In this episode we cover: 

• Why you need a headshot
• How a shoot works
• Considerations for tone and mood of photos
• How to prepare for a shoot
• Common mistakes in shoots

This week’s question is: Have you got a professional headshot?

Recommendation of the week is: Life in a Fishbowl by Len Vlahos

Apple 

Kobo 

Amazon UK

Amazon USA

***this show uses affiliate links

Events I mentioned are:

The York Writers Conference 2021. Three days, nine guest speakers, and plenty of opportunity to network and chat with authors from all over. Sessions include writer’s craft and marketing workshops. Join Friday evening for a virtual cocktail party with opening remarks from our honorary patron, Terry Fallis. Then workshops begin Saturday with a lunchtime Keynote with Andrew Pyper and of course, Sacha Black.

When: October 22-24, 2021

Where: Zoom – Register here

Find out more about Ed at:

@LastmanPhotography

Rebel of the Week is: Sarah W. Sparx

If you’d like to be a Rebel of the week please do send in your story, it can be any kind of rebellion. You can email your rebel story to rebelauthorpodcast@gmail.com or instagram me @sachablackauthor

No new patrons this week, but a big thank you to my existing patrons. If you’d like to support the show, and get early access to all the episodes as well as bonus content you can from as little as $2 a month by visiting: www.patreon.com/sachablack

The post 101 Author Headshots Making the Most of your Photographer with Ed Crowther appeared first on Sacha Black.

You can check out the other posts here:

3 Things You Need to Create The Perfect Gothic Story

11 Must Do’s When Creating A Podcast

4 Top Tips For Self-Publishing Your First Novel

But today, I welcome the lovely Helen Jones, to talk about book covers. I recently talked about mastering your genre’s book cover. But Helen goes into a tone of useful things you need to consider, that I hadn’t even thought of. So her post was super useful for me this week, because I just sent off my cover design brief! *squeal*. Without further ado…. Helen…

The old adage says ‘Never judge a book by its cover.’

However, that’s exactly what many of today’s book purchasers do. With such a wealth of books available to choose from, having a strong, professional looking book cover is one way to stand out from the crowd. Of course, an exciting blurb and a well-written story are also very important, but you only get one chance to make a first impression. Whether you create the cover yourself or work with a designer, there are several things to consider when designing a cover for your book:

ONE – Make the finished design as professional as possible

Just as your story should be properly edited and formatted, so too should your cover look as though it has been designed professionally, especially if you want to compete against the other 99,000+ books in your category.

TWO – How the design works at different sizes

You may have commissioned a beautiful painting or detailed photograph that looks amazing at full size, but which loses many of the details when it’s at thumbnail size (the online display size for your book). Using strong text elements can make it stand out more when it’s at a reduced size.

THREE – The style of your cover

The type of font you use and the image you choose should suit the story inside. For example, flowery curling fonts are well suited to novels in the romance genre, while solid block type tends to suit thrillers or crime novels. Look at other books in your genre for inspiration (but not outright copying!)

FOUR – Repeating Elements

If you’re writing a series, creating a design element to be used on all book covers throughout will tie the whole thing together and give readers a strong visual to guide them through the series.

FIVE – Different devices

Consider how the cover looks in black and white, as this is how it will display on many e-reader devices. Even though at that point you’ve probably already made a sale, a well-designed cover will catch the eye, especially if the reader has a lot of books to choose from.

Many writers who choose to self publish use stock images for their cover artwork. There are several reasons for doing so: the images are sharp and professional, they are easily found online, and it’s not always possible to take the photo you need yourself. Several years ago, I used to work in advertising, and one of the roles I held involved purchasing all stock photography for a large agency. I had to negotiate rights and usages for each image, so it would be fair to say I know a little bit about the process. Stock photos tend to fall into one of three categories:

Rights managed

These are images which require rights to be purchased for their usage. These fees are based on number of uses, the area where the image will be used, the length of time it will be used for and a few other variables, including fees paid to models who may appear in the image. Therefore, I wouldn’t recommend using this type of image for your cover, as it’s quite difficult to predict how many copies you will sell or where, and to purchase a blanket usage license would be quite costly!

Royalty Free

These are images for which you pay a single fee, then you’re free to use them as often as you like, wherever you like. Therefore, they are quite useful for cover designs. However, you don’t own the exclusive rights to the image, so it can be used by someone else at any time.

Free

There are lots of sites offering free stock images, some of which are excellent. However, some downsides can include the images not being of the best quality, or that you have to enrol and pay a subscription fee to access the images without watermarks. Also, I have seen free sites with the disclaimer that images are not to be used for commercial purposes, which then discounts them being used on the cover of your book. I recommend to always check the fine print before using any of these images.

Own Photos

You could also try taking your own photographs. I’ve shot some really nice images with my IPhone and it’s fun to play around with them and see what can be created. Apps such as Prisma let you try different effects, and even Microsoft Word has a number of tools to add filters, change colours, adjust exposure, or crop the image into something much smaller.

When it came to designing the covers for my Ambeth books, I wanted them to have a vintage feel, like the embossed leather books you find in antique shops. I also wanted an element that could be used across all the books, tying them together as a set. I worked with Rich Jones at Turning Rebellion (who also happens to be my brother) – the sword and cup images are my own illustrations, then my clever (brother) designer came up with the band element and the wonderful shaded backgrounds. Suffice it to say I’m very pleased with the end result.

Of course cover designs are as subjective as stories themselves – some people will love what you’ve done, while others won’t like it at all. But if you present the most professional, well-designed cover you can, I think that’s half the battle.

Oak and Mist, No Quarter and Hills And Valleys are all available on Amazon.

Helen Jones was born in the UK, then lived in Canada and Australia before returning to England several years ago. The thought of finding magic in ordinary places is one that inspires her; when she was a child she did find a strange valley and hear a scream – the incident stayed with her and was the starting point of the Ambeth Chronicles. She has worked as a freelance writer for the past ten years, runs her own blog at http://www.journeytoambeth.com and has contributed guest posts to others, including the Bloomsbury Writers & Artists site. When she’s not writing, she likes to walk, paint and study karate. She’s now working on several other novels unrelated to Ambeth, enjoying the chance to explore other fantasy worlds.

Why not get even more awesome writing tips in the book 13 Steps To Evil – How to Craft Superbad Villains. Click this link and just tap the logo of your device or regular bookshop and it will take you to the right page. You can also get a FREE villains cheatsheet and a villain’s short course by joining my mailing list just click here.

Read Keepers, the first book in my Young Adult fantasy series now. Or to hear more about the release of the sequels as well as get regular CogMail updates you can do so here.

You can also find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Goodreads

The post 5 Things to Remember When Designing Your Book Cover With @AuthorhelenJ appeared first on Sacha Black.

Having scrutinised it, I have to say I highly recommend it as a design site. For those of you who don’t have photoshop and illustrator its the perfect substitute. It has a plethora of professional looking templates for everything from book covers, blog photos, infographics, flyers, posters, cover photos… anything you could want it has pre made templates which you can edit to your hearts desire.

If you want to increase your blog traffic next year I am certain this tool will help.

ONE – Templates Galore

Canva has templates with the optimised sizes and pixels for everything from:

Every type of social media – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest. It has a variety of book cover templates with fully customisable functions, magazines, letters, presentation templates, infographics, album covers, cover photos for all social media, invitations, event designs and much more.

TWO – Infographics

The reason I find this such a useful tool is for its infographic capabilities. I have for a long time, searched for a tool with the mechanism to create infographics for free. With Canva, as long as you have your own photos or use their free ones – you can. Every image you create otherwise is the standard price of a dollar.

Infographics if you don’t know, are long thin images with standout facts and figures, or hints and tips,  this is one I created in just a few minutes.

I know infographics aren’t everyones cup of tea, but they are hugely popular on Pinterest, which drives an obscene amount of traffic to my site – if you want to up your traffic this is a no brainer, especially if you get them onto Pinterest.

THREE  – Attracting Traffic

Everyones knows photos attract people to your media, I wrote about how to create them in this post: 4 Easy Steps To Seriously Awesome Blog Post Photos. This is a catch all site that gives you the ability to create photos and media for all your sites in one quick go AND they are already set up in eye catching templates. Which means, traffic, traffic, traffic.

FOUR – Functionality

It’s functionality its intuitive. With a panel on the left for all the icons and an easy drag and drop system into the main panel for anything you want to pop into your graphics.

Fonts are changeable, text moveable and just about everything can be edited. If you can use wordpress, you can use Canva. Not because it looks and works the same, but because its as simple and intuitive as wordpress.

It also has a tutorial if you get stuck.

FIVE – Motivation & Inspiration

Have ever wanted to have a book cover before your book is finished? You know just to see? To play around and see what it would be like to have your name on a cover?

Maybe for motivational purposes to help you carry on but you can’t afford a designer incase your book changes and the cover needs to as well. Well Canva is your tool.

I made a pretend cover for Adultland, the second novel I am drafting as a result of this writespiration. Clearly this isn’t what I would put on the actual cover, firstly I’d get it designed professionally, I’d want a girl walking up the path anyway and it’s not right on a lot of levels. But, it is motivational. Plus not having published anything yet, it was kind of cool to see my name on a book. Definitely motivation to hurry the F up!!

Thoughts? Have you ever used Canva? Have you created a pretend cover to drive you on? What kind of graphics do you use? What do you think of infographics?

If you liked this post, subscribe here to get more FREE writing tips, tools and inspiration as well as information on the release of my books.

The post 5 Mind Boggling Reasons Canva is YOUR Blogging Design Heaven appeared first on Sacha Black.

I have had a couple of lovely compliments recently about the photos I use to start my posts, (thank you, and blush!). But what it’s resulted in, is me sharing my photo tweaking knowledge with others. So I thought it might be useful to share that knowledge with everyone else.

If you would like to know how to make photos like mine, or ones in your own style, then read on.

Now before I start, I want to draw your attention to an awesome post by Helen. She wrote about the pitfalls of using any old photo, instead of ensuring they are copyright free or your own images. Check it out, it’s called Before You Publish.

Let me first begin adding a caveat to this post too. I always make a point of trying to find websites with copyright free images, pay for images myself, or use ones I have taken. I wrote this post of my own volition, any websites I mention are not paying me to promote them, I am sharing those that I use, find helpful or have been told are helpful. You must first check terms and conditions on all sites as they are ALL different, or else use photos at your own risk.

Right now the boring bits out the way lets talk about the fun stuff.

If you aren’t a hot-shot photographer than you are going to need a supply of photos to edit.

ONE – WHERE CAN YOU GET PHOTOS?

There are lots of paid places which cost a varying amount, I personally use Fotalia, as recommended by Ali, and I have to say it is excellent. 44 million photos or something it has, careful – you can end up wasting 45 minutes looking for a photo – which I did Sunday night looking for one for my 8 Steps to Cracking The YA Mindset. *foreheadslap*

As general points – If you are careful and use the paid ones for special posts, then the credits last ages. I have only used 4 I think of the 26 I purchased and that was only about 20 quid, and I have been using photos for ages.

PAID AND FREE PLACES – in no particular order

1. Fotalia – paid for

2. Deposit photos – paid for

3. Stockvault has a variety of images both paid for and free – Hint – Paid for ones are the ones displayed in a black background at the top and bottom of the free section which is in white!

4. Graphic Stock – paid for

5. Death to Stock Photos – free

6. Free Images has a mix of free and paid for images

7. Stocksnap – free

8. unsplash – free

9. Gratisography – free

10. Negative Space free

11. PicJumbo – free

12. New Old Stock – for vintage photos and a mix of paid for packs and some free photos

13. Creative Commons + Flicker – possibly the two most famous places to get images – creative commons is widely known as a source of copyright free images. It will link you to flicker too hence the joint point. Scroll down until you find the section that says ‘Find CC Material’ and type in your search.

If this isn’t enough  – here are two post one, post two, with 37 sites between them for a variety of free and paid for images.

TWO – CHOOSING PHOTOS

When choosing photos there are a couple of things to bear in mind.

1. If your topic is on the perils of editing, make sure you choose a photo that’s relevant – a typewriter or a book, whatever, use your imagination, but if you start posting photos of a lion eating a safari truck, or a kid sat doing a poop on the toilet people are going to think you’re a) bonkers and b) not credible. That’s not to say you can’t be abstract, but having some kind of link to what you are saying is important.

2. Which means – send a message. Use the photo to give a message in a way your writing can’t.

3. I have found myself liking a particular style of photos, for me personally, I like to stick to that style. It gives a kind of branding to your imagery. If you are consistent after a while people see a photo and instantly recognise it as yours.

THREE – BEFORE YOU EDIT

1. I have a thing for consistency. I always use the same font across all my photos, posts, business cards, you name it, if I can edit it, then it will be in the same font. Like point 3 above there is a benefit to being consistent. You build your own brand, people recognise your stuff. BUT, like all things, rules are meant to be broken. One example is this. Where I used several different fonts all in one go. The way I kept consistency was to only use three colours for the font.

2. Light and dark distribution – when you pick a photo it’s important to consider what colour text you want to over lay on it. If for example you want a dark photo to represent a horror story or a post about writing horror stories, you can’t then over lay dark text on it. See the photo – can you even read the text? Yeah, exactly!

3. Text colour options – Now we each have our own style, so don’t feel obliged to do what I am saying, you may hate my style. The important thing is you find your own style and designs. I am just sharing what I do.

I like to (although not always) pick out the colours in the photo for the text so that they blend. Hence you can see orangey yellows around the skulls and the same sort of colour for the text. But I have used completely contrasting photos and it has just as good an impact.

4. Who are you? If you have something you want to promote then you need to make sure you label it on the photo. I always include my website address and if the post is part of a series, I try to put that on there too.

5. Busy photos – be wary, busy photos can be very hard to overlay text on. Text can become lost or the colours of the text don’t show up enough to pop against the busy background.

FOUR – MAKING MAGIC

Here’s the bones of it. It kinda depends whether you have a Mac or a PC. I have a Mac, which isn’t going to help many people. But our trusty Geoffle will explain for PC users. There are three ways you can edit photos simply.

ONE – MAC USERS

You could spend money and buy software – Mac’s have the App store and a simple google will tell you the right apps. I have Photoshop and illustrator – I do use them, but most of the time I don’t. I use the very simple and basic photo viewing software ‘Preview’. That’s what it looks like. I believe ‘Paint’ in windows is of a similar ilk. If you open a photo in your Macbook it will open using preview, and look something like this:

This is where the magic happens. To get your tool bar up, which is the row of icons. You need to press the suitcase – the suitcase is usually grayed out until you click it, like so.

This then appears:

These are the icons you need to edit photos. The ‘T’ is for a text box. It appears when you click it with the words ‘text’ in it and then you can type whatever you like it in and move them wherever you want. Add as many text boxes etc as you like.

The letter ‘A’ on the far right is your ‘font’ box, where you can change sizes, colours, fonts, alignments etc.

If you ever want to crop an image highlight the shape you want using your normal cursor ensuring the dotted square on the very left is highlighted and then the ‘crop’ button will appear.

TWO – INTERNET USERS

Another method for editing photos is online. There are various websites that will let you edit photos. For example, Pic Monkey, which gives a free trial – but then you have to pay monthly for its use. It does come highly recommended by Ali though. I believe Fotor is another site, but a quick google should tell you.

THREE – PC USERS

Over to you Geoffle:

You can use Paint. If you haven’t found this yet you can either open Paint by clicking the Start button , clicking All Programs, clicking Accessories, and then clicking Paint. Or you can choose a picture and right click to bring up the drop down menu. If you click on ‘Open with’ you will find Paint as an option. Or you can choose a picture and right click to bring up the drop down menu. If you click on ‘Open with’ you will find Paint as an option.

As Sacha explains with her Mac programme, Paint allows you to add text. Click on the A on the tool bar and this will provide you with a text box and the usual range of options. I’ve used a cool photo to give you an example. You can see the text box which can be moved and expanded as you like.

The same principle concerning croping applies here too.

Thanks Geoffle. If you didn’t know, he has just released a new book, called my Father and other liars. You can read his guest post on differentiating dialogue, and buy his books: My Father and Other Liars and Dead Flies and Sherry Trifle.

The post 4 Easy Steps to Seriously Awesome Blog Post Photos appeared first on Sacha Black.

I was nominated to take part in this photo challenge by Ali Isaac, who has a wonderful blog filled with fascinating tales of Irish mythology – check it out if you haven’t already, you learn something new with every post. I would like to nominate three of my blogging compadres to take up this photo challenge…

1. Ula because I think she’s fascinating and would love to see what she shoots

2. Keith – because he’s an awesome photographer already

See the rules below, never been much of a rule follower, so not only am I doing this over five weeks instead of five days, I highly doubt I’ll only post one story too! :p

The photo is of a common garden spiders nest of babies. Whilst they are growing as eggs they shed a skin. Once born they cling together usually in balls – but in trying to capture a macro shot I disturbed them – until they shed their second skin. 

***

I really hate spiders, mostly because I’m terrified. Not just a little squeak and run away scared. I’m the shove you out the way, jump on chairs, hyperventilate kind of scared. It’s those dark hairy legs. *shudder*. The thought of one crawling over me with those eight little legs dancing on my bear skin. Oh my god, I have to stop describing it my shoulders are twitching and I have goosebumps just thinking about it.

As part of the challenge I have to do a story – I’m going to do two (told you I couldn’t follow rules).

First up a personal one:

The wife and I had taken a jolly in her car – unusual at the time because I had just bought my new car and so understandably we were using mine a lot. The wife drove, she always does. I have no idea why because I constantly get car sickness unless I drive. But anyway, she was driving. If you know me – you know I have a thing about eyebrows – I could go out in crappy clothes covered in baby puke and without make up on. But I cannot leave the house unless my eyebrows are penciled in. Just can’t. Well I took my trusty artists pencil with me and needed to slap the paint on. So I pulled down the visor. I swear it was the size of a horse. Not a pony, but a fucking great big shire horse.

My wife says she can’t recall a time she has seen me move faster and she certainly can’t understand the physics of how I ended up still strapped into the front passenger seat whilst being physically located in the back. She also could not help unstrap me because she was in pieces laughing at my shrieks of horror. I was not laughing. I was cursing her for having a three door car. I was trapped in the back, with the tarantula about to advance on me and EAT ME. I was not laughing because I was too busy trying to climb through the boot to get out of the car. Here’s the little bastard:

***

My second story is in honour of my challenger, Ali. Ali is amazing at retelling mythological tales, so I thought I would do some research in her honour and look to see if their was a myth based on spiders, although I shan’t attempt a retelling – I’ll leave that to the expert :).

The symbology of spiders is an interesting one. I had wrongly (because I’m shit scared) assumed it would be all horror stories and pincers. But actually although spiders are predators they are commonly seen as the Great Mother. A weaver of destinies. Weaver coming from their web creating skills. In Cameroon they represent diligence and wisdom and in China a spider on a thread is a symbol of luck. Spiders weave webs like we do our lives, making choices that become the constructs of our lives, as they are the structures for their houses.

The Hopi (Native Americans) have a creation story with a spider woman as the goddess of the Earth. With the sun god Tawa, they created the first two beings.

In Greek mythology there was a girl called Arachne who was arrogant about her skills as a weaver. She refused to acknowledge that her gift came in part from the goddess Athena goddess of war and handicraft. Athena gave Arachne the chance to beg for forgiveness and be humble- when she refused Athena challenged her to a weaving contest. Arachne produced stunning woven work and Athena was angry at the high quality of her work so in a war like rage she destroyed it. Arachne became depressed that her masterpiece was destroyed and hung herself on a rope. Athena took pity and loosened the rope noose which became a web and she turned into a spider so she could weave forevermore. This is where we get the class name Arachnid from.

You can find out more about the myth here.

Below is the rest of the photos I took trying to get a good one. I have a macro lens for my iPhone, which means I had to get up close and personal with a ball of spiders – you can imagine my delight. Why I chose this as my first shot I have no idea!

***

***

The rules of the Five Photos, Five Stories Challenge are:

1) Post a photo each day for five consecutive days. (Sorry I’m cheating and going to do it once a week!)
2) Attach a story to the photo. It can be fiction, non-fiction, poetry, or a short paragraph. It’s entirely up to the individual.
3) Nominate another blogger to carry on the challenge. Your nominee is free to accept or decline the invitation. This is fun, not a command performance!

The post Five Day Photo Challenge #1 – Spidermare appeared first on Sacha Black.