Writing and publishing books has changed so much by 2017 as to be nearly incomprehensible from the old model of finding a publisher who will take your hard work and bring it successfully to the public.
Today, authors and especially indie authors by necessity have to do most if not all of the work themselves of not only writing their book but seeing to creation of book covers, publication in various formats, and advertising and media work to get the word out on their special creation they want to share with the world.
Today, authors and especially indie authors by necessity have to do most if not all of the work themselves of not only writing their book but seeing to creation of book covers, publication in various formats, and advertising and media work to get the word out on their special creation they want to share with the world.
As
an indie I’ve discovered several amazing free resources out there to help me
with the various aspects of putting together my books including the interior
design, book covers, social media advertising, and so much more. So here’s an early 2017 round up of some
wonderful free resources that I’ve found and use. I hope they may be of use to you in your
efforts to become a successful published author today.
Fabulous
website of hundreds of free use fonts for commercial use listed under themed
categories. These are great to use for
your promo Twitter cards, blog posts, and even dramatic text design within your
book or on your book covers.
Free Images and
Attribution-Free Images from Pixabay
Pixabay
is one of the greatest sites for free images not only for the quality of their
images but because they are also attribution free (though I try to give credit
to the author of an image I use as often as possible). All images are Creative Commons CC0 so you
are free to use them commercially, on your blogs, on items that you sell, for
your book covers, business cards, etc.
They are my total go-to image source now. You can ‘donate’ coffee money to any of the
individuals whose images you use though I believe all the monies that go into a
central pot to be paid to contributors.
So
now you need a utility where to use those great images!
Free Online
Photo Editing with iPiccy
Truly
there are dozens of really good free online photo editors. I found iPiccy when I first started and since
I’ve learned a lot about their features, I’ve stuck with using them to create
many composite images that I use for ads as well as for creating book
covers. But they can be used for so many
more applications.
Here’s
where I create my Twitter promo cards as I can upload a book cover image or
other image that I want to combine with text to create an ‘ad’ which can be
saved to a scaled MB size of your choice.
Here’s
a sneak preview of my cover for Immortelle, book 2 in my Iron Web series!
Calibre – Free
Book Converter
Take
your MS Word ebook file and convert it to a variety of different formats,
including Mobi for kindle, and ePub.
Of
course, when uploading to Amazon, they have their own program. Smashwords too has their own ‘grinder’ that
authors use when uploading there.
Free Music
Incompetech
provides free music selections in my categories, very easy to download. They do ask for attribution but this is easy
enough to add at the end of your video trailers, etc.
There
are several categories of types of music to choose from so go check them out to
see if they have something for your next project.
Free Movie Maker
App/MS Word
Included
in the MS Word suite is Movie Maker.
This is a very easy to use program that enables you to load images,
other videos, and music to put together your own video. I use this to create book trailers (have to
get onto my next one for that!) but there are many different applications
limited only by your own imagination.
The
program comes with a variety of features that allow you to put various movie
type effects onto your images such as fade in, pixelate in, etc. There are loads of effects that you can apply
to your images. You can also easily
upload a music file to your creation.
You can apply overlay captions, and there’s even a specific Credits
slide.
There
are lots of features in Movie Maker so you have to get in there and play around
to get a good idea of what can be achieved!
This is one of my very early endeavours:
More Freebies
Internet’s
largest free database of literary agents for those looking:
Free
service to find out if anyone has plagiarised your work
Character
Development Tool (a personality test that then gives personality traits!)
HumanmetricsHopefully some of these free resources will help you on your quest to becoming a successful self-published or agent/book house published author. Happy spring everyone!
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