Things may have appeared to be quiet at Blackbird Publishing for the past few weeks, but there’s been a flurry of activity behind the scenes! With the holiday and end-of-year chaos, this seemed like a good time to focus on getting ahead on publishing for 2018, as well as to revamp the blog posting topics…
Sometimes you want to flip an image either horizontally or vertically. For example, in this cover I wanted to horizontally flip the image of the woman so that she was facing right, not left. There are two options, depending on the situation: You can flip the entire canvas. Flip a single image layer. Flip the…
Findaway Voices allows you to publish and distribute an existing audio book. There is no requirement for exclusivity, and you control the pricing. You keep 80% of the royalties Findaway Voices receives. The actual percentages vary by the type of partner, channel, and business model. These instructions assume you have an existing audio book, but…
BookFunnel is an ebook delivery platform that allows authors to deliver books directly to their readers. You upload your ebook files to BookFunnel, create a download page, then provide the link to that download page to your readers. These instructions cover the basics, but there are lots of different options – you can customize your…
A ‘volume’ in Vellum is a way to group things together. Volumes can be used to associate content with individual authors and generate a table of contents for an anthology. What is an ‘element’ in Vellum? A book in Vellum is made up of a collection of elements. Each element can be formatted differently, displayed…
BundleRabbit was initially created as a story bundling platform. It now offers another feature: collaborative projects, often referred to as ‘collaborations.’ Terminology curator: The person who organizes the bundle/collaboration. (Note that curation for a single collection may be done by several people working together, just like an anthology could have multiple editors.) author: An author…
Books2Read, which is part of Draft2Digital, offers a free service where you can create a custom URL which will direct readers to just about every online bookstore you can think of. A universal book link is a custom URL that provides links to every site your book is available. This means you can provide one…
What is TrackerBox? TrackerBox is software for writers that takes all of the reports they get from Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, and a host of other distributors, and organizes them into a single, manageable set of reports. TrackerBox is currently only supported on Windows, but there’s a Kickstarter campaign to fund development of TrackerBox…
Vellum is a tool that creates both ebooks and print books from a Microsoft Word .docx file. You can export to this format from Scrivener and other tools. If you work directly in Word, you can create a Vellum template using Vellum’s custom styles. This will reduce the amount of work you need to do…
Meet Marcelle! Marcelle Dubé loves speculative fiction and mysteries. In Backli’s Ford, she has created a fascinating alternate history with strong characters, an unusual situation and an alien species stranded on Earth. Backli’s Ford In the early 1700s, an A’lle generation ship crashed in the woods of Lower Canada. Survivors stumbled out of the wreckage…
