I never thought in a million years I’d post a video on YouTube. Nor did I ever consider making book trailers. Then I saw a forum post about a year’s worth of free Lumen5 Pro with no strings attached and said, sure why not.
I love trying out new software and Lumen5 was surprisingly easy to use. It’s a web based application that has a large collection of photos, videos, and music soundtracks that you can choose from. You can point it to a web page and let it import the text for you to click and add to your video, or you can manually type everything in.
I tested it out with the Summoner book page on this website and clicked away on the text it imported, kind of willy nilly that first time just to see what would happen. Lumen5 used keywords from each sentence to pull up images or videos from its collection that was surprisingly appropriate at times.
I selected an epic sounding piece of music and walah! I had a video that looked fairly professional. After the initial high, I trimmed the wording down and used some of my own Dreamstime images to get a true fantasy vibe. But best of all, because I wanted to add it to Goodreads, I had to upload it to YouTube! Me. Adding a video. To YouTube! Unbelievable. That was actually ridiculously easy since I already had a YouTube + gmail account.
I’ve posted it just about anywhere I can because it’s that awesome, including in the Fun Vids section on this website. Check it out yourself:
In other news, I’ve submitted a newly finished science fiction short story titled ‘Chamo’ to an anthology. Like Biting Shadow, this is another character introduction to the group of defenders that will have to find a way to defeat the emperor and restore freedom to the empire. These shorts are good for me to do because I spend a little time fleshing out the series concept while coming up with some fun characters to write about. Plus, they don’t take too much time away from writing Summoner book 2.
Speaking of book 2, I just finished up a nice battle in chapter 9 and am almost done with chapter 10. This puts the story at around the one-third finished point. With no further distractions in the near future, I should make solid headway. My goal is to get this book published in June.
And that is how this author had fun this month! I hope your April went as well for you. 🙂