Book trailers, cover art, tech classes … oh my!

What an educational weekend I had!

It started with a class from the Writers’ League of Texas on early Saturday morning. The class was about PR and being your own publicist for your book. Let’s just say I have a lot of connections to make and press reviews and such to write. I did make two friends in the class and, hopefully, now have some new critique and interview partners in the making.

The importance of having a book trailer was stressed during the class. I knew it was coming. I just am not the best when it comes to video. So many options to choose from really. Do you want live actors? Do you just want still shots? Do you want voice over and have it sync with the images of the video? What about royalty free music and pictures? yadda yadda yadda

So after the WLT class I went to animoto.com and I created my video. It was a great video, but that led me to take a good look at my cover art for my book. My cover art needed tweaking!

So I was off on Sunday to take an online class on PhotoShop. I’ve never done PhotoShop before. Never needed to do it. I own the program, but it just sits in my pile of CDs gathering dust. So I dusted it off.

After hours of learning PhotoShop I then updated the cover art. I now LOVE the cover of my first book. It went from an okay cover to one that really pops.

So I put this all together this weekend and took a look at the time element that was involved.

The WLT class was at 9am on Saturday morning. My video was completed at midnight Sunday night. Two solid days of my time. I only wrote about 500 words in novel #2. I managed to get some laundry done, but not much more.

But, on the bright side, I own the video. I own the cover art. I did it exactly the way I wanted it and it was very little cost to me financially. If I had paid someone for both the cover art and video it would have been a lot of money. Time. Money. It’s always the tradeoff, isn’t it?

So now I have a video and have to figure out how to put it on my YouTube account and onto my website. I also want to update my website with the new cover art for my book.

I don’t do YouTube, so that is something else I will figure out how to do today while I try to write 1500 words in novel #2 to make up for not writing so much over the weekend.

Regina