Tales in Publishing:
Trial and Error of
Ad Making
Part of getting traditionally published means your publishing company markets for you, but if you think that gets you out of doing it yourself as well, you'll soon learn you're sadly mistaken. Unfortunately, marketing is part of being an author (unless you only write for yourself and don't want to sell many copies). If you are like me, published by a small press, you will need to do even more marketing to get sales as these presses do not have as many resources as the Big 5 conglomerates. After talking to many authors, I've learned that with the big 5 or small press, you are expected to and even sign contracts for your minimal marketing requirements. This means, if you don't try at all, you could get dropped. Sounds daunting, but usually it is simple like a social media account and website. I'm not trying to deter anyone from publishing traditionally, but stating the norm. Note, this is something you have to do as well if self-published but it will be all by yourself or you might need to pay a professional.
My publishers made ads, but I wanted to make my own as well. I felt like it would double the advertising effort. For my first novel, Apidae, I downloaded and altered a professional's book trailer he was offering free. It was through PowerPoint, so I learned quickly, I had to upload it elsewhere to add music (it's possible but difficult). It was a painful learning process and I should've known myself better. I never do well adjusting other's work or ideas to fit my own; I'm a do-it-from-scratch kind of person.
With my second book, Fyr, I decided to plan marketing early. You see, using ads from photos on the internet can be troublesome due to breaching copyright laws. There are a few websites where photographers donate their pictures to a database to be used for free, but they are a little limited. Notice how some indie books have similar covers? Plus my search yielded nothing useful for me as they had for my first book. One theme in Fyr is stone magic. I have an college friend who works with them, so made inquiries. She was willing to take some special photos of her stones for me in exchange for a free autographed copy of my novel. When I got the photos, I added excerpts in good ole reliable PowerPoint, which allows you to customize slide sizes. I made banners and social media ads without the need of cropping.
This all took a while because I'm a perfectionist and I kept toying with different effects for the wording. I also made a book trailer in PowerPoint but broke down and bought Windows Movie Maker to add music and better compatibility and sharing options. Next time, I plan on using Movie maker from the start to see if I prefer it over the multi-step process I went through.
So here's what I did for my ads and trailer:
- Downloaded friend's photos on phone
- Enhanced them using Instagram
- Moved them to Google Drive app (to transfer to computer)
- Went on computer and added words, transitions, and timing in PowerPoint
- Saved as an MP4 file (for trailer) or JPEG (for ads)
For the ads, that's all. Due to having everything synced on Drive, I can post them from my phone and computer.
The trailer had a few extra steps:
- Uploaded trailer into Windows Movie Maker
- Dowloaded copyright free music from YouTube's library and uploaded into Movie Maker
- Save and export where you'd like it--to phone, YouTube, etc.
Having it on YouTube is great as I have easy access to it wherever. In fact, when I went to upload it onto my blog just now, there's an option for my video from the site.
Sounds kind of simple, but honestly it took a while due to me trying to perfect things and my timings being off--when that happens, I had to go back to the editable form--PowerPoint. It's not as perfect as I wanted it to be, but I'm getting better.
If you are interesting in purchasing this novel, click here.