Tech Library TV

Self-publishing, WordPress, Genesis Framework, and more....

Blog Posts

Download Free Stock Images for Commercial Use without Watermark

by Leave a Comment

In this guide, we’ll see 25 websites through which we can download Free Stock Images For Commercial Use Without Watermark.

With this abundance you can have a never ending supply of images and designs for your blog posts, social media posts, within your YouTube videos and video thumbnails – the options are limitless especially if you are a digital content creator.

These websites will help you explore a unique way to create something to make your messages rich with visually appealing treats for your users.

Meanwhile, don’t forget to watch this as a video – subscribe to my channel, and hit on the notification bell icon to be notified of future video uploads, so that you don’t miss them.

TL;DR

  1. Little Visuals https://littlevisuals.co/
    This is one of the websites that is easily close to the heart. And that’s because Little Visuals began as a passion project for Nic Jackson (https://twitter.com/nicjackson?lang=en) but Nic is not among us now – he passed away in November 2013. His family has ensured that all of the images he has taken will remain available and free for commercial use through this website. You can use them anyway you want – and this is a reason enough to credit Nic for his works. The site has a very humble collection but with stunning images. Do give them a try!
  1. Photo creator from icons8. I know you came here to find a list of websites that readily lets you download free stock photos for youtube or for any other commercial use. But here’s something different. Photocreator lets you CREATE your OWN stock photos with swappable properties and faces, instead of providing readymade ones. Here’s how to use it. Simply choose a setting, pick a model – you can also choose to use models with swappable faces, so you can change expressions, hairstyle, and so on.
    Now, this is from icons8 and their ask is pretty straight-forward. Use it for free, but link to icons8. https://icons8.com/license
    https://icons8.com/creator/dashboard
  2. Jay Mantri – https://jaymantri.com/ – as the home page greeting says – Jay Mantri offers us free pics with which we can create magic. Once you are here, simply choose the image and click on the ‘download’ link, to open the image in a new tab where you can right click and save the image to your computer. If you really like the image and want it in a high resolution for printing purposes, you could purchase it for as little as a dollar.
  3. Blush https://blush.design/ – if you are in the designing side of things, you would have already noticed a surge in the use of illustrations on the internet. Blush has gone a step ahead and given this freedom to us to not only provide the illustrations but also customize them to some extent. Just create a free account, search for illustrations, customize them to change background colors, objects, and boom. It’s ready to download and use. They also offer a Figma and Sketch plugin apart from their web app.
  1. Pixy – https://pixy.org/
    Pixy offers high quality free stock images that you can use anywhere. You can choose a specific category from their drop-down menu. What’s unique with Pixy is their ability to provide plac eholder images that we can make use of in our blog posts and websites. Images on Pixy are released under Creative Commons CC0 license. You are free to adapt and use them for commercial purposes without attributing the original author or source. Of course, that’s appreciated but not required.
  1. CC Search – https://search.creativecommons.org/
    CC Search is a tool that allows openly licensed and public domain works to be discovered and used by everyone. Their simple to use interface is not to be under estimated because they currently provide more than 300 million images. They also have a search syntax guide if you want to do some advanced queries with search operators. Bonus tip: CC Search also comes in the form of a browser extension. https://opensource.creativecommons.org/ccsearch-browser-extension/
  2. Duotone from ShapeFactory – https://duotone.shapefactory.co/
    If you are a content creator – especially a blogger or a YouTuber, here’s a unique one that goes a step further in your Featured image or Video Thumbnail design. Duotone offers a way for us to search Unsplash and mask it with a transparent dual color tone that can match your brand colors. Simple choose the set of colors you want, and you get not just a free image but a pleasant dual tone colored image that matches your brand.
  1. RawPixel – https://www.rawpixel.com/category/53/public-domain
    RawPixel has a unique artwork collection. Not just the photos but they also provide a wide variety of graphic illustrations. Navigate through their tabbed categories to find your required illustration that comes with the CC0 License. These are free for personal and commercial use with no attribution required.
  2. SVG Silh – https://svgsilh.com/
    SVG Silh – For those who wanted vector graphics, this website is a boon. Not just SVG images, but also PNG formats can be downloaded for free. Their categories span across a huge collection with tagged links provided along with the number of images available within the specific category.

Bonus tip: in this list of websites, there are some that not just offers images, but also free video footages to download and use without any restrictions. See if you can identify any of those, and let us know in the comments below.

  1. IM FREE – http://www.imcreator.com/free
    Im creator’s free section has a decent collection of not just curated images but also a lot of other free web design resources, ALL for commercial use! This website sometimes may require attribution to the creator, and when that’s required you will see it near the download button.
  2. Flickr https://www.flickr.com/
    Flickr in my opinion is the best so far in terms of the number of images and varieties available. After searching for your image, filter the results using their drop-down to navigate across different types of options such as ‘All creative commons’, ‘Commercial use allowed’, ‘Modifications allowed’, and so on…
  3. Smithsonian Open Access – Smithsonian Open Access offers millions of images that can be used right now, without any permission. They provide 2D and 3D digital items through their collections with many more to come. This includes images and data from across their 19 museums, 9 research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.
    Smithsonian Open Access assets designated as CC0 for commercial purposes can be used without any attribution or permission. Although they offer copyright-free resources, they do have a detailed FAQ section that’s important to read first before using any of their images which may answer and help you to comply with their requirements.
    https://www.si.edu/openaccess
    https://www.si.edu/openaccess/faq
  1. FreePhotos.cc https://freephotos.cc/
    While stock photos enhance the message you want to convey, free ones ensure you don’t burn down your savings. FreePhotos.cc is one such website in our list that helps you with stunning images. These are again curated from different sources using APIs, but I must admit that their taste in curation and collection is elegant and quite minimalistic in its aesthetics.
  2. Free range stock https://freerangestock.com/
    Now this website provides both photos and illustrations and are available under a different kind of license called Equalicense. This license is slightly different from the CC0 license or public domain where a common sense licensing term is included https://www.equalicense.com/license-faq. You’ll have to create a free account before downloading creatives from the Free Range stock website, and it just takes a minute to do so. Once done, not just downloading, but we also get a choice to further edit it using the free Pixlr online editor.
  3. Photo Everywhere http://photoeverywhere.co.uk/
    Photo Everywhere is a collection of high resolution Travel Stock Images that offers more than 4000 photos. These are all free to use and ready for instant download. Their photos are really cool, and of high quality and context that can be used in a variety of projects. All their photos are neatly organized by locations categorized into the West, the UK, and the East – their complete collection is shown on a World Map with clickable links.
  4. AltPhotos https://altphotos.com/
    All images on ALTPHOTOS are released under Creative Commons CC0 License. It means you may download, modify, distribute and use them free for anything you like, even for commercial purposes. Their license details are clearly shown in the individual image pages, so you can quickly check them before downloading. E.g. https://altphotos.com/photo/brick-wall-with-metal-doors-3471/
  5. Pik Wizard https://pikwizard.com/
    They have a stunning library of over 1 million stock images and videos. All royalty-free and safe for commercial use, with no attribution required. They have a standard license with more details given in their licensing page.
  1. Pexels https://www.pexels.com/
    All photos and videos on Pexels can be downloaded and used for free. My most favorite section in Pexels is their Popular collections area, which can be found from the Discover tab – it has all the latest and trending topics listed.

Attribution is not required. Giving credit to the photographer or Pexels is not necessary but always appreciated. You can modify the photos and videos from Pexels. Be creative and edit them as you like. That’s pretty much it. A quite straight-forward and simple license. https://www.pexels.com/license/

Time for a Bonus tip: If you are a creator from India, Pexels provides a section dedicated where hundreds of images are available in the Indian context. Just visit pexels.com/search/indian/.

  1. UI Faces https://uifaces.co/
    Now, this one is a little different, in a sense that it offers random people’s face images as Avatars for your design mockups. Care should be taken to properly filter your sources of these images before they are used. I would choose Unsplash or Pexels to ensure the Avatars chosen are good to use for commercial purposes too. You could also check an individual photo by clicking on it and verifying its license.
  2. Morgue File https://morguefile.com/photos
    Morguefile is a free photo archive for creatives, by creatives. The photos have been contributed by a wide range of creatives from around the world, ranging from amateur photo hobbyists to professionals and all photos found in the Morguefile archive are free for you to download and re-use in your work, be it commercial or not.
  3. Picspree – https://picspree.com/en
    By now you’d got a hang of what I’m going to say. Yea… you can discover and download beautiful royalty free images, stock photos, illustrations, and vectors – all free here for personal and commercial use. Again, they have a neat User Interface, built-in with organized categories of images. Just be cautious to watch out for premium images listed in-between the search results in here as they are sponsored or paid ones. And you know the drill, remember to check their license information first, before using the content given here.
  4. Burst from Shopify https://burst.shopify.com/
    The next on our list is Burst from Shopify. Now, you might know shopify as an ecommerce platform to create online stores, but they are also highly business-friendly folks. Apart from their other tools, they also provide high quality free images to use for commercial purposes through Burst. When you visit the Burst’s page, remember to check the exclusive Video backgrounds section for some cool backgrounds to use for your Zoom video calls.
  5. Stock Snap https://stocksnap.io/
    At StockSnap you can navigate through awesome collections of high-resolution photos by using the Categories menu or simply go over all their photos in one go. These are CC0 licensed, so you can use them even in commercial projects.
  6. New Old Stock https://nos.twnsnd.co/
    If you are still watching this video, here’s a great one – just for you. This one is a real hidden gem among this list. This website provides vintage photos from the public archives with all the richness of old, noisy, cracky, and grainy looks. Dig deep with this stealthily placed search icon and find your cravings satisfied. These are genuinely vintage collections because when I searched for car, I got these beauties (give some gap) and when I searched for computer – here’s what I get. See, that’s what I am talking about!
  7. Visual Hunt https://visualhunt.com/
    We already have a big list of websites that give us fantastic photos and images so far. Now, how about getting closer to your brand colors and search for free public domain images that matches your specific color requirements! Get to VisualHunt.com and you’ll fall in love with it instantly. Simply click on these colors and find images that matches it. You can also filter by licenses here – where you could specifically choose for Commercial use or Public Domain.

Time for the bonus tip: at least a 25% of the websites mentioned in this video offers API capabilities. In fact, I had mentioned about one of the websites earlier which uses API. If you happened to be a developer and know what I am talking about, you can easily create tools on top of these websites to offer something related to images, to give back to the creative community.

Most free images available on the internet are either in the public domain or are offered through a Creative Commons license:

Public domain is that area in which the creative works are available for the community at large, unprotected by copyright or patent, which means you and I can make use of these works to amplify our messages.

That being said, some common sense rules still apply – because your peace of mind, reputation, and your finances are more important than rushing on your photo requirements hastily now and getting into expensive legal battles later.

Remember while using free images:

a) Images and Videos depicting identifiable persons may not be used for pornographic, unlawful or other immoral purposes, or in a way that can give a bad name to people, or to imply endorsement of products and services by those persons, brands, organisations, etc.

b) Almost all these websites have an ‘About’ page, a ‘Terms of Use’ or ‘Terms of Service’ page along with privacy, iability, and boundaries of usage. Spend a few minutes checking them out before you use their images because your peace of mind, reputation, and your finances are more important than rushing on your photo requirements.

c) If you want more guidance on attributions, check the links given in the description. (add them to the blog post: https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Best_practices_for_attribution)

d) Visit the official CC0 license page to learn more about the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ and in general about the CC Licenses. https://creativecommons.org/about/cclicenses/

Whenever you see a CC0 License: Here’s what you can do:

  • Download the image file
  • Publish, revise, copy, alter, and share that image
  • Use the image (as-is or as you’ve altered it), in both personal and commercial contexts.
  • You don’t even need to attribute the image to the creator. However, even though it’s not required, it’s a way of Saying Thanks to include an appropriate attribution. It’s a nice thing to do.
    Check the license information specific to the websites listed here.

Here’s what you cannot do:

  • You cannot use these images to imply any kind of endorsement on the part of the image creator or any person or product depicted in the image.
  • You can’t pass the image or the photographer as a direct stamp of approval for you, your company, or your products or services.
  • Finally, you cannot sue or claim any kind of liability against the person who created the image on any kind of theory of warranty or guarantee in the image.

To reiterate, most of these websites won’t allow us to re-sell them for a price. These are just to use in your projects, videos, websites but may not to sell them directly. Just make sure you read each of these websites policies on how to use them without getting into any trouble.

That’s all for this guide, I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Solved: How to Create a Submenu in Authority Pro Theme

by Leave a Comment

Authority Pro is one of the premium StudioPress themes and it’s secondary menu structure, by default, doesn’t allow creating sub-menus.

Not even after customizing our WordPress menu like this (pushed slightly to the right to create sub-menus):

Here’s how to fix this issue:

Go to your Theme Editor.

Click on Functions.php

Click inside the editor and search for ‘secondary_menu‘.

Within this code, ‘comment out’ the second line – as shown below.

	if ( 'secondary' === $args['theme_location'] ) {
		//$args['depth'] = 1;
	}

That’s it, click on ‘Update File‘ button.

The sub-menu problem in your Authority Pro theme should be solved now.

The Best Free Annotation Tool for Presenters

by Leave a Comment

If you’re into presentations or teaching something through screen sharing online with others, you know you cannot annotate, highlight nor zoom into the screen while presenting.

This is possible in some presentation software like Microsoft PowerPoint to some extent but not without showing the audience what you are actually doing in front of them.

But here’s what’s possible after you read this guide post / watch this video:

  • You could draw,
  • write directly on the screen,
  • highlight directly over most desktop applications including the presentation software and web pages.

Here’s how to get them done.

Just head on to this website which is from Microsoft and download the ZoomIt software.

Once the zip file gets downloaded click on it to open it – this only contains the exe file and is a portable file – you only need to double-click to use it.

This exe file opens up an options dialog box. Just go through this video demo for a detailed walk-through of how to make use of all these options to suit your situation.

In case you are in the Teaching profession or in any training Department within your company then this is a very useful tool to keep handy.

How to Remove Blank Space Between Words in Justified Paragraphs

by Leave a Comment

Sometimes you may see too much space between the words, after you justify your paragraph text.

This doesn’t look good while self-publishing an eBook, printed book, or simply any article or report. Here’s how to get rid of those gaps within your paragraphs. 

Actually, there are two ways to remove those wide gaps. 

1. The first method is to use Hyphenation settings in your document.  Watch the video clip above for a demo of how to do everything we discuss in this guide post.

Click on the Layout tab group, select Hyphenation drop-down to choose Automatic or Manual. The gaps automatically correct itself by adding hyphens to the broken words, thus removing the gaps between the words. Doing this manually would mean, it asks you for every hyphenated word whether you want to keep it or not. 

2. The second method is to use ‘Kerning for fonts‘. It’s the spacing between the characters, and this spacing is mostly different for every font face we use.

You can get to the Font kerning settings by clicking on the tiny arrow to open the Font settings dialog box, then click on the Advanced tab – and then select the check box. Then play around with the scale, spacing settings by testing various points here to see which works best in your situation.

NEVER do this as a default setting for the entire document, this is only for specific instances where you see abnormally wide gaps. 

Additionally, you can also enable the setting from File – Options – Advanced – “Don’t expand character spaces on a line that ends with SHIFT + RETURN“.

Once done, it auto-adjusts the spacing for the last line in your paragraph. This setting will also apply to your entire document. 

To conclude,

  • Remember that a paragraph that has not been hyphenated is much easier to read.
  • Hyphenate only when text is trapped in columns or in other narrow places, or when you want a very formal-looking document. Otherwise, follow the second method. 

I hope you liked or learned something from this post. Thanks for reading, and you take care!

How to Create Short Intro Videos for YouTube using InVideo

by Leave a Comment

Creating a short video as an intro or outro for YouTube from scratch is hard work. It takes time to position the logo where we want (after multiple trials and errors), find suitable music, get quality footage to use – not to forget the copyrights involved in the process.

InVideo is a tool which can help us exactly with just that. And more. I have been using it for a while now and it has become an important component of my video creation tools, mainly because of its ready to use templates and pre-made designs with music, scenes, animations, placeholders – it all cumulatively saves a ton of time!

A Definitive Guide to Using InVideo Video Creating Web App

Throughout this blog post, I will also mention some key features, tips, tricks, settings that you may find useful. I also mention a few things that need some improvement, so make sure you read this article completely. It took me a long time to break down all the important steps in this guide post, to create any video within InVideo – so once you finish reading this guide post, you’ll master everything that is there within InVideo.

Start using the InVideo tool for free NOW!

We will see how to use the InVideo tool to create your next professional-looking video, ad, or any promotional footage in under a few minutes.

Here’s a video with a sample intro video (actually two) + a complete walkthrough of what we are going to cover in this article. You can simply watch this video for the full walkthrough or keep reading further if you are of the ‘reading’ types.

Both the intro clips you see in the above video are created using the InVideo software in just a few clicks – and yes, no installation required in my computer – it’s all happening within the browser.

By the end of this article, you’ll be able to create a similar video for your own purpose.

We will cover 3 sections in this article:

  1. First, we’ll see the account setup process. It shouldn’t take long, it’s really short and simple.
  2. Then, we will do some initial important setup such as uploading and adding some brand presets.
  3. Finally, we will see how to create the video.

Now a full disclaimer here. I got a free account for creating this review video, and that being said, this video doesn’t show any bias and I have been using this tool for full 30 days tinkering around finding what’s good and what needs improvement, before producing this review for you. So, rest assured, you can be sure that this is a fair review article.

But if you choose to invest in this software (I don’t necessarily call it a purchase because you can definitely reap its rewards in terms of time saved and of course in terms of the professional boost you are about to give to your brand) – so if you choose to buy and invest in this software through my affiliate links below, I will get a small commission at no extra cost to you and that way you will be supporting my creations.

Get InVideo for just $5 per month.

We now know what is InVideo, next let’s create a new InVideo account.

There are some limitations with a free account but it does let you produce videos with a watermark – as you can see above from the screenshot.

If you choose to upgrade, there are two plans available at the time of making this video – which are Business and Unlimited plans.

The names of these plans may change depending on when you read this. These plans cost you $20 and $60 if you choose to go with paying every month, but you can instantly save 50% of it if you pay for the annual price, which costs $10 and $30 respectively, billed annually.

InVideo Promo Code:

And if you want to get an additional 50% off of this price you can use this InVideo coupon code arun50 and click on ‘Apply‘ to get it at just $5 per month paid annually.

Next, let’s see the account signing up process

Signing up process is pretty quick – just provide your name, email, number, and sign up. Once you are in, you will actually have a few setup options that can be done, but these are not compulsory to proceed and can be set up anytime later on. For now, I will just walk you through these settings.

If you scroll down a bit, you can see this ‘Personalize now‘ option through which you can let InVideo know your preferences. This will show some tailor-made content for you to focus on.

Another key setting to take care of is the Brand Presets section accessible from your profile menu here. Adding a logo once at the beginning using the ‘Brand Presets’ section enables you to have your brand logo in each scene by default. It also creates an end clip including your logo and social handles.

The brand presets option detects colors for text, background, etc. automatically once after you add your logo in accordance with the color of your logo. We will see how to make use of all that later.

Now, we are ready to create our first video.

Here, you will be greeted with three different workflows to create videos:

  1. You could use their Pre-made video Templates – where you can use more than 3000 templates to create videos in under 10 minutes.
  2. Use the Text-to-Video option to create videos from articles.
  3. Start from a Blank Template to pour your own creativity.

The best part is that all these three options allow us to create videos in either Wide, or Vertical or Square format, thus catering to popular video content platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia, and vertical ones specifically to target mobile users and square ones for marketing-related video content creators who can use that to create ads for displaying in mobile or on the sidebar of websites.

The first two options have some pre-made templates in the shown custom platforms and formats, which is pretty cool – as it saves a good lot of your time.

If you have used Canva before, then you will pick this up pretty quickly. If not, don’t worry, I will still walk you through in detail on how to create a video quickly in InVideo.

That being said, they also have an extensive FAQ section if you have any questions on how to use any of their available features or even find out what are some of the features that you may be missing out.

Alright, so, now let’s go to the InVideo home page, and use a pre-made template to create an intro video.

This video has animation, let’s me show my logo and the website link. Perfect for an intro or an outro alike, and it’s also really short.

So, now let’s pick this one.

Before proceeding, am going to add this to my favorites, so you can revisit this later if in case you want to browse through other designs to get some inspiration. You can add a video to the favorites by clicking on the ‘heart ❤’ icon.

Once you are ready, we can start using this template, but before doing that let’s set up some defaults such as the social media handles, logo, company name, URLs, etc. This is where we will make use of the Brand Presets section we saw at the starting of this article.

This step will be really helpful as one-time setup variables which will then be picked up by the template fields when we create and edit. It’ll be definitely a huge time saver.

However, on the other hand, I feel more options could be given here as something I would call ‘Profiles‘ to create multiple presets if I have more than one website or logo to create videos for. It’d be especially useful to have multiple presets if you are an agency creating videos for your customers. Anyway, that’s just my opinion.

Moving on…

Click on ‘Use this template‘ – upload your logo on the left side pane which automatically fits it into this video template, thus making your editing time far lesser. If you already uploaded your logo using the universal Brand Presets section, then you can skip this step.

After selecting the template, we can see the media asset features on the left-hand side and the editing options on the right-hand side.

There are different tabs here to add different types of content elements in your video, such as text, image, video, effects, shapes, etc.

Speaking of images and videos there are more than 3 million Standard Media Library assets from Pexels, Pixabay, and Unsplash in addition to 1 million premium media content that is copyright free for you to add to the project and produce.

Just search for them using the search bar provided on the left side of the InVideo interface.

Remember that the InVideo Unlimited plan gives us unlimited everything – such as Premium Templates, HD Video Exports per Month, more than 1 million Premium photos, and videos from Storyblocks and Shutterstock to be used in our projects. Whereas the InVideo Business plan offers 300 premium photos and videos and 60 HD Video Exports per Month at the time of making this review.

Okay, so the bottom section has the project’s timeline – you can either choose to have a basic timeline or an advanced timeline by clicking here to change your view. You could modify the way the layers are stacked as per how you want it.

Just ensure to unlock certain layers that are locked by default such as the background and the overlay elements.

Of course, we can also rename the layers (right side of the editing interface) to suit our video projects. We also get to change the colors we want in the video.

Speaking of adding the suitable music tracks, InVideo’s technology adds the music track that is best suited for the theme of your video. But you can always have the option to change it by uploading your own track using the Upload button option. You can change the music track for your video either on the ‘Preview’ screen or on the ‘Advanced Editing’ screen – all under the ‘Music’ tab.

One thing to note here is that you will be able to hear the music only when you play all scenes by clicking its button. We won’t be able to hear any music when clicking on the ‘Play Scene’ button.

Important Tip:

One unique feature in InVideo is its Intelligent Assistant button. Clicking this will analyze your scenes to look at it from different angles, timing, and setup and lets you know if you have a pixel-perfect scene, LITERALLY!

The sample video we saw doesn’t need to have any voice-overs but if you have that specific need, it can be done using this button here.

You can upload an already recorded voiceover track, or record a live one, or it has a very cool automated Voiceover feature that lets you just type some text and have the computer read it out in the accent of your choice. It could be American, Indian, British, German, and so much more. that’s really cool!

Alright, now we’re all set to export our video – clicking on this Export button will instantly export the video into a 1080p video format.

It provides a jobID to make note of so we can revisit them later. This can also be renamed. The rendering process takes a few minutes depending on the number of elements added in the video and the duration of all the scenes.

Once done, we can download and use it wherever we want. It’s as simple as that.

One of the cool things about InVideo is that they never get tired of creating new video templates. As you can see from the What’s Hot section, there is ALWAYS something new to pick from.

I also observed that they pretty much release a video template for every occasion or event – be it Teacher’s day, Labor Day, and every single celebrated holiday around the world. This is not only great to be current but also saves us time in creating a video on the hot topic or subject to release it to our related audience.

InVideo also has templates for almost every industry – regardless of which you belong to, you can access anything and everything.

As you can see here, there are templates for Finance & Loan services, Social Media Marketing, Bloggers, YouTubers, Yoga, Property Portfolios, Photography bloggers, Fitness, sales, marketing, production, health, education, travel, medical, electrical – the list goes on.

I hope this in-depth article provided a good walkthrough of how to use InVideo video maker app with adding your own music, adding scenes and bringing your creativity to life within a few clicks and a few minutes.

Don’t forget to use the InVideo coupon code ‘arun50‘ to get it for 5 bucks a month paid annually. I have been using it for a while now and it has become a part of my video creation tools that I cannot live without.

7 Insights for Book Authors to Sell More Books

by Leave a Comment

Nothing is more pathetic than working hard on your book and publishing it only to find out that no one is interested in it.

In this article, we will see 7 important mindset shifts to help you sell more and earn better from your writing.

1 Research Before You Write

If you want to sell books, then we need to understand from the very beginning that sales is directly proportional to the number of people who will be interested in whatever it is that you want to write.

Studying the market even before you write, and doing some research on keywords, surveying what people in your field really want – will all go a long way when you finish writing and start selling. In fact, these could pave the way to sell your books even before you start writing. KDP also has ‘pre-order’ sales options available to its authors.

This way we can distinctly divide the entire process into three parts:

1. research , 2. write, 3. promote

All these three steps are important and goes hand-in-hand to ensure your book sells more.

Tools such as Publisher Rocket helps in finding approximately how many people have bought similar titles in your genre, what is the typical downloads count per a given period, and more such useful metrics for you to decide.

Another treasure trove is the book reviews, ratings, and comments section for similar titles that others have written – you can easily find what your potential audience have loved and hated from their comments and then use that intel to enhance your writing exponentially.

If you are interested to learn more tactics, I highly recommend reading Pat Flynn’s ‘Will it fly‘ book – I will provide the link below so you can give it a shot.

Download a mind map version of this article for free.

2 Importance of platform awareness

Having different versions of the books you’ve written is great but if you are just starting out, focus only on your Kindle version.

More books are sold on Kindle than in print!

This way you can first focus on establishing a place for yourself in the world of writing. After you see some traction in your ebook sales, you can move on to publishing them in print editions.

Not just that, there are more avenues in the eBook world and Kindle is not the end – we have leanpub, Kobo, Google Play Books, Smashwords, iBooks and so on so you can cater to different types of people.

They are all people reading ebooks but the devices they carry in their hands are different and you are losing out on lot of money if you don’t tap into that diversity.

That’s why it’s all the more important to be platform aware and start focusing on the eBook market in your first month of selling eBooks before you exhaust all the options and then step into the print versions.

3 Understanding the technical side of ebooks

A simple shift in the mindset regarding the technologies we use to self-publish takes you really far in making the work you do to stand out from your competition.

An eBook is really just a web page, written in HTML. Learning some basics of HTML and CSS can really help in formatting the ebooks the way you want. If not nothing, consider using the services offered by professionals who charge very less in platforms like upwork or fiverr. They are experts in using HTML, CSS who can format your ebook the way you want with all the designs and formatting specifics.

4 Expect Less

Your first published book is no-doubt a bestseller in your family circles, but it is not going to be a super-hit out in the world from day one onwards.

There are exceptions and I will consider myself lucky if it happens to me. If you are just beginning to write and sell books as an author, then try writing something short but valuable for your target audience and learn all the technicalities involved in self-publishing your first book.

Publish more often applying the knowledge you’ve gained from the first book. Unlike olden days where people used typewriters to type their manuscript, and publishers who used big printing press machines, writing books need not take years with hand-held gadgets, cloud based apps, and self-publishing resources available for free these days.

Learn this business, forget the expectations, gain the experience and eventually you will ride on easily with increased revenue because this is all just science and the process works the same way for everyone.

5 Connecting with readers

Some authors just share their ideas in their books and leave it at that. The book stands in isolation without any action items for the readers, so they just move on after reading and you have lost a potential fan because there is no way to connect with you for them.

As an author, connecting to your readers is an important opportunity to ensure they also read your next book. CTAs or Call to action inside your books are vital to building a following for your works.

Turning that into a loyal following group depends on your consistency in engaging the audience with what they ask for. Here are some ideas that could bring your readers to know you better and get closer to you.

1. Introduction page – where you can tell more about yourself,

2. Contact page – Creating and linking to your website and other social media channels.

3. Offering a supplement to your current book and letting them sign up for your Newsletters or other free accompanying downloads called as Lead Magnets.

4. Creating a Facebook community and making it an exclusive access to your followers.

5. Doing an AMA or “Ask Me Anything” chat sessions on Twitter, Reddit, or Gitter (https://gitter.im)

6 Delivery Costs

Size of the eBook increases delivery costs from Amazon, thus leading to lesser royalties.

This is something that all of the authors who are self-publishing using Amazon to be aware of.

I created a dedicated video to address this issue and how you can resolve it. The main culprit is the images you use in the eBook and in this other video you’ll learn how to compress them effectively without losing the quality. Links are provided in the description below.

7 Content Seeding

The core principle here is repurposing the content you’ve already written. Almost every book you write can take another birth of its own in the form of a podcast, blog article, video, a slideshow, a course, a checklist (for non-fiction works), an infographic, or any other mini PDF that can be created out of the original work you wrote first.

No book should be left in isolation and must be reborn in one or many of these forms.

There are multiple benefits when this is done – these act as seeds of growth for your book, they increase the outreach for your brand, different kinds of people can take note of different varieties of value that you offer, grow your email list, provide further ideas and comments from the readers on these various platforms which can help in producing even another book on the same or related subject, and as we saw earlier, it can tremendously improve and increase the revenue sources for you based on the platforms you use to republish the content seeds.

Bonus tip:

For all those of you who are still reading, I have a bonus tip. Well it’s actually a no-brainer but not EVERYONE realizes it. So, I thought I will share it anyway.

8 Hyperlinked – Table of contents:

In case your books don’t have this, it’s time you edit and re upload your eBooks after creating table of contents – and if you already have the TOC in your eBooks then pat yourself on your back. This is because TOC section provides a great reader’s experience in eBooks. Some don’t use it and some misuse it by placing it at the end of their eBooks – this not only is a poor reading experience but also makes Amazon think that you are cheating its algorithm by letting the system think that the reader has fully read your book by reaching the end of the eBook. This is usually manipulated to tap into the KENP page read count related royalties. So, use the TOC within the starting sections only and use it to link to your main chapter and sub-chapter headings. Again, I have another video which talks about creating Table of Contents.

So, those were some of the pointers you might want to keep in mind in your writing journey. I hope this was useful and do let me know if you have any problems or questions on Amazon KDP below.

Cheers and good luck!

This is how to remove claps in a Medium article (if already clapped)

by Leave a Comment

A Medium article gains its vote by way of claps.

It’s a great feature, indeed. However, when the thunderstorm strikes, when all the comic villains are let loose, when ants stop eating sugar, things might go weird and we may mistakenly clap for an article where we may not want to in the first place.

Alright! Your clap now sits there which you didn’t intend to give.

How to remove them?

By the first look, I couldn’t. That’s when I just hovered my mouse over it.

Et Voilà !

A tiny ‘x’ icon sneaks out from the left. Clicking that removed my claps.

MEDIUM claps removal

That’s it.

Simple, not evident, but simple.

I won’t blame the programmers or the UX team at Medium – actually it’s less clumsy. It’s not there, but there.

Come on, who wants to remove claps that we’ve given? Anyway, if you wanted to, now you know how!

Note: Removing claps option only shows up after the end of the Medium article. The one on the sidebar can only take your claps, but won’t give back.

“WHAT YOU SEEK, IS SEEKING YOU”

— RUMI

If this quote blew your mind, consider subscribing to my Five Things Friday Newsletter, where I share 5 intriguing findings every Friday – which sometimes also include quotes such as this.

25 Awesome Tools For Authors and Self-publishers

by Leave a Comment

You could be a magazine editor, copy writer, blogger, author, poet, song-writer, self-publisher or a creative writer of any kind.

All the tools we’ll now see are going to benefit you in many ways!

1. Yarny

The first one we’re going to see is called Yarny which is an ideal software for fiction-authors.

  • First, create a free account so whatever you write gets saved and synced to the cloud.
  • Then name your novel – here you could also give yourself a goal of writing a specific number of words and track it!

We can start writing our chapters on the left side of its screen, and those are called as snippets in Yarny. These snippets could then be reordered if you decide to change the order of your writings by dragging and dropping.

You could also create a group and combine a set of snippets by clicking at the icon given in the bottom left corner of the tool. The ideas for people, places, and things can all be stored on the right panel, and organized by tags.

This tool also saves different versions if you decide to discard and revert to older plots. Once done, download your work by clicking on icon given at the bottom by choosing the format you want. It also offers different themes to suit your mood.

Did I tell you that Yarny is totally free!

2. iAWriter

iAWriter promises a distraction-free interface to let our thoughts flow on to the screen. It supports Markdown formatting, and we can choose to gray out all the words except the sentence that we are currently writing. They call it the ‘Focus mode’.

This software also highlights different parts of speech in different colors.

While this offers a paid version, there is a trial that you definitely want to try and even buy this which comes only for $19.99 for its Windows version and $29.99 for the Mac version.

3. Wordslingr

This is basically an online community for writers to help fellow writers to become better by providing feedback on their writing. Not just that, it provides feedback at all levels of the writing journey – be it writing, editing, formatting, or publishing – but that’s part of the paid version.

The free version of Wordslingr’s interface is similar to Yarny in terms of setting writing goals. You can change the default goal of 750 words and also change the word count to any number you want.

Create a new file by clicking on this button, and choose a template if you want to. There are multiple templates available to choose from, in case you run out of ideas. It’s editor is quite simple in its interface, with the regular formatting tools.

One key feature is the in-built Thesaurus, and dictionary. The real fun begins while writing the story where you could activate the navigation from the view menu and create your characters, outline, note down your researches.

4. Wavemaker

Wavemaker is a totally free tool!

With Wavemaker, you could easily write a whole novel!

It provides options to structure your draft novel manuscript into chapters, scenes, and notes – which can all be shuffled around in the order you want.

This virtually runs on any device, and the writings can be synced using Google Drive. This also works offline, so you could write from within a train or in your next flight to that city.

It provides planning boards to move around your plot ideas.

5. Sigil

Sigil is a free and open source software available for windows, mac, and Linux OS, that you can use to self-publish your next book.

This is an amazing piece of software to create deeply customized ePub files that can be used for submitting to many online publishing vendors, including Amazon KDP, Nook, iBooks, etc.

It comes loaded with a plenty of features, so much so that, it might take a while for us to get used to its interface. If you know HTML, CSS, then you can create a custom css file to easily decorate any part of your eBook. Although, Sigil could seem intimidating when you use it for the first time, it is a highly flexible tool with an in-built editor to directly edit the parts of your manuscript.

The only downside is that you cannot import Word document files – it supports only HTML and epub files. Not to forget that Sigil’s functionalities can be infinitely expanded with its plugins that are available from this mobileread forum page.

FreshBooks Suite of Financial Products – Let it Snow Sale!

by Leave a Comment

If you are into any business, chances are more that you already know the pain of maintaining your business’s expenses, sending invoices to your clients, creating tax reports, managing and remembering to pay your bills on time, tracking the time spent on a particular client, setting up payment system to receive payments from your customers, and the list is endless.

FreshBooks, makes all of these and more, a cakewalk from the get-go.

Related: Have you tried the FreshBooks Business Name Generator yet?

If you haven’t tried out FreshBooks yet, here’s a sweet news for you during this festive season!

FreshBooks is offering a massive discount of 70% off for 3 months on its Plus and Premium plans. This offer is valid only until January 9, 2020.

With all these important financial records, rest assured, we can be at peace for its security systems are pretty solid.

Just remember that if you would like to take advantage of this offer, get straight to either the Plus or the Premium plan instead of signing up for the trial period. Otherwise, this discount is not applicable.

Note: the links in the post may be affiliate links and at no additional cost to you, I may receive a small commission if you make a purchase.

25+ Most Amazing Websites to Download Free eBooks (2019)

by Leave a Comment

In this article, we will see 25+ websites to download free ebooks. These could be used to simply READ ebooks for leisure, to learn and to expand our knowledge, OR We can also use some of the websites given here to get your public domain ebooks that are sometimes totally FREE to even publish on Kindle.

I have obviously not included famous ones like the Project Gutenberg as many already know about that website. So, stay till the end of this video to find out some new websites along with a bonus website at the end.

If you want to “watch” this blog post in a video format, you can see the video below. Meanwhile, don’t forget to subscribe and hit on the notification bell icon – to be notified of future video uploads, so that you don’t miss them.

1 ebooklobby.com

ebooklobby.com has a humble collection with ebooks categorized into different types such as art, fashion, graphic design, photography, finance, biographies, computers, entertainment, and many others. They also have a section that shows Top 10 ebooks categorized into various sections.

2 bookspics.com

bookspics.com – This website claims to have 275 thousand + books available to download. They have a pretty good collection of books, except that they aren’t categorized for easy identification.

3 planetpublish.com

planetpublish.com – This is a pretty minimalistic website with a neat collection of classic books such as the Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Jungle Book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, etc, all available in PDF format ready to download.

4 Librivox.org

Librivox is a website that offers a free collection of Public Domain Audiobooks. This will be loved by people who don’t have time to “read” books but can find time to listen to books through audiobooks. Simply click on their ‘catalog’ and find hundreds of audiobooks, ready to be downloaded, which can also be filtered either by Author, Title, Genre, or Language. A little word of caution here: although these audio books are claimed to be in the Public domain, they are so in the U.S.A. please verify the copyright status of these works in your own country before downloading, otherwise you may be violating copyright laws.