Website and book trailers

I have been talking to some aspiring and new authors for a few months now. Some of them have emailed me to ask me who does my website/trailers. I thought I'd blog about it so they can just look it up if they need the information and I hope it's helpful for anyone who needs it. I had to do a lot of searching and hunting so I'd love to save someone else some time. Now.. who does my website and trailers? I do them. When I started out... I was flat broke. I couldn't afford to pay someone to design a website for me or one of those really cool packages that are offered for newbie authors. Some of them are AMAZING and made me drool. I wanted to buy a package so badly... yeah. It was painful. But I'm realistic, knew I couldn't afford it, and that left me with no website, no graphic art for banners if I even had one, and I was lost. So... I went and found a free website. http://www.yolasite.com/ It's free, it's cool, and I thought... now what because I know NOTHING about websites. I can't even figure out how to text on my phone, people show me, and I promptly forget. I have a razor cell phone that is years old because I know how to access the phonebook in it and it has a camera on it... and I mess that up too. I always end up taking video instead of pictures. I'm SOOOO clueless, this is embarrassing to admit... but I don't know how to get messages off of my phone. I literally had my oldest child set it up to record the message for me and I TOLD people to not leave me messages. I know how to look at the history of the phone so I just look at that if I miss a call, see the number, and call them back. LOL. CLUELESS... that's me.

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I'm sharing my techno embarrassment to prove a point. I got a free website at yolasite and yet I STILL managed to figure it out. It took me a week of trial and error. I probably post my click'able links wrong but... THEY WORK! I use the text boxes, add a picture to it, and THEN add the link. It works, I'm not rocking the boat. LOL. When I realized I could do that... I paid $30 for the year for my domain name and the privacy thingy ( so my name isn't registered on it publicly so no one can go look and say... ah... there's her real address! LOL ).
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Now I needed banners. I needed something that looked better than something one of my kids would bring home to me from kindergarten. I LOVE their artwork but I didn't think anyone visiting my website would appreciate it as much. I went back to the Internet because again, money was an issue, I can't afford to drop $500 on a photo editing software program no matter HOW COOL some of them are. Oh, and they ARE cool. You can build people! It looks complicated as all get out but for the techno people who can do it... WOW! As for me, I found two really helpful things that I use. There's a free download program called photofiltre. Do a google search. It's neat. It zooms in and out, you can freehand copy and paste, remove backgrounds, just a lot of features that my little ole paint program couldn't do. The other one if downloads aren't your thing and worry about your computer is a site called lunapic.com It's all online and you only save your finished work to your computer. For word banners... I love a site called cooltext.com

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See the pictures above? I made that banner myself and I use it for one of the pages on my website. I bought the stock photo of the guy, got the computer mouse in the free section that a few stock photo places have ( dreamstime and 123rf ) are the ones I use. I had another one but they went out of business. I copy and pasted his hair... made his hair longer... pasted in some planets and a moon... some stars... and I twisted and turned that darn mouse... cut a little off of it... and THERE is a spaceship!!! LOL. Kind of funny but I don't think I did too bad for a woman who can't even text! I'm getting better, this is one of my first banner pictures, but I like it so it will stick around for a bit. I can honestly say if I can do it... anyone can. I'm THAT techno clueless. The more you do it, the better you get and the more you learn by trial and error.

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Book trailers - I have a PC so I was using my pre-installed windows movie maker. I believe if you don't have it, you can download it for free. It was easier to figure out than I thought. You just need to play a round a bit with it. I found some free music sites ( grabbing your favorite artist and just tossing their song in there is a no-no I was told) so you need to find free music you're allowed to do that with. A great site called imcompetech.com. The guy there is amazing, freely shares his work, and Kevin just asks that you credit him in the end. Awesome music is to be found on there too! That's how I did Ral's Woman and a few other trailers. THEN... I saw some authors using onetruemedia (online site ) You can do free but I pay for the extra features. It's around $5 a month. I no longer have to HUNT for music because they have a big selection right there and they have some COOL features like the beginning and end of my author video. You pretty much can use your blurb, buy stock photos, edit them the way you want... and you have a video trailer for your book. I hope that any of this information was helpful if you're starting out, can't afford to spend a lot, and don't know what to do. Here's my author video I did on onetruemedia with a few of their neat little effects.

Take a look -

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Have a great week everyone!