• Jennifer Mueller


Over the weekend of the Sept. 20-21 I was given a free pass to the Chanticleer Award ceremony and mini conference. Well the pass was for the conference, but there was a whole weekend planned. The conference, the awards ceremony, and then on Sunday a book fair called Books by the Bay put on by Whatcom Writers and Publishers that I am a member. We're planning it being a yearly event. Unlike most writers conferences this wasn't about the craft of writing but the craft of selling writing. Which is really when the new website and blog came into being. I realized my old software had finally become obsolete in the realm of doing all the new things that are out there. One place, 6 pages, and it did everything that my 40 some had done before and more and more I had to find ways around to get it right.

The biggest thing was I couldn't seem to get html to go where I wanted it. Simple, but it had given up the ghost I guess you could call it. Why did that matter? A new company called Unbound Words cuts out all the third party sellers to get your books out there. Instead of putting your book on a publisher site, you upload your files to their site, post a short html code that puts a button on your page and thier software handles the downloads. Its all paid for via paypal, directly to your account, they don't handle money at all. For a small monthly charge you keep all your profit. Win win. Except I couldn't make my site do that simply anymore so that's how I got a new one.

Another program that's fairly new is Canva, its a design program that has hundreds of templates to change and customize. Book covers, posters, facebook covers, twitter covers, etc. They have a huge library of photos and elements, if you use one of them its 1 dollar. If you use your own photos you download it for free once you are done. I've used it for a number of covers. If I want to customize it a bit more I take it over to Picmonkey with a range of effects and options. Not quite as extensive of an option is the cover creator that Createspace has, I've used it time or two to give a bit of variety in making reprint covers for Kapheira Press.

Its all a far cry from teaching myself how to use a computer back in 1992 when I started writing as an 18 year old.

#writing #kapheirapress #canva #unboundwords #picmonkey #booksbythebay #chanticleer

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