gOOd Reads, Novel, Novelist, Writer, Writing, Blogger, Free Books, Free Serialized Books,
Hi, me again! I hope you're well: I don't want to loose my reader as soon as you found me, thanks. I'm as surprised as you are to find myself blogging again so soon. As I said earlier, I've been impacted by the school holidays, so I used it as an opportunity to get organised and try to learn a few tricks to make my writing life a little easier. Here's what I learned.
People 'liked' the new book cover on Facebook and nic pinned it on Pinterest. He guided me through it, thanks, but he doesn't really count as a reader. He has to read it when he checks for errors. He won't mind me saying it but his English and spelling is worse than mine! Anyhow maybe that should be person not people 'liked' the new cover, thanks.
As I told you I've embraced the dark-side and moved to Google for most of my creative work. The first thing to do is to fire-up Chrome (the browser) and select Google Docs. If you don't have it on your computer download it. Its available on any Google OS, as well as Apple and Microsoft. Assuming you've got to Docs open you'll be faced with a start screen.
Mine shows the documents I'm working on. Your should show yours or a set of templates. At the top left corner click the 3 lines beside the blue 'Docs' icon giving you the following screen.
Click 'Slides' from the menu.
It shows us the default screen. That's OK it will work just fine for the setup.
Now we need to setup a couple of things. First let's get some better fonts. Click the 'title box'. See the menu across the top changes and around the middle of it it is the 'Font' selection box, click the arrow to the right of it, and you get the 'Fonts menu'.
Click the first item 'More fonts' and you'll get the next menu. There are more fonts than I will never want and they have been optimized for the web by Google.
Chose the fonts you want to work with and when you're done click 'OK'. See I told you it would be easy. No downloading from the web, unzipping, installing, opening your application and inserting HTML in the right place. No smearing the blood of a sacrificed chicken on your body and praying to the web gods.
Now let's setup the images to same way. From the main menu select 'Add-ons' and then 'Get add-ons'.
That will get you to the following page:
Enter 'unsplash' in the 'search box', top right and press the 'return' key.
My screen shows two apps. with a green 'Manage' button because I've already installed them. Your screen should just show the Upsplash apps with a blue '+Free' or 'Install' button.
Click it, and you're done. I'll tell you about 'Social Slides' another time. I also installed the 'Top Stock' app for images as well. Do the same as you did for 'unsplash'. You can find other image stock apps like 'Adobe Stock' and 'Shutterstock' as well, but they also include images for payment, for I just use the free ones.
While mentioning payments, although the images I use are free, I like to contribute and include attribution to the artist.
Setup is done! Easy wasn't it. Why can't other software developers make it easy like that.
It doesn't need to be hard.
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OK.
That part is done and you never need worry about it again.
Let's get inspired!
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Now you will be able to insert images in your 'Slides' without ever changing 'tabs' or 'windows' again. You'll find your productivity soars.
Let's make this Book cover, or Blog header, or Social Post.
Click 'Add-ons' from the main menu. Then 'Upsplash Photos', and 'Insert an Unsplash Photo' and, the side bar will open and show the following screen. Next enter 'Lips' in the search box and press 'enter'.
Click the second image in the second column and the click it. There will be a pause for a moment before the image is copied into the slide. Then use 'Reset image' and 'Crop image' to get it to the required size and aspect. It should end-up looking like this.
Now the hard work is done. Simply place your text boxes, not forgetting to set the text colour and size. Scarlet, Arial, 36 for the author. Scarlet, Bungee, 24 for the book name. White, Pacifico, 24 for the 'call to action', and finally black, Arial,14 for the 'second edition'. I realize now the slanted text have should been a black ribbon with white text. Anyway, you can slant text by writing in a text box by using the dodad in the middle of the box. Click on it and move it left or right for the appropriate direction to rotate it.
It goes without saying that you can use text at 90 degrees for the spine of a book. I only do ebooks, so I don't need a spine or a back cover. I was told it's better to relocate the summary from the back cover to the first page for ebooks. Any thought on that?
The final act is to save it. Use the main menu, using 'File', 'Download', and 'Png image'.
And there it is, in all its glory!
I hope this has been useful to someone.
Regards nicah
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