What is a meme? There’s a
great explanation on the inimical Wikipedia here. But, in short, for our purposes, it’s a message conveyed via the medium of a picture with words added.
So, what’s it got to do
with writers?
Essentially, of course,
your book cover constitutes a type of meme. But it’s in the area of promotion
that these devices really come into their own. It’s long been the case that
visual messages create greater interest and more responses than the written
word alone. In the visually biased world we now inhabit, this has become even
more the case, and promises to be increasingly so into the foreseeable future.
The idea is that it’s more
effective to produce a ‘poster’, with relevant background picture and your
words applied, than to simply quote the words in a tweet or short post.
A lot of writers employ
cameras to collect information and records for their writing. It’s a fairly
simple matter to use the same equipment to collect images suitable for
backgrounds for memes. For those who don’t own or use a camera (and don’t
forget most mobile phones now contain a camera, as do tablets) there are a
large number of sites where you can use images taken by others. On most of
these you can make unlimited use of pictures for a small fee and limited use
for free. Don’t be fooled by the many claims that all images are free. Almost
without exception, such images are either very small or bear a great big
watermark. ‘Free’ for this purpose, generally means they are ‘royalty free’; in
other words, once purchased, they can be used commercially. Pricing is from
around £2.00 a picture, depending on image size. Make sure you read the
licencing agreements before you use them. I’ve made use of some of these images
for my book covers and they represent a very worthwhile investment. I list some
of the sites at the end of this post.
So, how do you apply words
to a picture? MS Word allows you to do this in a very basic way. You ‘insert’ a
picture in a document and then set the text so that the picture is ‘behind’ the
chosen text. However, this is unsatisfactory for a number of reasons; mostly,
it’s very limited and not easy to manipulate. Most ‘Painting’ applications will
allow the placing of words over or within an image. They also tend to be fairly
limited and not particularly straightforward, however.
By far the most effective
way of applying text to a picture is to use image manipulation applications,
But, don’t despair: you
don’t need a complex program to produce your memes. Below are some of the
applications offered, free and online, that I’ve tried out for you. In each
case, I used my own images, but all these sites have libraries of pictures you
can use as part of the application. I used Fotofelexer to produce ‘We Travel
this road…’ and ‘Breaking Faith’. Picmonkey was used for ‘If we stop..’ And
Ipiccy produced ‘Life is…’
These I found easy to use,
but each works in slightly different ways, so you’ll need to give them a try to
find out which one suits your particular working methods.
The accompanying posters
are memes I produced specifically for this post and each took me only a few
minutes. Many of the sites have bells and whistles to allow you to ‘jazz-up’
your creations, should you feel so inclined. My advice is to have a go and see
what you can come up with.
And, what to do with these
wonders once you’ve produced them? Well, you can Tweet them on Twitter, add
them to your blog/website, make them part of your Pinterest collection and
stick them in albums on your Facebook and/or Google+ author page (what do you
mean, you haven’t got one?). Obviously, make sure there’s a buying link to
those that promote your books. As for the words you use to apply to the
pictures, you have a choice of your own pithy sayings, excerpts from the text
of the book and, of course, those wonderful words of praise from your reviewers
(make sure you credit them, of course).
Have fun and scatter memes
all over your world. You never know, you might actually attract some readers
and maybe even sell some books!
If you’ve found this
useful, stimulating, interesting or experienced any other positive outcome,
please use the ‘share’ buttons at the foot of the post to let others know about
it. It took me a lot of time and effort to produce this post. Thanks. Oh, and
by all means comment, but bear in mind I’m no expert, so I may not be able to
answer technical questions!
Photo editing sites:
http://www.dreamstime.com/ 21,500,000 images – small charge and some
free. I’ve used this for covers.
http://www.shutterstock.com/ 30,000,000 images – small charge,
some free
http://www.istockphoto.com/ V large selection – small charge,
some free
http://www.thinkstockphotos.co.uk/ V large selection – small charge – some free.
http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/ Large selection – small charge, some free.
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