Authors Electric

After a long time away from social media I’ve started to tweet and Facebook again. Since I last used social media as a marketing tool things have moved on and I discovered:  Images on twitter are ‘the’ thing National and international celebration days allow you to plan ahead and use hashtag terms you know will be trending So last month I researched dates I could use to market my short story collections ( Anansi - Brer Rabbit and Coyote ). During my research I found  Awareness Days and Days of the Year  which contain a list of international and national days.  I then needed to know what the ideal size for Twitter and Facebook images was. So I researched into this and during my research I came across this blog post , which breaks down the page layouts and sizes for Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Youtube. Using this I created a template for Twitter images (1024 pix x 512 pix – although you can use other sizes) and a templ...

Back in the mists of time before the banking system wrought havoc on our economy I used to work as a freelance writer for a packager. If you don’t work in the publishing world you may not know what a packager is. Basically they find freelancers like myself, hire us on a flat fee basis to create a book. This book is then sold to a publisher or even publishers (if they sell the foreign rights) who then sell it under their own branding. It’s a great concept and at one time kept me very busy. The first book I worked on for a packager was a craft title. The concept for the title had been sold to a large publisher before I was even commissioned to work on the project. Typically, just days before the agreed deadline the publisher (in their wisdom) wanted an additional 12 pages. I began to panic. I simply didn’t have the time to produce that amount of additional content. My editor told me not to worry because she had content from a similar title she could use to fill these additional p...