Getting to Work and Working With Images
Wringing your hands only stops you from rollin’ up your sleeves.
I found this in a mystery I was reading (Black Order by James Rollins), and it resonated so much I wrote it down and am keeping it by my computer. It’s quite appropriate for me; I do tend to wring my hands instead of taking action.
But today I did take action, and it feels pretty good. I worked and worried at a problem, thought and stewed, and then finally just dove in. I probably didn’t do it the way tech folks would, but it worked!
Do you ever feel like you can’t even ask the right question to get you where you need to be? That’s where I was. I ran a number of questions through google, but none of the solutions even came close to being helpful for my immediate problem. I read through a number of my “how to do ebooks” books, but couldn’t find it there either.
My problem was that I have a lot of great books, all with great resale rights, but that have no image folder included to show the cover of the book all by itself. Seems kind of a non-problem until you want to list the book on eBay. I think it’s important to show a potential buyer an interesting image of what they’re getting (and I’m not even going to talk about all the listings that have pictures of busty women rather than the cover of the ebook!). One of these great books without an image of the cover is the one I wanted to offer as a bonus for signing up for my newsletter. The book is The Complete Newbies Guide to Buying & Selling Ebooks On eBay & the World Wide Web. It’s over 60 pages of great information, and I thought it would be the perfect book for you to have. I also hope to sell it on eBay. But I wanted to be able to show its great cover, and I understand that images are important in selling.
I figured out that by clicking on the image on the first page of the book I could copy it (left click, choose copy). I then opened an image file from another book, clicked file, clicked open bitmap file, pasted what I had in, then used the tools there, and come up with a file to save as a GIF file, and have it done.
It all worked, and if you go to the left side menu and to the page for the sign up form, you’ll see the image. It’s not the best it could be, but there is a picture. Now I know I can do it, and it feels great to have figured it out.
The point isn’t really about being able to work through this one thing (well, not entirely). It really is about just rollin’ up the sleeves and going for it.
You won’t ever see the really crappy images I came up with the first few times. And you don’t know how many images I had to throw in the trash bin. I did make sure to always “save as” so I didn’t mess up the original I was working with. And I did remind myself quite often that I wasn’t doing any permanent damage to the original work. That is one thing I hear often in talking with people about doing work on the net. Unless you’re getting into programs on your computer (which you DO NOT want to do), just about anything is fixable.
I have another domain name, registered, ready on my server, just waiting for me to get myself into some action to build the web pages. It’s going to be the one carrying the ebook store, the one I’ll refer my eBay buyers to, a critical piece of the eBay business. This small triumph has me excited to finally figure out what I need to do to build that site. It’s pretty amazing what these little victories can do.
The important thing is to just roll up those sleeves and do it.
