so much that I decide to do one for every chapter in Mad Gods. After finishing all 22 chapters I included them in a limited version of the full Mad Gods on ebay. I used an illustrative style that I thought was evocative of the story.

This then prompted me to change main Mad Gods cover to suit the rest of the illustrated chapter heads. I used the same illustrative style with Kostadino and Adam standing enigmatically before a wall covered by the horsemen of the apocalypse.


As much as I enjoyed and loved this new cover it was short lived because it did not help sales. I looked at it critically and concluded it made Mad Gods look like a comic and not the Occult/Horror Thriller I intended. Another revision came with the current cover that shows the skewed and twisted life Adam was saved from by Kostadino. The current cover now better reflects the true nature of the story: the terror and fractured sensibilities Adam is fighting to come to terms with.


This week I shared how I started making covers. Next week I’ll go into the steps in making a cover for authors. I describe the machinations involved in giving them what they want.

I’m always willing to help with indie authors with their covers. More examples of my work are @: Covers For Hire or email me @: mad-gods@videtron.ca.

Athanasios, thank you very much.

I have the advantage of having seen the forthcoming posts, and can promise you  some fascinating insights into what goes into the cover design process. Makes sure you’re back here next Tuesday for the next instalment!

But dont stay away from MWi meanwhile. Tomorrow is Review Wednesday and Thursday sees the official announcement of the release of Anne R Allen’s latest book, Sherwood Ltd., though the eagle-eyed among you will have spotted it’s already live on Amazon.

I should also add Athanasios is not the only cover designer working with MWiDP, and we also have several authors who design their own covers with fantastic results. We’ll be exploring them all over the coming weeks and months, as MWi and MWiDP take on a whole new look into 2012. Watch out for more news on that soon!

Meanwhile, if you’re impressed with Athanasios’s work come along and say so. Remember, you can always call him Tom if you can’t spell Athanasios!

 

Athanasios’s webpage is

Athanasios’s Covers For Hire page is

Mad Gods buy pages are

Commitment buy pages are 
2011
12/06
POSTED BY
CATEGORY
Mark Williams on Writing
14 comments

Sunday’s Tech Talk with Author Elizabeth Ann West: Links

Mark Says:

Turning Over a New Leaf

Turning over a new leaf: organization!

I promised a few weeks ago I’d introduce some organization to this blog, and if you’ve been watching very, very carefully you might have seen the odd example of it happening.

For instance, the regular Wednesday Review seems to be appearing regularly on Wednesdays. If you’re not a regular visitor you won’t appreciate just what an earth-shattering achievement that is.

This coming Tuesday one of our resident cover artists (the guy who created the wonderful Saffina Desforges Presents cover for us) will be commencing a four-part series on cover production.

And on Sundays Elizabeth Ann West will be here making sense of the techie side of ebooks and writing in the ebook age.

If you’re like me, IT is a scary word. It’s a foreign language so alien to mankind that only in the last few decades have we even begun to explore its bizarre syntax, crazy conjugations and impossible pronunciation.

So Elizabeth Ann West has drawn the short straw, and will be here every Sunday giving us some pointers on IT mumbo jumbo and how it can make our lives easier. Elizabeth thinks it’s simple even a child can do it.

And of course, they can. Kids can do anything. But what about an adult writer like you or I? Can she make IT make sense for us? We’re about to find out.

It was hardly a short straw…. I think I got the good end of this deal! :) I’m happy to be here every Sunday!

Basic HTML Authors MUST Know: What’s In a Link, Anyway?

Welcome to the technology isn’t scary/hard/outside of my comfort zone series! Every Sunday, you can sit and chat with yours truly and we’re going to demystify the things that beep with little lights. I’m not going to throw you in the deep end, don’t worry. Today, we’re going to start by treading water in the shallows with a most basic HTML function an author* must know: links.

NB: That’s ALL authors. Not just the self-published or indie author.

Attitude Check

Before we begin our journey, I have a slight requirement from the class. Ready? Smile in place. That’s right. We’re not going to go into this series with fear. Fear is for the people too weak to try anything. We are courageous. We are mountain climbers. We are those who dare. And if you ever have ANY questions, email me. Eawestwrites on gmail.

Here We Go Linky-Do, Here We Go Linky-Lie

Can you dial a phone number? Yes? Good, then you can understand links! A link is just the Internet’s version of a telephone number. Let’s look at the parts of a phone number:

(555) 555-5555.

The parenthesis is what? The area code. It tells the phone the general area you are calling and whether or not to charge you outrageous long distance fees. Next is the prefix. The prefix relates to specific neighborhoods in that area code. Growing up, my phone number was 479-1759. My neighbor’s was also 479 and four more digits. And the boy down the street I totally crushed on? 479-1129. Cell phones, at least in the United States, have eradicated much of the geographical references in phone numbers. Finally, the suffix. Those last 4 digits are what designates a unique home in that area code and in THAT prefix area.

But Elizabeth, that’s a phone number, not a link. Ah, stay with me. Let’s look at a link from my blog.

http://eawestwriting.com/books/buy-cancelled-ebook-direct

Http:// – that part is like picking up the phone. You can’t call anyone unless you pick up the phone. Sometimes, people use a phone on a secure line. For the Internet, that’s a link with https://

eawestwriting.com – There’s the area code! This tells the web browser you want to go to my site specifically instead of the millions and millions of other sites out there.

/books – My site is organized. This is the prefix that begins to narrow down the area of my site you want to go to. This could have been /news or /aboutme and so on.

/buy-cancelled-ebook-direct – Now we have the unique part of the URL, our Internet “phone number.” There isn’t another post or page on my website with this ending, which is also the page title. Why? Because I don’t want to confuse visitors or the search engines. This is like calling up a specific house in a specific neighborhood.

Search Engine Tip: Be thoughtful when you title pages and posts. In the above example, I call my post “Buy Cancelled ebook direct” This was on purpose. I get credit in the search engines for the phrase “Buy Cancelled” and “Buy Cancelled Ebook.” Same with my categorization “books.” Search engines like to see related words and phrases on the page and in the URL for top results. Using “Products” or “Christmas Sweaters” wouldn’t be a good use of SEO (search engine optimization) and your readers will think you belong in a loony bin because you aren’t selling Christmas sweaters. You’re selling books.

Understanding a link is important for a number of reasons, especially when you are planning your own websites and blogs.

  • Are you using logical, but human friendly URLs?

  • Do you categorize areas of your site so your reader is clear about the part of the website they are in?

  • You can see how a minor typo in a link, making it broken, is just like dialing a wrong phone number.

You can LEARN information about a site from a link. Let’s glance at a link full of gobbledy-gunk:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005MW1RL2/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=eawestwriting-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399373&creativeASIN=B005MW1RL2

WHAT A MESS! But we can dissect it. The site it’s going to is obvious, Amazon. No idea what gp stands for, but product makes sense. Then there’s B005MW1RL2. Guess what that is? It’s my ASIN for my U.S. ebook, Cancelled. The ref= information refers to how this link should behave, it opens in a new tab. ie=UTF8 identifies the character set that should be used (for other languages, this is different) and that eawestwriting-20 is my Amazon Affiliate name. The rest of the link? That helps identify the shopping trip purchases for my Amazon Affiliate report.

Links are the vehicle of selling your books on the Internet. Now that we learned the basics, and saw a link that goes above and beyond, let’s look at ways to make links work for us!

Just How Effective IS My Marketing Going?

One of the neatest tools available to authors is a link shortener. There are many free ones out there, I use bit.ly. Remember that massive link up above for my Amazon Affiliate link? Using bit.ly, I shortened:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005MW1RL2/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=eawestwriting-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399373&creativeASIN=B005MW1RL2

to

http://bit.ly/CNXaakindle

Bit.ly makes the initial ending tag random, but I customize mine to keep track of my link traffic. For example, anytime I tweet my U.S. Book version, that is the link I put at the end. This link sometimes changes if I’m tweeting through Hootsuite (a website that let’s you schedule tweets), as they have their own link shortener that begins with hoot.(rest of link). But even when Hootsuite shortens the shortened link, the servers at bit.ly get clued in that the link was clicked on.

Since my book is called CANCELLED, I use CNX on all of my shortened links for it. This will help immensely when my next book comes out next year! The “aa” tells me it’s my Amazon Affiliate link, and the kindle is just to make the link user friendly. A reader seeing the shortened link won’t know what bit.ly is, but they recognize the word “kindle” thus expecting to go to Amazon.

Bit.ly will show me how many people click on each of my shortened links (I shorten EVERYTHING, including my interviews on other sites so I can make sure I’m driving enough traffic there). It will also show me the COUNTRY the click came from. :) This information helped me tweak my tweets to make my UK links clearer to people it’s for, readers in the UK. (I sell my UK version through Mark Williams). I noticed a high percentage of U.S. clicks on my UK Amazon link when I put #Ukkindle at the end of the tweet. I now mention UK somewhere up front, or put the hashtag up front, and this greatly cut down on the amount of erroneous clicking. I would never have known there was an issue with my tweet format if I didn’t track my link clicks.

I’m a big believer in the 10% rule of advertising: 10% of the people who SEE the ad will click and 10% of those people will buy. So 100 people see an ad, 10 will click, 1 will buy. This holds somewhat true for my tweeted links. I average 10 clicks daily on my Amazon U.S. link and I’m seeing 1-2 sales per day. My UK links gets fewer sales, but I just started to reach out to that market, and I’m not British, so that probably hampers my tweet reach. But I’m not giving up! :)

Make links blend in.

But, But, I WANT a Pretty Link

Everyone still smiling? We’ve learned the parts of a link, what each part does, and how we can use links. I know this is long, but I promise after this blog post you’re going to recognize concepts you learned here all week.

There are times when a link needs to blend in with the text around. In talking about your book, in an interview or blog post, you might want just the book title to be a hyperlink to a site. My first post on Mark Williams was called On Safari to Find the Reader. See how that’s just words to click? The HTML behind that is:

<a href=“http://markwilliamsinternational.com/2011/10/23/on-safari-to-find-the-reader-elizabeth-ann-west-is-armed-and-dangerous/”>On Safari to Find the Reader</a>

Many programs do this automatically, or give you a clever little chain icon to make a piece of text a link. But it’s always a good idea to know what’s going on under the hood because you can then fix things when they break.

<a> </a> These are the HTML anchor tags. HTML tags are always surrounded by these symbols: < >. Call them alligators (I do), less than and greater than signs, etc. The / means stop. Think of this as walkie-talkie speaking. When you start, you usually give your handle then say OVER to signal you’re done speaking. The computer needs these tags to know when to start what’s in the middle and when to stop.

Href stands for hyperlink reference. Programmers are slackers too, who wants to type hyperlinkreference? No one. Hence the abbreviation.

The quotation marks are another universal piece in many programming languages as a text delimiter. It’s plastic wrap around the actual text of the link so the computer or browser knows the characters inside of the quotation marks go together.

There’s one last little part of that hyperlink I didn’t include, but you should probably know.

<a target=“_blank” href=“http://markwilliamsinternational.com/2011/10/23/on-safari-to-find-the-reader-elizabeth-ann-west-is-armed-and-dangerous/”>On Safari to Find the Reader</a>

Ooooh. Target=“_blank” If you’ve clicked the link you’ve probably figured out what that does. If you haven’t, give it a go and impress yourself.

Anchor tags can have MANY HTML attributes (we will get into this more with images next week). Target is one of them. Target=“_blank” is a very handy attribute because it opens the link in a new tab or window. So if you are putting links on your blog, or into an interview, it’s a nice courtesy to use this attribute. It allows the reader to navigate away from the website she is on without losing the site or having to cycle through a ton of Backs to find where she left off.

PHEW…. YOU ARE NOW A LINK MASTER

I'm clapping for all of you!

I’m glad everyone made it to the end. Links are just the Internet’s phone numbers. The parts of a link are very important, and used by search engines to judge what is on any given web page. You can use links to learn about the type of website you are going to (and probably now see a phishing scam a mile away!). Links are also great tools to track how effective your marketing efforts are. Finally, you should also now be able to put a link into a page with manual HTML if necessary.

Come back next week as we tackle images and how to make them work! And again, if you have ANY questions, I will be checking up on the comments here and I am available via email.

 Always Smiling,

Elizabeth Ann West

(Tech Guru for Mark Williams DPI and the WoMen’s Literary Cafe)

Disclosure: I am not a programmer nor do I hold a computer science degree. I hold a Bachelor’s of Art like many other writers, I’ve just always been technologically inclined from an early age. My husband and I are geeks, with more computers than family members. I’ve ran Windows, Mac, and currently run Linux (Ubuntu). I read documentation, have volunteered to write documentation for the Fedora project, and generally never give up until I understand something. This is why my mantra is firmly “If I can do it, YOU can do it.” I hope we have many enlightening Sundays together, and if you ever find a resource that contradicts me, share it. I’m always happy to learn!

2011
12/04
POSTED BY
CATEGORY
Tech Talk
36 comments
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