Sizzling Summer Sale

Love it, Ann.

alj wrote:

I'm working on a cover for "From Belfast to St. Joe" for Smashwords. What do you think?



Ann

It looks classic. I mean that in a good way.

Classic is what I was working for. Thanks.

Ann

With or without the tall ship:

With. This is how it will look on Smashwords:

Might want to choose a different font color. It looks a little washed out, and it's not all that easy to read at the size it will appear.

Good point, E Don. I have already done some tweaking, and Shelagh sent me an even darker version than my new one. The font shows up much better in both.

I just checked my Smashwords dashboard. Both books are still pending approval, but "Incident" has already had 26 downloads and two member library links.

I decided to put a $.99 fee on "Belfast" and see what the difference might be.

Ann

If you use the ship, do a bit of color matching on the square crop around the ship itself. It may not show up as bad in a smaller image as it does in the large one though.

That was part of the tweaking. Thanks for noticing.

Ann

The first nine books, short stories and/or collections just loaded onto Barnes and Noble for the Nook reader. Neither of the free ones are available yet, but at least they're beginning to show up.

I suppose the other 20 or so will soon be there.

Now it's a waiting game.

It's starting to get exciting, Don!

Yeah it is. And I'm still uploading more.

I have a ton of work to get that many ready to load. I am rewriting Arirang into three ebooks. I'll need to pull the ebook already at Kindle. I have twenty short stories I need to tweak - and create covers. The covers are throwing me for a bit of a tizzy. I admire the complexity of Ann's cover. I'll pull of e. Don and see what the Kindles look like...........I've been writing all day and am pretty dull at the moment.

DK, with the covers on my original Kindle shorts, I wasn't going for fancy, just for functional. They're mostly a blended color with a picture of me and the title of the story.

On the two Harpe books, I redesigned the covers completely from the original PA covers, and on the Smashword covers I went for a basic design with a minimum of art work and colors that I hope are eye catching.

We'll see how it works, and if I have to I'll go back and do some more complicated covers. Not unless it's necessary though.

Save your covers as PNG files, as that will give you the highest resolution, and Smashwords does look at that.

I just use an old Print Shop program, DK. I tried photoshop for a while, but it drove me crazy. I have to pop the image back and forth from Print Shop to paintbrush every now and then, but it works OK for me. It's much more user friendly.

Ann

Microsoft Publisher is a good program, and so is Open Office.org, which is a free download and has a drawing program also. It will allow you to export files as PDF's if you choose to go with a print version, and will also let you save a cover drawing as a picture, in PNG format.

I still have Microsoft Picture It on my computer, and it will also allow you to save as a PNG.

You can save files as JPEG's and usually Kindle will use them, but the clarity isn't as good as PNG.

And if you're going to use pictures, take some shots that are appropriate with your camera and use them. If you copy something from the internet you never know if it's copyrighted, and while there isn't much of a chance of someone seeing the cover and bring a lawsuit, it could happen.

The sky, flowers, hills, etc are always good, and if you own the picture nobody can say anything about it.

I know what you mean. Lynn, Chris, and I spent a morning in early May taking pictures of Enchanted Rock, for just that reason.



Ann

Beautiful, Ann.

Downloads slowed yesterday afternoon but picked up again this morning. MPFM is just outside the top hundred free downloads in the Kindle Store:

#107 Free in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Free in Kindle Store)
#2 in Kindle Store > Books > Fiction > Children's Fiction > Literature > Science Fiction, Fantasy, Mystery & Horror
#5 in Kindle Store > Books > Children's eBooks

This is the third day of the free offer and the book has just broken into the top one hundred free downloads in the Kindle Store:

#98 Free in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Free in Kindle Store)
#2 in Kindle Store > Books > Fiction > Children's Fiction > Literature > Science Fiction, Fantasy, Mystery & Horror
#5 in Kindle Store > Books > Children's eBooks

Good work, Shelagh.

BTW, Redstone Stories: Vision Quest is now free on Smashwords.

Ann

Me again. I've also added a pdf file of Vision Quest to my website "Documents" page as another way to download it free.
And if you want to see the difference between the clarity and sharpness of a png to a jpeg image, as E. Don mentioned, look at the difference between the two cover images on that page.

Thanks for the advice, E. Don.

Ann

Downloads total is currently 607 and MPFM is:

#51 Free in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Free in Kindle Store)
#2 in Kindle Store > Books > Fiction > Children's Fiction > Literature > Science Fiction, Fantasy, Mystery & Horror
#4 in Kindle Store > Books > Children's eBooks

As of yesterday afternoon (EST), MPFM is now free on amazon.com. The number of downloads exceeded 1,700 in less than a day. Currently, the book is

#41 Free in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Free in Kindle Store)
#1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > Action & Adventure

On amazon.co.uk the number of downloads since Friday, 22nd July is 1,285. The book is

#45 Free in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Free in Kindle Store)
#2 in Kindle Store > Books > Fiction > Children's Fiction > Literature > Science Fiction, Fantasy, Mystery & Horror
#3 in Kindle Store > Books > Children's eBooks