playing with quotes

I may be the most competently incompetent social media person around.  I have Tumblr.  I have Twitter.  I have Facebook.  I have Goodreads.  and now I have Instagram.  When promoting myself in these spaces, I spent most of my time talking about my books instead of (I guess?) posting pictures loosely pertaining to them.

I am not the kind of writer who uses images of things to prompt my writing, or even to anchor my descriptions.  This is fundamentally why I don’t have a Pinterest account.  Share the images which inspired your characters, I’m told.  That’s cool, but I don’t have any.

Anyhow, I’m trying.  Hence, the Instagram account, which forces me to use the camera on my phone for reasons other than taking a photo of what my wife told me to buy more of at the store.

I also appreciate that one way to promote my writing is to take quotes from something and put it in a box in front of a picture of something or two, and sharing the hell out of it, with the hope that people who are unfamiliar with the novel will read the quote and share the hell out of it too.

I’m sure there is a single word that means quotes in front of pictures in a box but I don’t even know what that word is.  I also don’t know a thing about graphic manipulation.  I don’t have Photoshop, and if I did I wouldn’t know how to use it.  I pay someone to design my covers, and someone else to update the website, and concentrate on writing words instead.

But, this has to change, and thankfully there is such a thing as Canva for graphic design luddites such as myself.  (My nearest equivalent experience is newspaper layouts, which I did in high school.  Our printer was a cold type press machine and we had no computers.  Just think about that.)

I’ve been playing with Canva for a few days, and produced the images below.  They may be awful, but if you think they are less-than-awful, please share them, and let’s all hope I start to get better at this.

Sheriff with bullhorn quote (1)

His name was Sam Corning. He was a twenty-four year old six foot four square jawed soldier with baby blue eyes and a smile that never went away even when he stopped smiling.

http://genedoucette.tumblr.com/post/142847436862/the-spaceship-next-door-quotes

(The third one is pulling from my Tumblr.  Why?  Because I can’t get the image to upload here.  Why?  I don’t know.  See: luddite, graphic design.)


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No Comments

  1. Mom on April 16, 2016 at 8:39 am

    Hot lead. That was the typesetting machine in high school if I recall your description of it then correctly. Trays of lead slugs inked and inserted into giant rolling press …

    • Gene Doucette on April 16, 2016 at 9:58 am

      no, it was a cold type machine. Hot lead machines melt and re-form the letters after each use, this pulled pre-formed letters from a tray an slid them into position.

  2. Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt on April 16, 2016 at 11:10 am

    Just a suggestion? The text is hard to read in places.

    You might look into the forms of text which have an outline, and fill that with a color which gives you good contrast with the background photo. It’s the simplest way to make the text stand out; there are others.

    If you just want a few images, Stencil.com has a free account (10 images produced a month for free) which makes it VERY easy to get a quote on a picture.

    • Gene Doucette on April 16, 2016 at 11:37 am

      yeahh I can’t figure out how to outline the letters so they pop more, or how to de-emphasize the background. I’m still working on it.

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