How I Make Book Covers

This week we found out we were rejected by Asimov's.

My aunt said she'd buy a copy of our story if we published it. She's very sweet. My co-author said he wasn't opposed to the idea of making it into an ebook and using that later as a freebie when we market our longer works.

I began to work on some book covers. I came up with 2 of them and needed some opinions. You can help until August 14th if you have a Wordpress account.

Vote here.
https://hawkandyoung.wordpress.com/2017/08/05/help-us-choose-a-cover/

Making book covers is easy with Canva. Sign up. Check it out. It's free. You choose a template that works for you, then you can edit the text and font, as well as change the background images. Download the images to your computer in whatever form you choose. I download them all, just because of the different file formats required for different self-publishing sites.

You may use images released for commercial use. Pixabay has a decent selection. Download the images and use them for whatever you wish. I use them for book covers and for making memes for Spoonfuls of Sugar.

I know that's a big link dump, but that's how I'm feeling, full of helpful information. I hope I can help you, too.

Wordpress Website Fun

I found out, months later, that I actually paid for two domains when I paid Wordpress for my website.

I spent some time fleshing out those two and creating links and funnels between them. Basically, one is a landing page of sorts, complete with our short stories - hawkandyoung.com -

hawkandyoung.com

hawkandyoung.wordpress.com

 - and the other has our blog.  - hawkandyoung.wordpress.com Both have the same information for Contact and About and What We Do.

The trick was to make the link for 'blog' go to the wordpress.com site as well as link back to the main site when you clicked on 'home' while you were on the blog site.


But this all came about because I found my OLD Wordpress blog Spoonfuls of Sugar and I decided to use what I've learned from website building to make Spoonfuls better.

dailyspoonfulsofsugar.wordpress.com  (old website design)

And I edited the content and started using it to share positive posts. I'm a pretty laid-back and positive person, but I've noticed a growing trend with bouts of loneliness and depression in myself. I think it's something I'm going to keep track of.

Back to the websites...

It took me several hours to figure out what each tabbed part does on the Wordpress dashboard in order to customize my website. Some themes do things differently. I found a new theme I liked and changed Spoonfuls. There are a couple basic things I need to edit, but I like the thumbnail images for people to select the positive message they feel they need right now, or what speaks to them. I know that's how I want to use it.

dailyspoonfulsofsugar.wordpress.com

New website design!

I thought about making a website, and paying for it, for ElshaHawk, but having two sites for HawkandYoung, one for Spoonfuls, as well as two Blogger blogs, two Facebook pages, two Twitter accounts, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, two Amazon author pages, and multiple ebook sites, I'm pretty busy!

I'm getting good at automating these accounts, however. Wordpress is great at sharing across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and other social media sites. Blogger, not so much. Marketing is getting faster. I only need some sort of money maker and I'm golden!