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In this week's episode, I take a look at 7 things you should not put on a book cover, and also discuss how I used to write tech nonfiction. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 216 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is August the 30th, 2024, and today we're considering seven things that you should not put on your book cover. We'll also talk a little bit about how I used to write tech books and have Question of the Week. Last week we also had a bit of a problem with the microphone levels. Hopefully that should now be adjusted and the sound should not be bouncing around randomly throughout the episode. So first up, updates on my writing progress. I am currently done with the rough draft of Shield of Conquest, 97,500 words written in 21 days. Right now, I'm writing a companion short story, The First Command. That will be a short story that my newsletter subscribers will get for free in ebook form when Shield of Conquest comes out, hopefully sometime in September. I'm also 40,000 words into Ghosts in the Tombs, which will be the next main project after Shield of Conquest is out. I'm 10,000 words into Cloak of Titans, which hopefully will be around November. In audiobook news, the recording for Half-Orc Paladin is done. That will be excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward. And if all goes well, that should wend its way through the various audiobook stores and be available soon. 00:01:19 Question of the Week Now let's do Question of the Week, which is designed to inspire enjoyable discussion of interesting topics. This week's question: what is your favorite movie in the fantasy genre? No wrong answers obviously, but I think it's an interesting question because I suspect fantasy is a lot harder as a genre to bring to film than police procedurals or romantic comedies. Quite a few responses for this one. Mary says: The Princess Bride. Justin says: The Lord of the Rings trilogy is in a category by itself. A faithful (given the constraints) adaptation of the greatest fantasy story of all time. Conan is very good, but The Princess Bride is what I watch over and over again. Barbara says: Ralph Bakshi's Wizards. I know it's animated, but I watch it every chance I get. Even hunted down the soundtrack. It was our go to entertainment when my husband and I were dating and right after we were married. William says: Watching Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits as a child was an impactful experience for me. Personally, I don't really see the need to adapt perfectly good books into movies where you can make a perfectly good original movie instead like Star Wars. Martin says: Lord of the Rings has an epic quality about it and has everything. One of my favorite fantasy films is Stardust. It's a great journey for the characters involved and has a wonderful mix of magic and action. Jenny says: Legend and Labyrinth are iconic to me and Dark Crystal. Lord of the Rings is epic though, I agree. A different Barbara says: Got to be Labyrinth. Bowie was spectacular. Not a fan of Lord of the Rings. Gary says: Lord of the Rings is pretty obvious, but I've always liked Time Bandits. BV says: Hand down, Lord of the Rings and the upcoming movie Shield Knight (which is not terribly likely). Bonnie says: Willow is number one, then the original Dune. Yeah, I know-quite the spectrum. Juana says: Lord of the Rings and Fantastic Voyage. David says: Don't forget Krull. Tom says: Lord of the Rings, then Stardust. Rewatched those so many times. AL says: Willow also had a terrible plot. I think my second choice would be Bright, lol. And then the last Dungeons and Dragons movie. Jeanne says: Without question, Lord of the Rings. Darla says: Geez people, every movie you mentioned makes me want to see them again. There are so many good and not so good fantasy movies. I would say Lord of the Rings plus Rings of Power on Amazon. A really old movie from my brain is Scanners. Although the acting was totally terrible, the concept was intriguing. And finally, Pippa says: Lord of the Rings, then Willow. So yeah, we can see from those answers that Lord of the Rings is definitely the category winner, which agrees with my own assessment. For myself, I think the overwhelming answer would have to be Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. In my opinion, and your opinion may vary, The Lord of the Rings movie set the bar very high, so the trilogy is kind of in its own category. You can watch them 20 years later and they hold up well in a way a lot of stuff from 20 years ago does not. But with that said, I think my second favorite fantasy film would be the Arnold Schwarzenegger Conan the Barbarian, since it does a pretty good job of capturing the spirit of the original stories and the soundtrack by Basil Poledouris is superb. The Anvil of Crom track is excellent. Also, James Earl Jones plays an evil sorcerer/cult leader named Thulsa Doom, which is of course excellent, although after reading all the comments and thinking about it, I think Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves from 2023 would be tied with Conan the Barbarian in my second place fantasy film. 00:04:38 Reflections on Writing Tech Books Now onto a slightly different topic, how I used to write tech books. I can always tell when the school year starts because suddenly I have numerous orders for the paperback copies of the Linux Command Line Beginner's Guide and the Windows Command Line Beginner's Guide. This happens because some professors have recommended them for their classes because the books are one- low cost and two- a good introduction to the topic. If you've only discovered my writing recently, and by recently I mean within the last six years or so, you might not know this, but I used to do a lot of tech writing. That was in fact my first successful attempt at writing from the Internet, tech blogging back in the second half of the 2000s. When I started self-publishing in 2011, I also wrote a bunch of tech books and Linux Command Line Beginner's Guide and Windows Command Line Beginner's Guide are definitely the most successful of them. Around 2018/early 2019 I stopped tech writing due to lack of time and the fact that fiction turned out to be much more lucrative. That said, I occasionally get snide remarks and people saying well, why paid $0.99 for an ebook? All this information is available for free on the Internet or YouTube. That is true. However, it overlooks the fact that people learn information in different ways. For some people, having the information laid out step by step in a book is the best introduction to the topic. And the books are intended for absolute beginners. Part of the experience of being an absolute beginner is that you don't even know the proper questions to ask, which means it's hard to find research. It's hard to research and find relevant information on the Internet. It's said that experts know what they don't know. If you're a beginner, you don't even know what you don't know yet. That means you don't know what to Google or look for on YouTube. Linux Command Line Beginner's Guide and Windows Command Line Beginner's Guide were intended to give people a good beginning foundation on the topic. And since the books have been out for 12 years, I think I've achieved that achieved that goal. I've gotten many emails from people who found themselves suddenly forced to use Linux. My favorite was from a teacher who unexpectedly found himself teaching a high school computer science class one week before it actually began. They said that the book helped them come to grips with the Linux Command Line. I'm glad that was helpful. I'm glad that the book has helped people, which is why I've kept them at $0.99 for over a decade now. And if you are learning command line for the first time and you're one of the people who bought the book recently, I hope it is helpful. 00:07:00 Main Topic: 7 Things You Shouldn't Put on Your Book Cover Our main topic this week is seven things you shouldn't put on your book cover. We have talked a lot about book cover design and related topics on this podcast so I thought would be a good idea to take a look at seven things you shouldn't put on your book cover. It is a delicate balance to get a cover that is eye-catching and represents what you want people to know about your book without being either offensive or boring. Studying other covers in your genre is a great start for learning how to make successful covers and to match what people expect to see on a cover. Amazon has a broad “material we deem inappropriate or offensive” sentence in its guidance about inappropriate covers. So how do you know what makes for an inappropriate cover? As a general rule, over my book covers I've avoided any sort of nudity and no weapons pointed at the reader. If you have weapons on your cover, such as swords or guns or whatever, they should not be pointed at the reader. More specific questions you can ask yourself about whether something is inappropriate for book cover are: would someone be embarrassed or nervous to be seen with this book cover on the subway? Thanks to ereaders and phones, you can read whatever you want on the subway or the bus without people knowing what you're reading but if you have a paper book, would you be embarrassed to be seen with this cover in public? Would you have to hide this cover from a grandparent, a former teacher, or a teenager? Is this the kind of cover you would not want them to see? Would a newspaper be uncomfortable printing this cover as part of a story and would a local bookstore not be excited to have this cover in their window for the entire community to see? If the answer to any of those questions is yes, you may want to rethink your book cover. And now on to our actual list of seven things you should not put on your book cover. #1: Awards that no one has heard of or bestseller lists besides the New York Times. If your book has won an award that isn't super well known like the Hugo or the National Book Award or the Edgar, etcetera, it shouldn't take up real estate on your cover. It's definitely not worth chasing some of those random tiny book awards that focus on Indies, some of which are more sketchy than others, just to have a shiny gold metal on your cover. If people don't know the award, it's at best confusing and at worst makes it look like the book couldn't win a real award. New York Times is the only bestseller list the average reader would care about, maybe USA Today if you were on it before it ended. And similarly, advertising your Amazon ranking on your cover is cringey and looks desperate, so unless you've won a prestigious award that people who are outside the book world would have heard of, it's probably a good idea to not put any awards on your book cover. #2: Low resolution images and text and font that can't be read in thumbnail. Both too small and too stylized are problems. Test out your thumbnail on both color and an E Ink screens because you want it to be comprehensible and legible in both formats in thumbnail. Low resolution or pixelated images make your book look cheap and low effort, which will be especially noticeable and regrettable in print versions. Never zoom into a JPEG unless the JPEG is high enough resolution to support it. In any kind of photo editing or cover design, you want to work with the highest resolution photos possible because there naturally are more pixels to work with, and then you can do more things with it or zoom in a bit without it becoming appearing pixelated, which is not possible with low resolution images. So you'll want to avoid those for your book cover. #3 of things you should not put on your book cover are images you don't own or AI generated images. Copyright matters. If you don't own the image or a license to use it, you're infringing on someone's copyright and they can respond legally or send take down notices to the places where your book is sold. Be careful about using Creative Commons sites, since copyrighted work frequently ends up on those sites. Also, many Creative Common photos are restricted from commercial use and/or the artists require attribution. Tread carefully and make sure you understand the conditions for using images with Creative Common licenses. For myself, I source my images either from reputable stack photo sites like Dreamstime.com or I use pictures I've taken myself, or I use images generated by Daz 3D. Because of the way DAS 3D licensing works, you can use any 2D images you generate from their 3D assets. If you generate a 2D image from those assets, you have the right to use it. As for AI generated images, read Amazon's and the other site's instructions on the use of the AI carefully before making something with the assistance of AI or wholly by AI. It's possible Amazon and the other bookstores in the future may somehow penalize work created with AI, so it's not worth risking future problems by not disclosing AI use properly. Also, many people feel very strongly negative feelings about AI Art and associate it with books created using ChatGPT. As of right now on Amazon, if you publish a book, there is a check box you have to check saying that no elements of the book or its cover were created using AI. If you don't check that then your book has a little notice once published saying created with the assistance of AI, which can of course turn people off. And I suspect that Amazon added that so that if some point the legal environment turns against AI, they have a quick and easy way to say they're in compliance and getting rid of most of the AI generated content on their site. So for now, I would strongly recommend that you avoid using AI generated images on your cover. #4: The fourth thing you shouldn't put on your book cover is ineffective review quotes. One or two word reviews on covers like “magical” or “thrilling book” saying nothing about the book and make it look like there wasn't much that was positive to say in the reviews. Conversely, long reviews take up too much space on the cover and end up being hard to read. Someone who isn't well known or a celebrity public figure outside of your genre will look odd or someone who uses a random five star review from Goodreads, like for example Beth from Milwaukee says “I couldn't put it down.” Since the reader likely doesn't know Beth from Milwaukee, it's hard to be excited about her opinion or use Beth from Milwaukee's taste to compare with their own. Many people (often correctly) assume that the reviewer is paid or incentivized to write the review, and that it isn't sincere. For a public figure/celebrity/author, their review on your cover could be a liability later on if they end up associated with some type of scandal or crime. There is a major scandal going down right now with a major fantasy writer who, it turns out may have been involved in many inappropriate relationships (some of them may have been criminal, though none of this had been confirmed yet), and I bet a lot of people who have this major fantasy author's blurb quotes on their book cover are kind of wishing they could take it off right now. Another potential pitfall is copyright, because technically anyone who writes reviews owns the copyright to that review. So if you quote, for example, from a random Amazon review, you technically don't have permission to do that unless you actually go out and get permission. So that is something to be aware of with quoting reviews on your cover. It's generally not worth the hassle in my opinion. #5: So the fifth thing you should not put on your book cover is scantily clad, shirtless, or nude people. Amazon does penalize authors for this, but the enforcement has always been rather inconsistent. The idea is that on Amazon there is what is something that's called “The Erotica Dungeon” where works that feature erotica or erotica style elements on their cover end up and they're not found by general search and you can only get to them through direct links. There's always problems with this, where people who actually do write erotica try to game the system so their books are visible outside of “The Erotica Dungeon” and people who don't write erotica but are mistakenly classified as it end up in “The Erotica Dungeon.” One of the surefire ways to end up in “The Erotica Dungeon” is to have scantily clad, shirtless, or nude people on your book cover. Amazon says book covers are not supposed to contain pornography, which is an intentionally vague warning from Amazon, which means they can interpret it however they want and they need to. Some people find any amount of scantily clad people on a book cover to be gross, awkward, offensive, or embarrassing, even without having to carry the physical book cover around in public or at home. Some people think it makes the book looks like it's from the 1980s or the Fabio era of romance novels, and some people think it means the book is low quality or just erotica. Overall, I found that this tends to get enforced on Amazon when people complain about it, so overall it's best to avoid having scantily clad people in your book cover because it can become a problem for you later on. And in my opinion, in general, it's just in poor taste. #6: The sixth thing you shouldn't have on your book cover is explicit violence/gore. Some people find this a little tricky to define because if you have, for example, on your book cover you have a man holding a sword and he's like making a dramatic pose, is that violence? Not really, no. But if you have the man, you know, driving the sword into someone's, you know, mouth and blood is exploding on the back of the guy's head, then that is definitely violence and will lead to your book being flagged. It's very hard to incorporate violence and gore well on your cover and could lead to your book getting flagged. You'll notice that most with thriller or horror stories, which are often very violent. You know, the typical thriller story has, you know, the hero mowing down a bunch of bad guys and horror stories, often are quite violent, especially ones with, you know, serial killers or slashers. But they often don't have scenes from the books on the covers. It's a common convention for thriller novel to have a man with his back to the camera walking towards like the US Capitol, or something under a moody dramatic sky and a horror novel will have, like, you know, an abandoned looking house or a spooky looking forest on the cover or something of that nature. You notice that's not explicit violence. And it's a case where definitely less is more, and being understated is a better idea than being explicit. Anything that shows violence or abuse against children is very likely to be flagged, so avoid that. And then finally, guns on book covers used to be forbidden, but this seems less of a problem now, provided the gun isn't pointed at a person. I've had a couple of book covers where a person is holding a gun, some Nadia ones. Avenging Fire and the Silent Order covers used to have people holding like future guns on them, but so long as the gun isn't pointed at a person or at the reader, then generally you're probably going to be okay. So just keep in mind that sometimes with violence on book covers, less is definitely more. #7: The seventh and final thing that you should not have on your book cover is hate speech. Now hate speech is one of those things that is notoriously difficult to define, especially in the United States with the 1st Amendment and people constantly argue about what it is or what it isn't or whether something is hate speech or isn't. And of course there's a spectrum to it where someone says something that's very obviously hate speech and can't be construed in any other way to a whole range of other statements that could be interpreted in different ways. But when it comes to book covers, Amazon specifically defines hate speech as “what we determine to be hate speech” and does not give specifics. So that said, it's pretty easy to practically define it as anything that Amazon thinks makes it look bad or could harm their sales across the platform. So if you bear that in mind, it's probably pretty easy to avoid hate speech on your book cover, especially if you're writing about sensitive political topics. And again, that could be an example where once again you don't want to go too explicit, and it's probably fairly easy to avoid putting something that could be construed as hate speech on your book cover. So those are seven things you definitely do not want to put on your book cover. So that is it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your view on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, I take a look at how to make a bad book cover, and things that you should avoid on your book's cover. I also take a look back at my top 10 bestselling books of 2023. This week's coupon is for the audiobook of CHILD OF THE GHOSTS as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of CHILD OF THE GHOSTS for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: JANGHOSTS The coupon code is valid through January 31st, 2024, so if you find yourself needing an audiobook to break up the winter doldrums, we've got you covered! Reference links to books mentioned in the show. The Fellowship of the Ring: https://www.tolkienguide.com/modules/wiwimod/index.php?page=BREM+US+PB+FOTR My Brilliant Friend: https://www.amazon.com/My-Brilliant-Friend-Neapolitan-Novels/dp/1609450787 TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 183 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is January the 12th, 2024, and today we're going to talk about how to make a bad book cover. We'll also take a look back at my top 10 best selling books of 2023. Before we do that, let's have this week's Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon is for the audiobook of Child of the Ghosts, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of Child of the Ghosts for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: JANGHOSTS. That's JANGHOSTS and that will be included in the show notes with a link. The coupon code is valid through January 31st, 2024. So if you find yourself needing an audiobook to break up the winter doldrums, we've got you covered. Let's also have an update on my current writing projects. As of right now, I am 97,000 words into Shield of Storms, which puts me on Chapter 18 of 21, though the final draft will probably have a slightly different number of chapters as I move things around. I am hoping to get to 100,000 words before the end of the day when I finish recording this. We'll see how the rest of the day goes. Once Shield of Storms is out, my next book will be Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling and I am 59,000 words into that and I will finish that up and have it come out relatively quickly after Shields of Storms is released. I'm also 12,000 words into Half-Elven Thief, but that will be a ways off yet because once Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling is finished, I want to write Ghost in the Veils first so I can make its recording slot in April. In audio news, as I mentioned last week, the audiobook of Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation is out, as excellently narrated by CJ McAllister and you can get that at all audiobook stores.   00:01:51 Top 10 Ebooks, Audiobooks, and Print Book Sales for 2023 As I mentioned before, I wanted to take a look back at my top ten books and audiobooks of 2023, and I did that because it's time to start figuring out taxes for 2023, which means checking paperwork, making sure your books are balanced, making sure all your receipts are properly organized, filing for 1099s, and all the other various little chores that go into preparing to file your taxes, at least in the United States. It also means finding out the top 10 bestselling books of 2023. So to start with, here are my Top 10 bestselling ebooks of 2023. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that 2023 was the year of the Dragonskull series: #1: Dragonskull: Talons of the Sorcerer #2: Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock #3: Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress #4: Dragonskull: Crown of the Gods #5: Cloak of Dragonfire #6: Dragonskull: Fury of the Barbarians #7 Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire #8 Dragonskull: Shield of the Knight #9 Dragonskull: Blade of the Elves #10 Dragonskull: Curse of the Orcs   So basically my best selling ebooks of 2023 were the Dragonskull series plus Cloak of Dragonfire. This bodes well for both Shield of Storms, which is a direct follow up to Dragonskull, and Cloak of Titans later this year. Audio, of course, has become an increasingly important format, so here are my Top 10 bestselling audiobooks across all platforms for 2023: #1: The Ghosts: Omnibus One #2: Frostborn: The Shadow Prison #3: Frostborn: The World Gate #4: Frostborn: The High Lords #5: Frostborn: The Dwarven Prince #6: Frostborn: The Dragon Knight #7: Frostborn: Excalibur #8: Frostborn: The Gorgon Spirit #9: Frostborn: The False King #10: Frostborn: The Dark Warden   So for audio, 2023 was nearly almost entirely the year of Frostborn, but people still really like the big omnibus audiobooks like The Ghosts: Omnibus One. Paperbacks for me are a much smaller sales channel than either ebooks or audiobooks. I sell more in both ebook and audio than I do in paperback, but as it turns out, it's really easy to run the report of bestselling paperbacks. So with that in mind, here are my Top 10 bestselling paperbacks of 2023: #1: The Windows Command Line Beginner's Guide #2: The Linux Command Line Beginner's Guide #3: The Ubuntu Beginner's Guide #4: Frostborn: The Gray Knight #5: Frostborn:  The Eightfold Knife #6: Sevenfold Sword: Champion #7: Dragonskull: Shield of the Knight #8: Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress #9: Malison: The Complete Series #10: Dragonskull: Curse of the Orcs   So those were my top 10 bestselling paperback books of 2023. I don't really write about technology very much anymore, and I stopped shortly before I started recording this podcast in 2019. I enjoyed writing about technology quite a bit, but there are only so many hours in the day and the money is just a lot better for epic fantasy fiction, and there's less research involved, too. That said, I'm glad that people are still finding my tech books helpful enough to buy. My all-time favorite review of the Windows Command Line Beginner's Guide came from a math professor who said he hated the book, but he couldn't find a better introduction to the Windows Command Line environment, and so he still recommended it to his students. So thanks for reading those books, everyone, and as I said before, I'm still working on Shield of Storms, so hopefully we'll have a new book very soon. 00:05:34 Main Topic of the Week: What Makes a Bad Book Cover? So let's move on to our main topic this week: how to make a bad book cover (from which we hopefully will learn how to make a good book cover). Since I started doing my own covers and spending a lot more time with Photoshop in 2020, obviously this is something I have given a great deal of thought to over the last four years and throughout the entire time I've been self-publishing. So I thought it would make an interesting topic for a show. Let's start off with some specific examples of a bad book cover. One of the most famous ones is The Fellowship of the Ring cover by Barbara Remington, which Tolkien famously did not care for (I'll include a link to it in the show notes, so you can follow if you're curious). It just looks very ‘60s, very psychedelic, and just not at all related to anything connected to what the Lord of the Rings is actually about. Another fairly well-known example of a bad cover is the original cover of My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, which is a 1950s story about a woman coming of age in the poor outskirts of Naples. But if you look at the cover (especially the cover linked in the show notes), it looks like kind of a romance novel or a story about a wedding. It doesn't at all reflect what the book is actually about. So as we strive to make good covers, one that will draw readers into books, what should we keep in mind? I think there are to start with three key points to keep in mind when preparing a book cover or consulting with your cover designer about what you would like your book cover to do. First, taste is highly subjective and that leads directly to the second point, which is you're not going to be able to make a book cover that everybody likes, just as you are not going to be able to write a book that everyone likes. The point is to write a book that your audience that you have in mind will enjoy and the cover by extension will be a sort of a guide that can help your audience find the book and let them know that this is the kind of book they would like, that the cover will telegraph in essence, that this is the kind of book that particular reader would like. Three, the main thing is to provide key information about the book, namely the author and the title, easily and quickly with a quick preview of the book through the design of the cover. You want, when you look at a book cover, to immediately in a fraction of a second to be able to grasp the three important points: the name of the book, the author of the book, and the genre of the book. Those should all be immediately apparent when you look at the book cover and anything that gets in the way of that is not a good design element for a book cover. So with that in mind, what shouldn't a book cover do and what design elements do you massively want to avoid on your book cover? First of all, you should avoid bad fonts or fonts that are hard to read. It's important to remember that in a book cover, two of the three things that it needs to convey at a glance are the author name and the title of the book. And if you have bad typography on your book cover, that will sink you. In fact, you can almost get away with having a bad looking image for your book cover, so long as the typography for the author name and the title is suitable. So what constitutes an unsuitable font for a book cover? Colors that are hard to read and shall we say overly artistic or overly stylized fonts that are difficult to read. You know something like wingdings or some really overly complicated font with too many flourishes. You want the font to be able to be easy to read. You want the font to be a color that is easy to read and is visible against the rest of the cover. You don't want the font to be too small either, because then that will make it difficult to read. That ideal is even once in a thumbnail on the Amazon website that you can still pretty easily get the author name and the title. You also will want to avoid design elements that clash. We can all think of examples of badly Photoshopped covers where there's like a Photoshop picture of a horse or cowboy or a Scottish Lord or something that is very badly Photoshopped in and doesn't look at all good. Part of that is avoiding images that are poor resolution. If any element of your cover looks pixelated, it's time to have a rethink and choose different elements. This can be a problem if you're getting stock photos from free stock photo sites, which is not the best idea because just because the site says the stock photos are free and licensed for commercial use doesn't mean that they actually are, because there's not really much of a safeguarding process. You're better off using a reputable stock photo site where you pay for credits and then keep a record of what you use. And that way, if there's any legal challenges or troubles you can say, well, the stock photo I got off iStock Photo in 2019. Here's the record of it and then you would be good to go. Even if you have good images, it's important to make sure that the image matches with the genre of the book. If you have an image that does not match the appropriate historical time period of the book or the fantasy aesthetics, that won't work. For example, you have a Regency romance book set in 19th century England and the woman on the cover is wearing a leather jacket and jeans, that would immediately be a bad cover design element. To return to the topic of The Lord of the Rings, you have a cover of the Lord of the Rings where Aragorn is dressed like a Wall Street broker and Frodo is wearing shorts, a t-shirt, and a backward baseball cap, that would also be a poor choice for cover design. You'll also want to avoid major inaccuracies on the cover. This is not hugely important but it can significantly annoy a subset of readers. Like for example, a cover of Anne of Green Gables where the Anne on the cover is blonde when in the book Anne quite famously has red hair (and in fact it's a plot point, if I remember right). You probably don't want to include ad copy on the cover because that is a waste of valuable real estate. Now granted, if you get, like an endorsement from like a major celebrity or some sort of significant author in your field, it's probably a good idea to put the blurb on your cover then. Like, if you are writing a mystery and say you get, like blurbs from like John Sanford or Harlan Coben or Karin Slaughter or other, you know, major mystery writers, you know, that's probably good idea to put that on the cover. However, if you're picking quotes off Goodreads or Amazon or something to put on your book cover, that's probably not a good idea. And you may not, in fact, actually have the right to do that based on U.S. law, because technically I believe the copyright for the review belongs to the person who wrote it. So that is something to avoid, you know, taking quotes from reviews from Amazon or Goodreads or TikTok or something, though you can probably make an exception if you like, get a major figure in your genre to endorse your book. Finally, you would also probably want to avoid the default templates provided by Canva or Amazon. If you self-publish a book on Amazon and you don't have a cover, you can use one of the premade ones that Amazon provides. But to be honest, these are not very good and they don't look very good, so it's probably best to avoid those if at all possible. You'll also want to avoid book cover design elements that can actively irritate people. One of those is photographs of people, especially if it's just a stock image. Generally, if you want a stock image to look good as a book cover, it needs to go through Photoshop quite a bit. It needs to, you know, make sure it matches the colors of the background. You might need some color adjustment. You might need some shading. You might need to apply a couple of masks to it to make it look properly good. This is actually one of the reasons why I started using DAZ 3D modeling because it's very hard to find a long string of stock photos with the same character you can use for book covers, whereas with DAZ, as you can generate a character who looks like how you want the character look and then use that over and over again in different poses and so forth and different shadings and different enhancements in Photoshop to keep consistent look across all the covers, which is what I've done for the Caina Ghost series and the Nadia Cloak Mage series, which would be a lot harder to do with stock images. Something else that really tends to annoy people is shirtless men or women in overly revealing outfits. From a purely a publisher's perspective, this can get you in trouble. If you have a book cover that's showing a little too much skin, the various retailers might reject it or you will be able to run ads on the book, or the system will automatically sort it as erotica, which would limit its visibility on the store and therefore its sales potential. One trend from the 2000s and 2010s that used to be popular but now no longer is, is stock photos where the character's head is chopped off and you sort of just see them from the neck down on the cover. That was very popular for a while in the 2010s. It is not popular now and people might complain about your cover if you have that on there. You may also want to avoid images are too abstract or too bland. I'm thinking about, like a lot of modern literary fiction covers have just random color swirls on the cover (it doesn't look good) or the rereleased versions of Robert Jordan's covers for the Wheel of Time. They used to have this really beautiful fantasy artwork on them. Now it's just a vaguely faded symbol from the book. It just doesn't look good compared to the older ones, and I think there was a mistake on the publisher's part. You will also, in my opinion, very much want to avoid AI art. There's a couple of good reasons for this. One is that a very significant subset of the population absolutely hates AI art, refuses to have anything to do with it, and will not buy anything that uses it. Every time a major company like Wizards of the Coast or Microsoft or somebody uses AI art in some sort of advertisement, there is an immediate backlash on social media and you will want to avoid that. More practically, the copyright status of AI art is still a massively open question. As of this recording, which is January 12th, 2024, there are many lawsuits underway to determine whether or not AI generated art and text is in fact a form of copyright infringement, and as of right now, the question is unsettled. A couple of months ago, Amazon started adding a check box to the KDP Publishing forum where you need to disclose if your book uses AI elements, and I strongly suspect part of the reason they did that was in case there's like a Supreme Court ruling in the US or a major piece of legislation that drastically changes the legality of AI generated art and text. Then they have an easy out to immediately wipe all that stuff off the store and say, well, we do our due diligence about this. You can't sue us. So for all those reasons, I do think it is a very, very good idea to avoid any AI images in any book covers or audiobook covers or anything you sell for right now.   00:17:39 What Should a Book Cover Do? So let's move on from the negative to the positive. What should a book cover do? As we mentioned earlier in the show, the book cover has three missions. At a single glance, it should convey the author name, the book title, and the genre of the book. It is in fact fairly simple to convey a genre in a book. It's just the hard part is making it look good. Like for example, if you have a book with a dragon on the cover, obviously that's going to be fantasy. If you have a book with like a spaceship flying near a planet, that is going to be a science fiction book. In fact, I redid all the covers in my Silent Order series to be a spaceship flying near a planet after I read a joke about that in a Penny Arcade comic where one of the characters of comics says they only buy books with spaceships and planets on them, and I realized that would probably be the best way to convey what the Silent Order series was about. And in fact, sales did go up after I changed all those covers. Other examples would be if you see a man and a woman looking longingly at one another, that's going to be a romance novel. If the character is wearing a long coat and has his or her back to the camera walking down a dark street, odds are you've got a mystery. If it's a highly edited photo of like the US Capitol or the White House or something, and the title is something like, you know, Patriot Fury, you're probably looking at a thriller novel. So there's lots of conventions to convey what genre book is and the best way to learn them is, you know, to read a lot and to look at a lot of different book covers, which is in the modern age, very easy to do as you scroll through Amazon or Apple or whatever. The text should also be as easy to read as possible, especially in thumbnail or smaller images, so you may have to make the text what feels like slightly ridiculously large, but so long as it's reasonably easy to read, then you'll have achieved the mission of the text. And if possible, you want to hint at the plot without telling the story. A good example of that would be like an urban fantasy book where the cover shows a woman wearing a leather jacket and you know, magic glowing things glowing around her hand. So that hints at what the plot is going to be about or like a thriller novel where you see a woman in like a tank top and combat pants holding a combat knife and a pistol that hints that is going to be a thriller novel and she'll be, you know, fighting for her life. Finally, the last point is fairly subjective and hard to do, but, if possible, you want to balance uniqueness with being familiar enough where people understand the genre at a glance. You don't want to copy someone else's design for many good reasons, but you want to have one that both expresses the genre of the book yet somehow is a little bit unique and that is something you try to strive for, if possible, with the book cover. So that's it for this week. I hope those tips were helpful. I would just like a minute to thank my transcriptionist. As you might have noticed on The Pulp Writer Show website, we now have transcriptions of the newer episodes and she helped me pull together the research for this episode, so thank you for doing that. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found this show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe, stay healthy, and we'll see you all next week.

In this episode of From the Block Chain, Ashley (Bored Becky) is joined by guest Sara Baumann, Co-Founder of Women and Weapons and artist. Before diving into NFT's, Sara worked as an occupational therapist in hospitals and sold her art on the side. In January 2021, Sara began her NFT journey. Sara took a risk and commented on one of Gary V's posts, and Gary bought three of her art pieces resulting in a 45 second sell out while she was working in the hospital. With this, Sara was catapulted into the web3 spotlight overnight, encouraging her to take action and launch a full 10-thousand-piece generative PFP collection, Women and Weapons. She has since launched a Season 2 collection, and has developed a related digital character, Nova.   01:01 – Introduction with Ashley and episode overview.  07:39 – Meet Sara Baumann (Women and Weapons). Learn more about Sara's background. Ashley and Sara dive into Brilliant Minds and how they met. 11:34 – Sara talks about the launching of Women and Weapons, the PFP launch, and season 2 of Women and Weapons launch. 15:08 – Sara discusses when she shifted to the Web3 space and her husband Jake joining her team. 18:23 – Sara explains Women and Weapons and her overnight success.  20:51 – What's Sara's intent behind creating, releasing collections, and expanding.  22:35 – Sara and Ashley dive into Community, IP ownership and holders' rights.  24:53 – Who is Nova, how she corresponds to Women and Weapons, and the tech behind Nova.  33:17 – Experiences as an Instagram/Meta beta artist.  40:17 – Sara dives into her collaboration with Amber Vittoria and the merch drop. 42:06 – 2023 Conferences and what Sara is focusing on this year.  44:24 – ChatGPT: How to approach growing a team. What Sara has learned in the process of hiring people for her team and how she reached out to people.  49:30 - Where to find Sara and learn more about her projects    Today's show is brought to you by Daz 3D     LINKS:  To learn more about Fame Lady Squad and our NFT project, visit our website.   Have a question, comment, or guest suggestion? Fill out this form   Subscribe to our newsletter here   Follow Ashley “Bored Becky” on Twitter   Follow Danielle “NFTIgnition” on Twitter   Follow Cara on Twitter  Daz 3D Sara's INSTA, TWITTER Women And Weapons WEBSITE, INSTA, TWITTER Brilliant Minds BPI Sports Girl in the Verse Amber Vittoria Nova Instagram Nova Twitter 

The Fame Lady Squad has blown up their Discord! This is your chance to find out more about what has been going on behind the scenes at FLS and to dive into what they've been thinking about as business leaders and within the Web3 space. Topics such as long term strategy, what is being prioritized, and two exciting new projects (Nerd Collective and Fight Back Apes) are all touched on. In this episode, Ashley and Cara discuss Discord and why FLS went Read-Only, the current NFT landscape, FTX, the Daz 3D acquisition, and the potential future purpose of the FLS Discord. Be sure to tune in! Resources  To learn more about Fame Lady Squad and our NFT project, visit our website. Have a question, comment, or guest suggestion? Fill out this form Follow Fame Lady Squad on Discord Follow Ashley “Bored Becky” on Twitter Follow Danielle “NFTIgnition” on TwitterFollow Cara  "LadyC" on TwitterLearn more about FTX Learn more about Daz 3D Learn more about Nerd Collective Learn more about Fight Back Apes 

Album 3 Track 14 – Matt Wilburn, President and Co-Founder of Tafi and Daz 3D, previously Chief Marketing Officer of Cricut and Senior Category Director of Yahoo. Matt has worked with a variety of brands and companies to grow his experience and he brings it to our virtual building this week. If you've ever wondered about NFTs (nonfungible tokens) and the growing prevalence and strategy behind them, you don't want to miss this.A few takeaways:  If your brand isn't utilizing NFTs, you are already behind and missing out Career paths aren't singular but dependent upon pursuing what you want to do. But rather, choose a career that empowers you to be the best you can be The power of Muhammad Ali, a common role model of DC and Matt Analytics - the answer to all problems or a deterrent to taking risks? Sometimes great success comes from painting outside the lines

In this conversation, we are joined by James Thorton, Chairman and CEO of Tafi and Daz 3D. Daz 3D is a software platform that provides software and source content from various artists. Utah is considered to be one of the best hubs for web 3 in the country. Listen to James share his input into being an impactful leader in a constantly growing space.

In this conversation, we are joined by James Thorton, Chairman and CEO of Tafi and Daz 3D. Daz 3D is a software platform that provides software and source content from various artists. Utah is considered to be one of the best hubs for web 3 in the country. Listen to James share his input into being an impactful leader in a constantly growing space.

Jeremy and Cit sit down with Morgan Milovich @MLMilovich and Ty Duperron @Ty_Duperron from DAZ 3D . They have an exciting NFT project minting the middle/end of December 2021 entitled Non Fungible People @NFungiblePeople. To celebrate, we are giving away 5 of DAZ 3D's earlier NFTs - We have a few Elven Warrior NFTs to give away. This NFT was minted at .06ETH Not only can you see some of the early traits that later are becoming part of the Non Fungible People project, owning an Elven Warrior NFT comes with utility as well. Owners will be able to get you access to the pre-sale for the upcoming Non Fungible People NFT release, you can also purchase at a lower cost as well. So, not only do you get to keep the Elven Warrior NFT, owning it allows you early access to the Non Fungible People NFT and also allows you to purchase at a reduced cost. Win - Win - Win!Give Away Contest Directions for the Elven Warrior NFT - 1. Follow us on Twitter @allin4nft 2. Subscribe to our podcast "The Allin4NFT Show"3. Leave a review of the podcast4. Take a screen shot of the review5. Tweet @ us and include the screen shotAlso - listen to the podcast episode in its entirety, as Morgan also has a giveaway allowing listeners to get on the whitelist for the Non Fungible People. We loved chatting with Morgan and Ty and are super excited for this special upcoming NFT release for Non Fungible People from DAZ 3D

Album 3 Track 14 – Matt Wilburn, President and Co-Founder of Tafi and Daz 3D, previously Chief Marketing Officer of Cricut and Senior Category Director of Yahoo. Matt has worked with a variety of brands and companies to grow his experience and he brings it to our virtual building this week. If you've ever wondered about NFTs (nonfungible tokens) and the growing prevalence and strategy behind them, you don't want to miss this.A few takeaways:  If your brand isn't utilizing NFTs, you are already behind and missing out Career paths aren't singular but dependent upon pursuing what you want to do. But rather, choose a career that empowers you to be the best you can be The power of Muhammad Ali, a common role model of DC and Matt Analytics - the answer to all problems or a deterrent to taking risks? Sometimes great success comes from painting outside the lines

Album 3 Track 14 – Matt Wilburn, President and Co-Founder of Tafi and Daz 3D, previously Chief Marketing Officer of Cricut and Senior Category Director of Yahoo. Matt has worked with a variety of brands and companies to grow his experience and he brings it to our virtual building this week. If you've ever wondered about NFTs (nonfungible tokens) and the growing prevalence and strategy behind them, you don't want to miss this.A few takeaways:  If your brand isn't utilizing NFTs, you are already behind and missing out Career paths aren't singular but dependent upon pursuing what you want to do. But rather, choose a career that empowers you to be the best you can be The power of Muhammad Ali, a common role model of DC and Matt Analytics - the answer to all problems or a deterrent to taking risks? Sometimes great success comes from painting outside the lines

Dit is voorlopig even de laatste Appels en Peren Show. Misschien komen we nog terug, misschien niet. We zien wel. Onderwerpen eSIM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESIM) om een burner iPhone in je telefoon te zetten Twee whatsapp op je iPhone Radio.garden (http://radio.garden) Nova.chat (https://nova.chat) A clean start for the web (https://macwright.com/2020/08/22/clean-starts-for-the-web.html) Project Gemini (https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.html) Panic Nova (https://panic.com/nova/) Lojban (https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban) Club Nintendo Archives (https://clubnintendoarchives.neocities.org/) CASTLE CYBERSKULL (https://castlecyberskull.neocities.org/) Bryce 7 Pro 3D Landscape Software | 3D Models and 3D Software by Daz 3D (https://www.daz3d.com/bryce-7-pro) Procedural generation - Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_generation) Oskar Stålberg (https://twitter.com/OskSta) Oskar Stalberg - Wave Function Collapse in Bad North (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bcZb-SsnrA) Plastic optical fiber (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_optical_fiber) Planck EZ: A Powerful, Backlit, Open-Source, 40% Mechanical Keyboard (https://ergodox-ez.com/pages/planck) LGR (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLx053rWZxCiYWsBETgdKrQ) Grote dank aan de vrienden van de Appels en Peren Show: Nozzman (http://www.nozzman.com/) voor het coverartwork, Clublime (http://twitter.com/#!/clublime) voor de introjingle en al onze Patreons (https://www.patreon.com/appelsenperenshow).

Guest Bio: Dan Farr attended his first comic con event as a vendor, hoping to market 3-D illustration and animation software to the comic book and video game artists in attendance.He marvelled as he watched the enthusiastic attendees file in, dressed in costume or waiting to meet a favorite celebrity.Farr was star-struck, through not just by the caliber of celebrities he was encountering. He was hit by how much it meant to fans of all ages to talk with the stars of their favorite shows."I got pulled into the energy of that fandom and also the creativity of the cosplayers that were there," Farr said.As he attended conventions in major cities — New Orleans, Chicago, New York — he began to realize something. For the caliber of stars in attendance, the enthusiasm of the fans, and the population of the cities they were in, Farr was stunned that attendance wasn't higher.Then he decided he could increase it.In 2012, Farr began a transition away from DAZ 3D, a company he had helped establish, with the idea of starting a comic con in Salt Lake City. He started attending geeky conventions across the country in order to establish relationships, searching out celebrities and vendors he would eventually try to woo to Utah.Farr sought out a potential ally in Bryan Brandenburg, an entrepreneur and game developer he had first met in 1996 and had worked with at DAZ 3D and other companies. Brandenburg said he needed to at least see a comic con first, so Farr took him to the Wizard World convention in February 2013.In a flash, Brandenburg was hooked."After spending a couple days there, I said, 'Yeah, we could totally do this and be successful,'" Brandenburg said. He helped establish Salt Lake Comic Con a few weeks later.Together the two decided to hold a convention that fall, setting a goal for about 15,000 attendees.By September, the Salt Palace Convention Center was bursting at the seams with 70,000 delighted attendees and heavy hitters such as Marvel creator Stan Lee and "Star Trek" icon William Shatner on stage, far more than the pair had dreamed possible.In two subsequent events the next year, organizers drew 100,000 guests to the first FanX in April and 120,000 more to the second Salt Lake Comic Con in September.

It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a review of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer #1 rang out into the darkness. Show your thanks to Major Spoilers for this episode by becoming a Major Spoilers Patron at patreon.com/MajorSpoilers. It will help ensure Dueling Reviews continues far into the future! MICKEY SPILLANE'S MIKE HAMMER #1 Story by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins Writer: Max Allan Collins Artist: Marcelo Salaza, Marcio Freire Publisher: Titan Comics Imprint: Hard Case Crime Cover Price: $3.99 Release Date: June 27, 2018 When a chance encounter with a captivating femme fatale leads to a violent mob retaliation, hard-boiled detective Mike Hammer finds himself dodging both bullets and hard broads as he undertakes the most dangerous case of his career.  [su_quote cite="Matthew's Thoughts"]This art is wholly inappropriate for the story being told, and the coloring is strangely garish for a noir story. The story feels like a boilerplate detective tale, which makes me wonder if the scripts it's being adapted from was actually complete or not. Collins has the voice and the tough-guy dialogue down, though... [/su_quote][su_quote cite="Stephen's Thoughts"]There's a reason why Spillane's books are so controversial. Titan Comics takes a story that should have been left untold and told it, complete with art that looks more like a weird DAZ 3D comics than what you normally expect. Still, if you like hard crime tales where the hero isn't afraid of taking down anyone who is on the wrong side of the law, then Mike Hammer is the hero for you.[/su_quote]

It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a review of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer #1 rang out into the darkness. Show your thanks to Major Spoilers for this episode by becoming a Major Spoilers Patron at patreon.com/MajorSpoilers. It will help ensure Dueling Reviews continues far into the future! MICKEY SPILLANE'S MIKE HAMMER #1 Story by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins Writer: Max Allan Collins Artist: Marcelo Salaza, Marcio Freire Publisher: Titan Comics Imprint: Hard Case Crime Cover Price: $3.99 Release Date: June 27, 2018 When a chance encounter with a captivating femme fatale leads to a violent mob retaliation, hard-boiled detective Mike Hammer finds himself dodging both bullets and hard broads as he undertakes the most dangerous case of his career.  [su_quote cite="Matthew's Thoughts"]This art is wholly inappropriate for the story being told, and the coloring is strangely garish for a noir story. The story feels like a boilerplate detective tale, which makes me wonder if the scripts it's being adapted from was actually complete or not. Collins has the voice and the tough-guy dialogue down, though... [/su_quote][su_quote cite="Stephen's Thoughts"]There's a reason why Spillane's books are so controversial. Titan Comics takes a story that should have been left untold and told it, complete with art that looks more like a weird DAZ 3D comics than what you normally expect. Still, if you like hard crime tales where the hero isn't afraid of taking down anyone who is on the wrong side of the law, then Mike Hammer is the hero for you.[/su_quote]

In this episode, Drew Baker, Kieran Yanner, Patrick McEvoy, and Jeremy McHugh discuss a listener question from Frostfyre on upping your game as an artist and illustrator.We also discuss Patrick's unnatural love of Manga Studio. We won't judge.Listen to episode 130! Subscribe to the Ninja Mountain Podcast on iTunes, if you want to up your game. Manga StudioDaz 3DPoserMayaDave Palumbo's article over on Muddy colors!

Richard Thomson is a passionate software craftsman.  He has been writing C programs since 1980, C++ programs since 1993 and practicing test-driven development since 2006.  For 10 years, Richard was a Microsoft MVP for Direct3D, Microsoft's native C++ API for 3D graphics. His book on Direct3D is available as a free download. Prior to that, Richard was a technical reviewer of the OpenGL 1.0 specification. He is the director of the Computer Graphics Museum in Salt Lake City, Utah and currently works at DAZ 3D writing 3D modeling software in C++. Recently, Richard has added the C++ language track to exercism.io and has been working on adding refactoring tools to the clang tool suite. News C++11/14/17 Features In VS 2015 RTM Futures for C++11 at Facebook A Conclusion to Accelerating Your Build with Clang Live Webinar: A Tour of Modern C++ Richard Thomson @legalizeadulthd Richard Thomson's blog Richard Thomson's Github Links Utah C++ Users Group Create your own Refactoring Tool in Clang CppCon 2014: Matt Hargett "Common-sense acceleration of your MLOC build"  

In this session we interview  Paolo Ciccone with his new book "The Complete Guide to DAZ Studio 4". You can find out more about the book here:- http://3dartdirect.com/GuideToDazStudio4 And the book is also available on Amazon here:- http://3dartdirect.com/DAZStudio4Amazon Suprisingly, despite the wide reach and community of the DAZ Studio software (it's a free application), there are not many publications to choose from when it comes to learning the software. Of course, there are the DAZ 3D forums where you can get answers to specific queries, but a complete map and guide to using the sofware in the form of a book will be greatly useful. The book is aimed at those starting out with DAZ Studio up to the level of mostly intermediate users, but more advanced level users will find gems in here also. The author, Paolo Ciccone is a software engineer and photographer who now lives in Santa Cruz, California.  He is an experienced software developer with 20 years of experience. His field of expertise is developing applications  for both Mac OS and Windows  that assist computer graphics artists achieve photorealistic results. He founded Prêt-à-3D (www.preta3d.com) in 2010 , a company dedicated to bringing high-end computer graphics tools to the masses.  His Reality software for Poser and DAZ Studio has been used for video game illustration and for the preproduction of Hollywood large budget movies such as Jurassic Park IV and Hunger Games: Catching Fire.  In this session we ask Paolo about:- - His first contact with DAZ Studio the strengths he noted from it during his early use of the software. - Whether he immediately saw a gap in the market for the book? Or did it take some time for you to identify some needs of the DAZ Studio community that could be fulfilled? - We talk about the by-line of the book “Community Experience Distilled”.  - The book cover artwork. - Paolo is an educator and writer in the 3D Arts world, but this Was Paolo's first book project. What were some of his early barriers he had to overcome in starting up and getting a writing regime going? - Who the the book is aimed for? - The mind-set barrier of being able to pose figures naturally when first starting and how this book overcomes that barrier. - How the book covers creating new characters with morphs - the ability to start adapting existing characters to create new ones. - The practical content of the book - customising DAZ studio, finding and installing new content and navigating the studio environment. - The aspects of lighting covered in two major chapters : lighting a scene and achieving photo realism with the Reality Plugin. - How the new Dawn figure is covered in the book- what readers can learn about using this figure. - Paolo's favourite topic or chapter.

Rookie Designer's home has a new look and a lot of new features. In this episode I'll point out those improvements, and also share some of the best things I learned at Photoshop World 2007. Keys to the Game: Go to line in Dreamweaver Mac: Cmd + , PC: Ctl + , Book Report from todays show: Learning Web Design - A Beginners Guide to (X)HTML, Style Sheets, and Web Graphics By Jennifer Niederst Robbins, Published by O'Reilly I can't say enough good things about this book! There are publications that just teach you how to make a website, and those are great too, but this book gives you history of the web, how it actually works, and why we design in a certain way. Best of all, once you have learned how to build a site, it also tells you how to get it up on the web live! Links from todays show: Daz 3D Ananya Curves Rookie Mistake Tip: Knowing the latest software backward and forward is not enough to transform you into a great designer. The applications you use should be thought of as tools that aid you in bringing your brilliant design ideas to fruition. In the Bullpen: Kelby Training Try GoToMeeting for 45 days! Visit www.GoToMeeting.com/podcast to start your free trial today.