No matter where you are in your author career, it's never too late (nor too early for my soon-to-be-published authors) to take an aerial view of ALL The THINGS that make up your author life. In this workshop, we'll take time to do just that: audit (and prepare to fix) your author career one section at a time! I know that sounds painful, but if it meant more efficiency, more clarity, maybe even more time saving, money saving, money earning strategies that could be realized, and peace of mind to be had, wouldn't you try? Yes? Sound good now?
In this session, I'll quickly overview how to get your goals straight for your publishing career path-whatever that is- offer questions, thought provoking scenarios and plenty of tools for increased efficiency. All of this will provide you with a way to canvass your career, assessing what needs fixing (that's right now), and what can wait to help you make a solid, thorough plan, and move it! Plus they'll be plenty of free, useful goodies in the Google folder for this workshop that I'll be sharing with you.
Let's Fix all the parts of your Author Life, and turn it into a long, exciting and lucrative career!
Tracee Garner Bio:
Tracee Lydia Garner is an international best-selling author of almost 20 books; a motivating speaker, humorous writer and book coach helping aspiring authors write to publication or a coveted book deal and finish a solid manuscript for today's market/readers. Tracee writes fiction and nonfiction depicting African Americans triumphing over adversity and meeting success whether that be in love, or life pursuits. Tracee loves public speaking, teaching workshops, and talking about the craft of writing at every opportunity. Tracee is a virtual instructor, having taught at the community college level, and at the Writer's Studio of Rosemont College in PA, teaching has become an extension of her motivating brand. Tracee holds a BS in Communications and continues to make her home outside the DC metropolitan area with her family.
Visit her website at https://traceegarner.com/
Ever wanted to boost your sales on Amazon, but didn’t know how to navigate the various options? In her presentation, Making Amazon Ads Work For You, Kelley Rene will demystify the process of advertising on Amazon. You’ll learn how to easily set up sponsored ads, how much to spend for each, and how to target your ideal reader. She’ll identify several pitfalls to avoid and point out tips and tricks to gauge an ad’s progress. Don’t miss this opportunity to boost your sales and get your book in the hands of your readers.
Kelley Rene Bio:
Kelley Rene currently lives in Panama City, Florida, with her husband and mini Australian shepherd, Blossom. But she never knows when Wanderlust will whisk her away to a new locale. Traveling and meeting new people are her passions and often the inspiration for her stories.
Kelley self-published three novellas—Saving Sabine, Romanian Runaway, and Kamilah—based on her experiences while living in Germany. In 2022, she led a team of fourteen writers to publish the anthology, Next Chapters Unleashed. She’s proud to have collaborated on the Christian nonfiction project, Embrace The Journey, which hit Amazon’s #1 Best Seller List. Her next endeavor, Miracle Mindset: Finding Hope in the Chaos, releases summer 2023.
Visit her website at https://www.kelleyrene.com/ or come hang out with her on Facebook and other social platforms @imkelleyrene
DARA’s February 25th meeting will tackle the basic concepts of graphic design so you can work better with designers and create some of your own graphics. Randee Paraskevopoulos, a graphic designer with over 20 years of experience, will lead the presentation starting about 10 am. Join us on Zoom for social time at 9 a.m. and a short business meeting at 9:30 a.m. If you need more information or the Zoom link, contact info@dallasarearomanceauthors.com.
GRAPHIC DESIGN IS ART WITH A PURPOSE. And you don’t have to be an artist to do it. It’s visual communication in which you convey your message using typography, images, page layout and color. Your writing life interacts with graphic design most prominently in book covers and interior page design. But it’s also vital to your website, advertising, social media, and swag. When it’s an image that’s going to last a long time, like a book cover, you’ll want to work with an experienced designer. But you can absolutely do-it-yourself for one-time uses like social media posts.
This online presentation is specifically geared towards writers and will cover just the basics of graphic design. We’ll learn the terminology, so our conversations with designers will be more productive and we’ll get what we want without a lot of costly revisions. We’ll also cover, on a high level, some of the general concepts such as selecting fonts and colors, and the importance of balance and white space in a layout.
Finally, we’ll get a crash course in the free online graphic design program, Canva. We’ll also get a list of safe places online where we can get stock images, clip art, and fonts for free or almost free. When we’re finished, you’ll have the knowledge you need to tackle your own simple designs.
ABOUT RANDEE
Randee Paraskevopoulos is a freelance graphic designer and developmental editor at P15 Creative (P15 because Paraskevopoulos has 15 letters). She studied journalism at Berry College in Rome, GA, and became a copy editor. She discovered she loved the page layout part of being a copy editor. Now, 20+ years later, Randee still has a passion for graphic design, even though she can’t draw a decent looking heart.
Over the years, she’s created everything from logos and business cards, up to posters and wall-sized banners, from straightforward web banners to complex, multi-page playbills and catalogs. Her specialty is static graphic design – designs that grab your attention and tell you everything you need to know without moving parts or interactive features.
Graphic design and editing are her day jobs. She also writes romantic suspense under the pen name Randee Leigh (again, because Paraskevopoulos has 15 letters). Her novels are still unpublished, but a few of her short stories have appeared in anthologies.
Randee lives her own happily-ever-after in an idyllic suburb of DFW with her husband of 27 years. (He says he knows she loves him because she took his last name.) They have two technically adult daughters, both in colleges far away from home. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, taking classes on a variety of subjects, or watching just about any sport or Marvel movie. She often multi-tasks, doing those things while snuggling with her two chihuahua mixes, Pepper and Jane (named after Thor and Iron Man's girlfriends).
In addition to her bachelor’s degree from Berry, Randee has an MFA in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University and an editing certificate from the University of Chicago. You can find her at p15creative.com.
