How Authors Can Use Web Photo Albums

If you’re an author you know that in today’s world simply writing a story or a novel isn’t enough. You need to be an evangelist for your work. From getting a publisher to notice you, to actually making sales there is a lot of work to do! The good news is that in today’s world there are a lot of free and inexpensive tools available to make that work easier. One tool that you can immediately begin using are online photo galleries.

Now you’re wondering how this can help you as an author. It’s pretty simple really! Here are three ideas to begin implementing today.

1. Create a photo gallery of your inspirations. If you’re in the process of writing right now, create a web photo album to gather all of the images that are inspiring you. They might be locations that you are setting your story in, or clothing that you think your characters might be wearing – anything goes! Make sure you label your images well – you’ll want to use this folder later!
2. Character Sketches. Another album can focus on your characters. Find images of other people that they are similar to. Find visual images of their attire, the jobs they might have, what they like to have. Again, taking care to fully label and hash out your ideas as you save the images. 
3. A third folder can be a place to save ideas for cover art, text, and other design details related to the final look of your book. The colors that you like, the images that reflect the overall feeling of the book, even quotes or snippets of text you might want to include. 

These photo galleries will help inspire you as you write but they also will be an invaluable resource when it comes time to market your work. Readers love to gain inside knowledge. They are interested in your process, how you crafted your characters and what you were thinking. This information can sometimes be difficult to recall, especially if it has taken you a good deal of time to put the book together. If you established your characters 12 months before the book was released you probably won’t remember the details of how they came to be. Pulling up the images can help spur the memory.

If you plan to use social media to market your book images are a great tool! Share one image a day that inspired you as you wrote. Giving your readers this kind of visual accompanied by some more of your thoughts is a wonderful way to engage them. You might ask a question like, “this is what I imagined Sylvester looked like, does it match what you thought?”

Online photo galleries are a must-have tool for writers from project inception to final marketing. Keep this in mind when you begin your work so that you can create powerful photo albums to fuel your writing process and power you through an amazing advertising push!