My Articles
Ghostwriter Agreement
Please note. I am not a lawyer and this isn’t legal advice. If you use this ghostwriter agreement, it’s on you. You may want a lawyer to look it over. Having said that, I use this all the time but again, it’s up to you to do your due diligence. If you have a ghostwriter and don’t use an agreement, well, you probably don’t own your work. Here is the agreement:
LegalCollaborators Agreement
Transcript Hello. I’m going to talk about the collaborator’s agreement that is freely available and necessary for anyone who cowrites books with another author or a partner. Hello. Welcome back, and this is an addendum to my existing post on collaborator’s agreements. First I want to emphasize I am not a lawyer, although this has been used for the last 20-plus years in my career as a songwriter.
LegalApple Store and Pirates
*If your book is successful enough, it will be pirated. The worst offender seems to be Apple’*s *iTunes store.* How do you get Apple to listen? I recently helped a mutual friend who’s books have been, and continue to be, pirated in the Apple Store. The first time was panic, now it’s just routine, albeit, a pain in the ass. The first time this happened she was alerted by a Facebook message from another caring author.
LegalJutoh Page Flip Hack
If you need to make your books non-page flip compliant in Jutoh, here’s a quick lesson. Transcription All right. This is going to be a really quick down and dirty lesson because honestly, I don’t think this technique’s going to last very long, but if you haven’t heard, there’s a major problem with Page Flip’s and Kindle not counting for anything but one page if a reader happens to read the entire book or even parts of the book with Page Flip.
Jutoh TutorialsUsing Acrobat Pro to Digitally Sign Documents
This is a short video showing how you can use Adobe Acrobat Pro to send documents out for digital signatures. Note: You must use the Pro version, it doesn’t work in Acrobat Reader. I have Creative Cloud and it’s included. I’m not 100% sure it works if you only have the paid Adobe Acrobat Pro since it uses the Adobe Cloud for storage. Transcript Hello everybody. This is going to be a short little video on the benefits of having an Adobe Cloud membership every month.
TutorialsSpeculative Fiction Showcase Interview
I had the pleasure of being interviewed on the Speculative Fiction Showcase. Here is the interview: Today, the Speculative Fiction Showcase is pleased to interview Jon Griffin, author of Black Space, Cloudbreak and other SFF stories. You say you like to write in many genres. What attracts you to Speculative Fiction? I have been a reader of sci-fi and fantasy since I first learned to read. I’ve read all the classics, and though I have less time to read as I get older, I still prefer reading spec-fiction.
NewsJutoh - Hyperlink not resolved in TOC
If you are using a Jutoh template that was created in version 1 in a Jutoh 2 program, you may get a compile error when you try to create a .mobi file. The error will say: *Hyperlink not resolved in toc (possible reason can be that link points to a tag with display:none)* Fig. 1 – Some hyperlinks could not be resolved This is a little misleading since the error is really caused by a corrupt object.
JutohAuthor Relaunch - Day 1
Yes, I am very late, but my other pen names already make most of my money, so I have to deal with them first! So, let’s get started. Strategy My strategy, and this will change as I go along, is to have a free, unreleased book to giveaway for an email subscriber. The book I am giving away is Cold Pursuit. It’s a psychological espionage short story. At this point it is only available from my email list (hint, if you want a copy, you can get it at: http://www.
MarketingHow to Replace a Book in a Jutoh Compilation
Get Jutoh - Click Here Transcript One of the great things about Jutoh is it’s very easy to make compilations. I have a video about making acompilation in Jutoh. You know that I love it, but one of the problems that I found was I had an older book from a client that was re-edited, and now I need to put the new edited version in. I was thinking to myself, how can I do this without re-doing the whole thing?
Jutoh TutorialsUsing irFanView to batch edit images
I recently decided to repurpose a product and turn it into a book and Kindle version. The Kindle version had no real issues with images since they get down sampled anyway, but the printed book needed to have the images at at least 300 dpi (dots per inch). If not the images would almost certainly be grainy, and I don’t want that. Most screen capture software saves the images at 96 dpi or sometimes 72 dpi.
Layout TutorialsUsing Jutoh to Create a Document With a Template
Transcription In this episode I’m going to show you how to take a document, either Word or Open document or some other format that’s readable by Jutoh and explain the easy way to use a template. Welcome back. Like I said, I’m going to take my Word document, which is from one of my clients, and use my base template which has all my styles and other things set up and basically just import everything so it works and you’ve got 90% of your work done.
Jutoh TutorialsAnalyzing page reads in Kindle Unlimited
Transcript What I’m going to do is a quick video if you have a book report; or, you could do this manually. Enter this data into a database. This goes into my system, which you won’t have, but it’ll give you an idea of what you can do. I guess you could do it with an Excel spreadsheet, but it gets crazy. Too many rows and it’s too hard to work with after a long time.
MarketingUsing Adobe InDesign with Word - Part 1
Transcript Hello, everybody. Today I’m going to talk about how to make your long documents in Word very easily usable in InDesign. I know a lot of people are afraid of InDesign because it’s really a complicated program, but hopefully the next series of tutorials that I’m going to do here will help you out, and I’m going to give you a free template that I use that will make your life much easier.
Layout TutorialsAdd Your Book to GoodReads
Transcript I’m going to show you how as an author you can add your book to Goodreads ahead of the release date. Many authors depend on Goodreads as well as Amazon for reviews and if you send out advanced review copies, it’s a good idea to actually ask your reviewers to put a review either on Amazon, Goodreads or both preferably. One things that’s always hardest from an author point of view, Goodreads is really terrible from an interface point of view.
Marketing TutorialsAdding a Table of Contents to a Jutoh fixed layout book manually
Get Jutoh - Click Here Okay. This is an update and an important addendum to my tutorial on Creating Fixed Layout Books with Jutoh and it has to do with the table of contents. I realized that there is an issue in the fact when I automatically created the table of the contents with Jutoh by going up here to book, build table of contents, you’ll notice I took that out and I want to show you why.
Jutoh TutorialsCreate a fixed layout book in Jutoh
Get Jutoh - Click Here Please see note at the bottom for an update. By popular demand, this episode I’m going to show you how to create fixed layout eBooks in Jutoh. That’s not just for Kindle. It will also be EPUBs for Barnes & Noble, iTunes, et cetera. In this lesson I’m going to discuss how to create Kindle and EPUB fixed layout books using Jutoh. It’s been asked of me by several people so I decided to make a quick video for you.
Jutoh TutorialsUsing Jutoh to Create Compilations
Get Jutoh - Click Here Transcript In this lesson you’re going to learn how to make book compilations in Jutoh very easily. Hi, everybody. Jon Griffin here again and in this episode I’m going to show you an easy way to take already existing books that you have in Jutoh and make them into a compilation. Say you have a sci-fi series or a bunch of short stories that you’ve put out but you want to make into a longer book.
Jutoh TutorialsCreateSpace Book Cover Template
Update I realize I should have accounted for the spine bleed and the new version on google docs has it. I will update the excel version as well. Transcript Hello. Jon Griffin here, and today I’m going to show you how to use my CreateSpace cover dimension sheet to create a cover in Photoshop with all the right dimensions and guides. Hello, everybody. I’m going to show you a real quick and easy way to set up a template in Photoshop for your physical books on CreateSpace.
Layout TutorialsUsing Facebook Insights to target your books audience
Probably Deprecated Transcript I’m going to redo this series. Sorry for the mix-up before but this is how you can use Insights in Facebook advertising as an author. Even if you don’t have any audience at all you can get some ideas to at least get you started before you get people to your website or whatever, if you don’t have a mailing list. It is possible. You don’t have to scrape users IDs or emails or any of that questionable stuff.
Marketing TutorialsDefine your audience for Facebook Insights - Part 1
Transcript Today I’m going to talk about using Facebook’s Insights and one way to get a more targeted audience. An easy thing to do is go to an author page. What I notice, and when you go to the author page is customers also bought items by. It gives you a list of 16 people you can look at. What I do is I copy all those and pull them onto a notepad or something that I can just copy.
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