graphics Archives - Kathleen Wendorff

To make our author websites look good, we need some graphics. Good graphics. One book I read suggested that, whenever we consider a graphic image, we ask ourselves

Is it relevant?
Is it interesting?
Is it appealing?

and make sure we can answer yes to at least 2 of those 3 questions. Sounds good to me.

I would ask 2 additional practical questions:

Is it free or inexpensive?
Is it legal for you to use it?

I’m guessing that you, like me, are a beginning or mid-list author without a lot of money to spend.

And, I assume that, as writers, we respect copyright and creative capital, and don’t want to steal some artist or photographer’s work. So…

Book Cover(s)

First things first! Most authors can start by featuring the book cover your publisher created.

Author Photo

Most authors also provide an author photo for their curious readers. You want a good quality photo of yourself, with rights to display it on a website. You have a few options here.

You can go to a professional photographer, which is probably easiest and safest, but most expensive.
You may be able to piggyback and use a professional photo taken for some other purpose – a church directory, for instance. (That’s where mine came from.) Another possibility – if you have a high school senior, photographers may offer extra poses with other family members, at a reduced rate. Always check with the photographer and make sure you have the rights to use the resulting photo on a website, bookmarks, etc.
You may have a friend or relative who is a talented amateur photographer with good equipment, and who would be willing to help you for love, money or a nice dinner out.
Or you may have to go with someone with an ordinary camera and no special training. And that’s probably good enough. After all, we’re authors, not pop stars – nobody’s going to spend hours gazing at our photos. They’re going to take a quick look, go, “Huh,” and move on.

Other Graphics

Here’s where we authors scatter every which direction. If you need inspiration, visit the websites of your own favorite cozy mystery writers, especially the ones who are mid-list or newly-published, like you. You can also get ideas from the big names and best sellers, although you may not be able to afford those ideas.

Your Own Photographs

Many author blogs include photographs they’ve taken themselves, at events they’ve attended – readings, conferences, etc. – or showing objects or places that relate to their stories. I don’t know about you, but I always find those interesting. And such photos have several advantages..

As snapshots, we readers enjoy their immediacy and the window they give us into the author’s “real world.” Not professional quality? So what?
They’re unique, particular, and focused – not some generic stock shot.
And we’re sure they’re free and legal for us to use.

So – again, I don’t know about you, but I plan to keep a camera around, keep my blog in mind, and look for photo ops.

Stock Photographs and Clip Art

If you want more professional photographs or ready-to-use clip art, but don’t have a lot of money, you can search for public domain and Creative Commons images.Here are some suggestions:

Use Creative Commons Search — it sets search filters to return only “content you can share, use, and remix.” You may be able to add it to your browser.
This article lists several sources for images you can legitimately use, and what they offer.
Flickr’s Creative Commons section and morgueFile are good places to find stock photos free for your use.
Clker and the Open Clip Art Library (OCAL) are good sites for clip art.
Wikimedia Commons and FreeStockPhotos.biz are good for both clip art and photography.

Modifying Graphics

You may want to tweak the images you use — crop or reframe them, resize them, remove red-eye from photographs, add text or arrows, change colors, and so on. Or maybe you don’t want anything to do with all that! In that case, you can stop reading.

But in case playing with graphics sounds like fun to you, here are some places to start. Again, there are many levels of tweaking, and whole libraries written about this, not to mention online tutorials and YouTube videos.

First – you need editing software.

Various Photoshop products are the default standard – but pricey.
GIMP is free and amazingly powerful – but wow, is it hard to learn! The guys who wrote the code are NOT great at writing clear intuitive instructions. I use GIMP because I am ~~cheap~~ frugal and truly enjoy futzing with it. If Photoshop’s price gives you pause, I recommend you try GIMP. There are quite a few helpful YouTube videos, and online tutorials to help you out, or you could see if your library has a 3rd-party guide. But it’s definitely not for everyone.
You can do an amazing amount with the lowly Microsoft Paint program. ( I don’t have a Mac, so don’t know about equivalent free Apple software. Any suggestions?)
And your camera probably offers some basic editing software which may do everything you need.

Second – you need to choose a consistent style.

If you’re using public domain or creative commons clip art, pick graphics with a similar style.

For instance, I decided to go with simple “coloring book” style clip art for several reasons – I like the clean look, I know how to tweak it in GIMP, and the file sizes are generally small.

But there are many possibilities. Maybe you’re a good enough artist or crafter to create your own graphics, or can use Zentangle-like techniques. If you write needlework cozies, you probably know how to convert photos and graphics to a cross-stitch or needlepoint design. GIMP and Photoshop have filters and effects which can apply various looks to your photos or graphics — posterized, impressionist, black and white sketch, oil painting, jigsaw puzzle…

If any of this sounds like fun, why not play around awhile? What have you got to lose?

If it doesn’t sound like fun – remember, you can’t go wrong with the KISS principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid. Stick with photographs and book covers, and concentrate on your text.

(By the way, it has not escaped my attention that there are – ironically – no graphics on this very long post. Oh, well. I’ll come back someday and plug some in.)

Now we get to some fun stuff! Getting the look you want on your website.

A Consistent Look

Variety is wonderful – but it’s tempting to get carried away. If instead you carry a consistent look and layout throughout your whole website, it will look more professional. And consistency helps your readers navigate more easily.

The books all say to stick to a limited color palette. But we’re authors, not artists, and it turns out, choosing a harmonious color palette can be tricky. Google “choose website color palette” and you’ll see there are a bazillion ways to go. But as authors, we have a no-brainer method – base it on our book covers. After all, you’re going to be featuring your book cover prominently on your website, and you want everything to go together. Plus, it was created by a professional who knows much more than you do about graphic design.

Getting colors from your book cover image

So how do you do that? Start with a digital copy of your cover(s.) Use an online color scheme generator to generate a palette (Google “color scheme from image”) Or choose a handful of colors from that graphic, using a color picker to find the hexadecimal or RGB codes which describe each color. (Look for the eyedropper in graphics programs like Photoshop, GIMP, or even Paint. Or use a stand-alone — Google “color picker tool“).

Then use those exact colors (or lighter or darker versions of them) to personalize the WordPress theme you’ve chosen. Use those colors in backgrounds, borders, texts, graphics, whatever you’re able to tweak. (There are a lot of colors our templates don’t let us change easily – later on, I’m going to try and get under the hood and tinker with those, too, using CSS and child templates. I’ll let you know how it goes. But for now, let’s stick to simple stuff.)

I, alas, do not have a book cover yet, so instead, I used the Wisconsin postage stamp graphic featured in the banner on each page. Notice the blue color of the page title? (“Kathleen Wendorff, Wisconsin Nice Mystery Series”) It’s exactly the same blue as the blue border of my image.

Here are some other examples. Take a look at the red Wisconsin on my “On Wisconsin” page — I filled an outline of the state with the same red found in the barn in that picture.

On the “For Writers” page — the blue and the yellow on the pen exactly match colors in the Wisconsin postage stamp graphic. I tweaked that from a copyright-free graphic of a pen that started out lavender and a different yellow.

Here’s a word cloud containing different cozy mystery elements, which I’ve used on a couple of pages. Wordle let me specify colors from the Wisconsin graphic when I generated that, too.

Tiny subliminal details, but I think they help make everything look more “together” and professional. You can decide whether – for you – it’s worth the time and trouble.

Tag Archives: graphics

Graphics for your author website