Publishing Promo – Six (semi) techie things I’ve learned

And these are just my known unknowns…!

Facebook

• You can have more than one name on your profile page. If you’ve got a pen name, you can have that in brackets under your real one, or vice versa. I have a Clare Chase author page, but my personal account was still solely under my legal name, and things were getting confusing. This page explains how to add a name.
• You can ‘like’ pages using your author page persona as well as your personal account. Once I’d realised, it meant I could create a dedicated newsfeed for all things bookish.

Amazon

• You have to set up separate author pages on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com, and what they offer is subtly different. (For instance you can link the Amazon.com page to your blog, but not so, .co.uk)
• The authl.it site (found thanks to Alison Morton) allows you to create one international Amazon buying link for each of your books. As the site points out, you can also feed their link into bit.ly to monitor the number of click-throughs you get.
• The free apps for reading Kindle books on non-Kindle devices still aren’t that well known. Or at least, that’s been my recent experience. I’m now planning to scatter the Kindle app download link liberally about my website.

Windows Movie Maker…

• was included with my version of Windows 8, and is less scary than I thought. I have managed to make a book trailer.

I did have help with the music and photos! Here’s the result (she said nervously): 

And now, time to fess up: my children had used Movie Maker before… Here’s what I learned from them – some stages intuitive, some less so!

• In Movie Maker, in the home tab, you can simply drag and drop photos and videos into the right-hand side of the screen, arranging them in the order you want.
• If you want a plain slide with text, then clicking ‘title’ works. Disconcertingly, these slides appear blank when they’re selected afterwards, but double-clicking on them reveals the text box and words you’ve already added.
• As you’d expect, to add text over an image or video, just click ‘caption’ with the relevant scene selected.
• You can alter the way the images appear on screen using the ‘animations’ tab, which enables you to give a feeling of movement, even when you’ve only got stills to play with.
• The ‘edit’ tab allows you to change the length of time spent on each scene in the movie and also to trim any video to your specification. You can then add music or narration from the home tab.
• The music is imported as a discrete file, and if you’re using a video that already has its own soundtrack, one will lay over the top of the other. (At one point I had a good mix of music and Lake District wind in my trailer!)
• If you want to include a video, but not the sound, you can use the ‘video tools’ tab to mute the volume.
• The music tools allow you to alter your music file so it’s just the right length, and also to fade the sound in or out.
• The save options include settings for YouTube and many other sites.