DAWG ~ Daz Authors Writers Group ~ Tell Us Your Books, Support Each Other!
Novica
Posts: 23,887
There's been a smattering of posts for when people announce their books have been released, but I wanted a thread to collectively get Daz authors and illustrators all in one place for handy reference. You can mention the titles of your books, but TOS says no commercial links. (In your signature is allowed.) If you have a free book or a promotion currently running which makes it free, this would be a good place to mention it.
Second, if you are an author, you know the importance of social media. So if you have Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc, let us know.
EDIT: And showcase your covers in this thread!
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For Instagram, type in instagram.com/ then put the username.
I've attatched the first page of one I'm working on now. Been using Daz for about a year now to create content for kids books. Have a free one listed in my signature and another on Zon free today and tomorrow.
I laughed about the homeschooling part- he lives in a garage so it's technically garage schooling. Very clever! I'm sending you a PM
I've written eight YA SF/Fantasy books under my real name (Melissa Conway). They sell for $0.99, and every once in a while I make the first book of my Xenofreak Nation and The Gossamer Sphere series' free. I use Studio to make my covers, book trailers, and I'm slooowwly working on a narrated/illustrated version of SelfSame. I have a website, an author page on Facebook, and I'm on Twitter. I've heard about Instagram, but haven't checked it out yet. Now I will.
Melissa- are you referring to Amazon?
if your books have a theme (let's say Paris) then you'd put Paris in the search and come up with all the images/people from Paris, and those folks would be a good target audience for your book. Here's a few tips for Instagram: (I'm a new user, but I did about a week's worth of reading so I did it RIGHT.)
Anytime you post an image, put #(keyword) at the end of your description (and having a description may get more comments/likes.) One common # is #newphoto.
Try to check at least once a day for followers, check them out, and follow back if they meet your criteria.
Many people unfollow if you don't reciprocate after a couple days. (That's what I do too. If I support you and you don't support me, I don't want only a few followers and a ton of people I am following. People look at that and wonder why everyone else isn't following you.) You will see I currently follow 33 people and have 13 followers. Four of those are from today! The people who I commented on and are following who don't follow me by tomorrow will be removed, and a new batch will take their place. This is a slow and steady process, which is why I say start as soon as possible.
I think it's okay to put a link in your bio (which goes at the top of the page) to your books. Not sure on that. Anyone know?
Also, know the most popular times to post. It's Wednesday, between 5-6pm. That may be good or bad- your posts could get buried. I had luck today between 3-5pm Central time.
Get Instagram apps- there's great ones for tweaking your images, adding text, etc.
I posted an Alsace render and someone has already asked how I did it. Sent them here to Daz.
I haven't used Instagram either because I seldom do photos, but are you saying you post renders there Novica? Is that a market to explore?
Hi Novica. Not sure what you mean, but if you're asking if my books are available on Amazon, then the answer is yes. I'm heading over to Instagram now to check it out.
From my research, Facebook apparently is NOT showing all your followers (your meaning, if you have a page there, not you specifically) your posts. Several authors did tests and people they could trust (aka family members and close friends) were NOT getting all the posts. If you Google it, you'll get quite a few results of not-happy-campers-authors. They're switching to Instagram and from the articles I read, their sales were increasing/noticeable. You can hold fun contests with your newsletter just as easily on Instagram as you can on Facebook- for instance, since your book deals with dragons, you could post an image of your character and tell folks to use #schooldragon to post their dragon pictures. I think (not sure, haven't done it) you can also have them locate the best dragon photos on Instagram, if they comment with that hashtag, those should show up too.
Then you award a free copy of the book or whatever. The way you check the entries is simply put #schooldragon in the Instagram search engine and you'll see the posts, and I think the commented posts where they left the hashtag.
Facebook owns Instagram- they bought it because that market was soaring and they knew a good thing when they saw it. You can easily post videos (I did two in under four minutes.) and link to them in your newsletter, your blog, your own website.
So it's good for videos, photos, posting teasers of your book- YES! The people following my page (and that is my author page, not my book page, which is private and where most of the images of the horse and other references to characters will go) probably have kids and I'll pick up sales there. I will put my blog link at the top when I get my book done, and then when I post my images, in the description, ask followers to check out the blog there too for a bit. (They surf in to the photos, not necessarily your main page. )
To answer your question :) yes, show some renders.
You can have up to five accounts.
Read this- DIRECTLY FROM THE FACEBOOK TEAM. So Daz, you might want to rethink your Facebook page. (if a Business account.) Instagram doesn't hide a THING. (Edit- and you don't pay to have your post shown.)
Another one. (with more specifics)
Oh, yes, I’m painfully aware FB limits what posts my fans see. They did that to force us to pay to “boost” our posts. The fact that FB owns Instagram is not comforting. IMO, it means pay-for-boosting is not far off. They’ll wait, of course, until we’re all on board the Instagram train. Sorry if this sounds defeatist, but I’ve been in the indie game forever, and have seen time and again how we are lured in with the dangling carrot of free marketing – only to have it cost us at a later date. Of course, those who get on board the train early enough DO see benefits, so I’ll toodle on over to Instagram to check it out. Thanks for all the information!
Sure! Anything else helpful for new authors, would love to hear your insight. I don't think you are being defeatist, it's being a realist. But if you / we can scoop up followers BEFORE any changes and steer them to our own blogs/websites, tah-dah! Let me know when you get set up over there (if you do) and I'll check it out!!
I've changed the thread title to include forum members so we don't leave anyone out- if you've shared your artwork on Instagram or have a page, let us know!
Instagram is a mobile app program, so you may wonder how to share your art. Take a shot of your computer screen (get back away from it) then zoom slightly, tilt your camera down a bit, which seems to help eliminate lines. Instagram also has fine tuning for photos, and by changing the contrast, you can get most the lines to disappear.
My hobby is book design. But I don't write fiction, so since 2002 I've been doing graphically enhanced .pdf editions of other people's fanfic (with their permission and approval) and posting it online at my own site: redhen-publications.com. Quite a number of the projects posted were done just in Photoshop and FreeHand (rip 2005), but since about 2011 I've been gradually doing more and more of the work using 3D renders. Mostly covers and frontspieces, but some are illustrated works. The site is completely non-commercial, so I would expect that my reference to it comes under the ToS. It's basically my private gallery.
Most of the work posted is Harry Potter-related, but there are also a couple of Oz books and a fantasy series based on Bioware's Dragon Age.
Of course back when I started, eBooks were barely a gleam in the developers' eyes so none of the current software to produce them existed. Which is probably just as well, since I'm a both a control freak and a disgusting show-off and those methods wouldn't have given me nearly the scope that InDesign and .pdf do.
Since 2006 I've also been doing covers for some small publishing houses; Zosssima Press, Winged Lion Press, and Barnabas Books. Most of these are also Photoshop work, but several of them have used 3D renders. I know Winged Lion has a website, not sure about Zossima. Barnabas Books is actually produced by the same fellow who's in charge of Winged Lion, so I think that stuff is rolled into the same site. Not everything shown there is mine (I think about 5 or 6 aren't) but anything using 3D is.
The Graphics Area of my site also has at least one book cover that I did as a private commission using a 3D render. As well as a lot of images done in Studio for fanfests or exchanges. But those aren't exactly what you are asking about.
JOdel- love the colorful site! I really like the black checkerboard pattern with the gold, goes well together. I explored the graphics, had to smile at the cute meeting. What a stoic group! I am not into Harry Potter so didn't know the references. You've put a lot of work into your site (and I love the changing menu buttons.)
The single most important thing you can do is build your email list, so before Instagram goes the way of Facebook, steer those folllowers to your site, and specifically to your email signup page! I'm not speaking from my own experience, I've not done well building my own list. But I do know people who have built their lists up over 1000 people, (one gal has over 4000!) and when they announce a new release their email recipients propel the book into best seller status in a day. It helps, too, if you release the book at 99¢ for a couple of days. Your list will rush out to buy the book before the price goes up, and when you have a huge list, that means top spots on your first day. If your list is large enough, you can reach #1 for all of Amazon. I've seen Lee (Leighann Dobbs) do it time and again. (And yes, I am very envious of her list. Even though I know it took her several years to build it over 4k.)
I don't have a smart phone, nor am I likely to get one, so instagram is not an option for me. I use Twitter (BooksByLorraine) and Facebook (LorraineAdairBooks) and I have a blog (LorraineAdair dot com)... My one published book is currently available on Amazon, Barnes&Noble, and Google Play. I'm thinking of bringing it back to Amazon exclusively so people can read it via Kindle Unlimited. There are several more books in the works, but I have to admit I've been severely distracted by all things DAZ.
The cover for both the ebook and the paperback were done in DAZ Studio. If you'd like to see the finished covers, search on Amazon for "Ambient Light Angel McKenzie"...
-Anita
aka L'Adair
aka Lorraine Adair
ETA: I started a companion thread for showing off our actual 3D covers and illustrations. Here's the link: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/85706/
I have a series of three novels, with a fourth in progress, plus some spinoff novellas. They're currently just on Amazon, but they'll be going to other stores as soon as I can get my act together (they've just come out of Select). Search in books for Flick Carter - she's the heroine, and the series is named after her. It's Future dystopian (or post-post apocalyptic if you like), set in and around Oxford (UK), some 200 or so years from now and 150 years after the end of the world. Very British. Although the heroine starts of at age 16, I don't market it as YA (in book 4, she's now 20), and it's not written in that style. Plus, if you accused her of angst, she'd rip you a new one!
I do have a Facebook page - TimArnotAuthor - but I'm not on Instagram as of yet. Also, Flick Carter has her own FB "character" page, although I'll admit it's not very active.
So far, one of my covers was rendered, the others being made from stock and my own photos.
Thank you! The original site was built in GoLive (which was also rip 2005) I took the class in Dreamweaver and rebuilt it just about in the nick of time in 2013. I wouldn't have been able to run GoLive on an newer OS and the code it generated was pretty badly depreciated. Dreamweaver insists on dealing more directly with the code, but its no where near the level of tedium that GoLive entailed.
I would never have thought that a hobby in book design would spin off in *so many* differrent directions...
Heads up- you do NOT have to have a smartphone to use Instagram. Instapics is letting me get my computer images and post directly to Instagram. It is for Windows 8 and up. Load it onto your computer, sign in to your Instagram account, and away you go posting your renders!
This page will give you all your options. Instapic is the best one for me as I am a Windows User. The program is FREE. You do not have to crop your images for InstaPic.
Just me my luck... I'm running Windows 7 on everything... No, wait. The laptop I gave my husband has WinXP... lol
I'm working on my first novel. It seems as if I may never finish at times, but I am close to the end. For the moment, though, I'm lurking in this thread to see what info I can gather for when I'm ready to think about actually publishing and networking. I've already learned some things I didn't know. Thanks for starting the thread, Novica!
Sure! Posting what I learn as I go. Finding out how to post from my computer was a biggie! (But I'm only on Day 3 of using it, so I'm happy that I'm exploring and learning quickly.)
You're in luck then! Those other programs on that page don't require Windows, IIRC.
I've been thinking of writing a book for quite a while... The problem with that is you have to make the words go in some sort of order and use those dot and line thingies and even those squiggly things what look like a snake that got nervous and pooped... And then they expect the whole thing to make some sort of sense, tell a story or help with learning stuff... To be honest I just wanted to write a book so I'd have something handy to throw at people who bother me. Now you are saying I have to consort with social media... And have followers? I've had followers, but mostly that's just store detectives and members of the law enforcement community trying to figure out what I'm up to... Usually that's nothing, but nonetheless ,I'm not sure if that counts.
Besides, most of the things that I write about are based on my rather colorful and possibly factual adventures in the previous century and I'm not sure anyone is much interested in those sort of things, especially if I were to actually charge people real currency for it... Imagine folks spending money on something I've written... And illustrated in crayon to boot. But that information you have posted is quite informative and it's good to be informed by it... I'll take it under consideration in the event I ever finish a non-throwing type book. Thanks for the heads-up Novica!
...so Instagram only works on mobile devices and you have take a photo of your screen rather than directly uploading an image like FB allows? That seems sort of clumsy.
In the linked image, I notice a slight amount of vertical colour banding and a lot of "jaggies" along edges (particularly on the deck of the sailboat).
The only gallery site I use for posting my work is DA. I gave up on the Daz galleries after they changed from the monthly format as submissions now are buried within minutes.
Nope- I posted a link to a page that gives you three options. One works with Windows, the others I believe you give more choices.
Hey, sorry I'm so late in posting. I've been out of town and did not see my email from Jakiblue about the thread until today. At any rate, I have written and self-published two books:
1. Exile's Redemption
2. Exile's Gamble
In addition, I have done a few covers for another author (utilizing DAZ Studio):
Just a note: i can highly recommend these books! Well, the first one anyway, I haven't read the second one yet...cos I don't have it, cos Maraich is too mean to send it to me (even tho she DID thank me in the acknowledgements in the first book....) *evil grin*
I actually bought the first one in print form from amazon and was blown away by the quality of the book itself. And the story is great. :) If you like fantasy, you'll love it.
Hi all,
I've been lucky enough to have several graphic novels picked up by publishers. All were made with DAZ products, and three of them have been shortlisted for awards.
My social media info (haven't provided links because spammy):
Facebook: ShaneWSmith.Author
Twitter: @ Shane_W_Smith
Instagram (brand new account): shane_w_smith
Website: shanewsmith.com
Mailing list: shanewsmith.com/email/
About five years ago, I was a featured user of DAZ, and the interview is still up: http://www.daz3d.com/explore-shane-smith
Happy to provide sample art or advice on request, or answer any questions. Thanks.