Promote your book with a free Adobe iPad app

[InklingBooks]

Adobe is getting into iPad creativity apps in a big way and their latest, the free Adobe Voice, offers a way for authors to promote their books with videos. It lets you take a string of images–they could be pages or pictures from you book–and add voice-over to them for posting on your website or perhaps to uploading to retailers such as Amazon.

gizmodo.com/adobe-voice-a-free-i … 1572443425

appleinsider.com/articles/14/05/ … ful-videos

Here’s a summary of what it does:

Everyone with a cool new idea or vision wants a concise and beautiful video to illustrate their story and broadcast it to the world. But oh, right—you suck at all things visual and just learned how to make something move in After Effects. Adobe’s new iPad app, Voice, is there to hold your hand in the making of presentation videos.

The story you tell with Voice, available for free in the App Store, will consist of a narrated explanation of whatever it is you are presenting, coupled with appropriate artwork, your own photography, and text—all swirled together with seamless animations and set to music.

Here are the gotchas. You have to get that free Creative Cloud account and Adobe’s income comes when you purchase images. Use your own, and you need make no purchases. And in my case, I already have a CC account.

To get started with Adobe Voice, you will need a free Creative Cloud account, but not a paid subscription. Launch the app, choose a type of presentation, and Voice guides you through a clear-cut process of telling a story in the easiest way possible, telling you what to say according to preformed structures. It then gussies things up by letting you choose content from a giant sea of content accessed from the Cloud. The app is more than just a library of illustrations, music, and motion graphics. It actively assists you when you don’t know exactly what you want to say or how you want to say it.

You can get it here:

itunes.apple.com/us/app/adobe-v … 55131?mt=8

The app is huge, 227 Meg, but comes with ten examples of how you can use (or abuse) the app to get across ideas. The Steppie one is probably the best illustration of using it with your writing.

And yes, if you’re like me you hate to hear the sound of your own voice. That is the downside. That said, perhaps I should try to do a video about my latest.

–Michael W. Perry, Inkling Books, Lily’s Ride: Rescuing her Father from the Ku Klux Klan

[InklingBooks]

One correction. Contrary to one of the reviews, you need not get an Adobe ID to use the app. In the Shared area, you can also “Sign in with Facebook.”

Adobe has more details and sample videos at:

getvoice.adobe.com

Possibilities:

If you do short stories, particularly short stories for children, this app is an absolutely marvelous way to turn those short stories into brief videos. The “Turtle and the Scorpion” sample illustrates that. Then post them online to make your writing better known.

Book authors can create a video that introduces their book, fiction or non-fiction. That might keep them hanging around, considering your book long enough that they buy.

Authors who’ve create a literary world, whether historical, fantasy or scifi, can use a video to introduce that world to readers. Don’t just introduce a book. Introduce a series and sell all the books in it.

–Mike Perry, Inkling Books, Auburn, AL

[InklingBooks]

Here’s a more detailed review from MacWorld:

macworld.com/article/2152585 … tware.html

Bottom line
For the inexperienced presentation-maker, Voice is a godsend. It’s simple to learn, hard to mess up, and fills a gap that Apple’s Keynote and Microsoft’s PowerPoint probably didn’t even realize they were leaving. Even more experienced users may enjoy this program for quick-hit pieces—after all, sometimes it’s in the limitations, not the features, where you can find true beauty.

–Mike Perry