Learning Curves
Pacing Myself… Learning One Major Thing Per Day…
With Steph being gone, there are a number of things I just never got around to learning over the last number of years. (Sort of like many of you with copyright… Sorry, too easy…) She just did the tasks in her wonderful way.
Today I learned, with the help of Chris York who has better eyes than I do, the inner workings of Zoom and recordings for webinars and so on.
Plus today I did a couple covers in InDesign (Canva is a coming learning curve for me…) and also put most of a collection together to get ready to put into Vellum.
And yesterday I learned that my brand new Mac4 with its stupidly small screen will not handle 2 extra screens no matter what the specs say, or what the fine techs at Best Buy say. Lisa Silverthorne (IP expert) and I tried a bunch of stuff, including downloading a program that should have made it work. Nope, and it is not the ports or the wiring. So I gave up and took one screen down to the WMG office and now my computer down there has two screens and this business computer has two screens. Good enough. Three hours plus of my life I will never get back.
I could have done five book covers in those three hours… sigh…
And I got a 3-T hard drive hooked up to this computer and I am working to get everything here backed up.
So I am on a tech learning curve and honestly having a blast. I know, I am weird, but I just love learning. Sort of like a sugar rush. Too much at once would kill me, but one learning curve a day is wonderful to climb over.
7 Comments
Mangala McNamara
Have you folks seen BookBrush yet?
It’s a web-based tool designed to be Photoshop for authors. Let’s you make your book cover look like it’s already on a print or phone book… and then you can throw together covers or ads or whatnot.
People who use Canva tell me they love it. I use Gimp (opensourcee version of Photoshop) for more detail stuff with the art, and now I’m following you on indesign for the full cover (so the fonts are licensed properly).
Bookbrush is a good complement to the rest.
It’s turning out to be a lot of fun as well!
Linda Niehoff
I know an excellent class that teaches book covers in Canva that you could take. 🙂
dwsmith
Yup, working my way through that, but still loving InDesign for basic book covers.
Michael W Lucas
When I switched from Windows to Mac (driven by MS’ insistence on pillaging my intellectual property to train copilot), I bought a Mac Studio specifically because it could handle many monitors.
If you haven’t tried it yet, put one monitor in portrait mode and do your writing on that. Having an entire page of text visible at a time, in friendly large print, is an absolute game-changer.
dwsmith
I do that on my writing computer, nothing else on it except Word.
Mark Kuhn
Wow, what happened to Stephanie?
dwsmith
She just moved on. Nothing bad, all good.