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Kickstarter Best Practices
Finally Able To Do It Again… After two months of not being able to list Kickstarters from the writers on Kickstarter Best Practices free class because of my eye issues, I was able to do so tonight. Sorry about missing those of you who did campaigns in the last two months. Just not able to do it with the eye issues. Those of you thinking about doing a Kickstarter campaign, give me a chance to look at it ahead of time to help you fund. Just email me the preview link and I’ll be glad to take a look. And yes, I listed my own campaign as well. A Make…
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Cover Fun… Sale Extended One Day
Not Sure if Teachable Was Having Troubles on Sunday… So the August half-off workshop sale is extended until Monday night. Detail in previous posts. Now for Cover Fun I spent a few hours today doing covers. Four new short story covers and one new Smith’s Monthly cover. Had a good time with them. They all use my templates so other than finding the art, they were quick and easy. Thought I show you them just for fun like I do every other month or so. The four short stories are all original stories done this year.
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Last Bits of Smith’s Monthly #63
Just Finishing SMITH’S MONTHLY #63 Up Tonight… Fun thing to do on a Friday night. As many of you know, I do all the layout of the magazine, and every month I have a blast with it. There are four original stories in this issue, plus another collection of stories and the novel that is the header of this web site. MELODY RIDGE, which is a combination Jukebox Novel and Thunder Mountain Novel. It is the origin story of all my jukebox stories. So I wanted to put the collection of the short stories, with how the jukebox stories came about, and how thirty years after I started them I…
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Monthly Cover Fun
At Least Fun for Me… Every month with Smith’s Monthly I get to do all the covers for the short stories in the issue, plus the exterior cover. And sometimes I put the covers here. This month was fairly easy, actually. There are ten short stories in this issue and one novel. But the six of the short stories are in a collection I put together, so I had already done the covers and the cover for the collection. (The entire collection is in the issue.) And one of the short stories was in an another collection I just put out, so that cover is already done as well. So…
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Cover Fun for #52 of Smith’s Monthly…
Five Short Stories and the Issue Cover… I was having fun working on these covers, stopped for dinner, came back and my InDesign had blown a fuse. Not kidding. It wanted me to sign up for a seven day free trial. Well, I had been using InDesign for decades. I tried everything, and considering this is Saturday, I was going to be out of luck until I could get help from Allyson and Josh at WMG on Monday. But Kris convinced me on late Saturday night to call Allyson, that she was still up because Kris had just gotten a text from her on another matter. So I did and…
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Some Covers…
Just For Fun!! Since I might have had the hardest workout today moving since I ran that marathon in November, I have no brain for anything tonight, so since I had not displayed Smith’s Monthly #51 covers yet, thought I would do so. Cover for #51 and #52, as well as all five short story covers. #51 is the July issue and will be out shortly, meaning the next day or so. The move pushed it back in the month. All short stories each issue will be up for sale about the time the next issue comes out. And The Big Tom short novel is also now in a cat…
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Short Story Covers for #50…
With The Help of Angel… I did these five short story covers for the short stories in #50 in about 1 hour and 45 minutes. April demanded some pets along the way and some attention and there is a new picture of her after the covers. Turns out four of the five covers were tough art choices which also took me a little longer. All stories are in my regular series, so I went back to styles I had done before and stayed in cover style. Of course, tonight all five were in Smith’s Stories branding form. Sorry these came in so large. Something messed up here in my media…
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Very Impressed…
The Covers From the Covers 101 Workshop… The writers who managed to get through to the last assignment of the covers workshop produced some stunning book covers. The Covers 101 Workshop is a step-by-step process workshop in design and layout of covers. I just got done earlier tonight going through Assignment #5 in the Covers 101 workshop (first time it was offered) and basically all were professional covers that would sell books. I showed Kris a few and she just said, “Wow!” A couple writers, as expected, thought they could write sales copy for the back cover without training and failed, horribly, but this wasn’t a sales copy workshop, it…
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Cover Basics
I Got a Surprise Today… With the Covers 101 workshop starting next week, I decided I needed to round out my education a little on what the writers were doing who hired people to do their covers. All of you know I think that is a waste of time and money and can hurt your writing overall, but numbers of writers I know have others do their covers, so I was curious. So I wrote one wrier and asked a favor, if that person wouldn’t mind sending me a blank copy of the contract they use with their cover designer. I got a nice letter back saying they didn’t have…
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A Quick Covers Post
Different Aspects of Cover Art… I tell writers to do their own covers. The levels of critical voice excuses I get back are amazing. And all the excuses are geared to make sure the writer fails. After all, that is what critical voice does, it stops you. In this modern world, unless you have a ton of money you want to just toss into a garbage can, no writer can afford to hire covers done. Wait, let me change that. No moderately prolific writer can afford the time, the money, the problems that come with having someone else do your covers. Moderately prolific? Four novels and a number of short…