My Steps To Self Publishing

So, in the KindleBoards.com forums, I saw someone’s signature with their book covers moving from one to the next. I’ve been trying to found out how to do that in html, so I sent the author a private message. The key word he gave me so that I could do it:

animated gif

.

YEAH! I love it when I learn a new thing! I didn’t know WHAT it was that people were doing to make their book covers flash around.

He said he used Photoshop. And you know me…! I went searching on how to do it with the freeware Gimp. Sure enough, there’s a quick and dirty way to achieve it.

1) Open each of your book cover images using FILE > OPEN AS LAYER
2) Rename each Layer like so: frame 1(2000ms)….frame 2(2000ms)…..frame 3(2000ms) by Right-Clicking and selecting Edit Layer Attributes. If you don’t see the Layer window, just go to LAYERS > RECENTLY CLOSED DOCKS > LAYERS, CHANNELS…

3) Resize each book to be the same size: IMAGE > SCALE IMAGE (I set mine to 546 width and 828 height pixels. NOTE: Whatever size that you use, it must STAY that size for the animation to work. If you try to resize it like a normal picture…it won’t work. So, think of what size you want the animated gif ahead of time.)
4) Take a peek on how it will look by going to FILTERS > ANIMATION > PLAYBACK (Note: If it’s playing to fast or too slow for you, just increase or decrease the ms number of the layer’s file name)
5) Then do the: FILTERS > ANIMATION > OPTIMIZE FOR GIF (this will open a new window)
6) SaVE AS a GIF file and Click SAVE AS ANIMATION when prompted
7) Save the other window as the Gimp file .xcf for updates later on

AND YOU’RE DONE! VERY VERY EASY!!

I don’t know what I’m going to do with it yet on my web page. I mean, I got a hint I’ll use it on the first page of my webpage when I get more of my Calling Series up and then link the image to a Calling Series Book page or something. For now, I just stuck it somewhere on my webpage because I like it (here).

Oh yeah! You can only add ONE hyperlink to the picture. It’s like any other image. So, you can’t put a separate hyperlink for each book image. Now THATS’s what I really would like to do, but I’m sure that’s some kind of movie/image file like I did for my pictures on my website. But that took a lot of work initially. This animated gif stuff was EASY!

Then I updated my blog with it! That’s it on the Right. I use to have it up TOP on my header and had to change my style sheet #header section of the CSS from the imageheader.jpg to imageheader.gif and upload my picture. I just edited over the .jpg file for the header in Gimp, making sure I kept the same sizes (i.e. height, width). I think it looks cool!

Until next month!

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 30th, 2011 at 8:20 pm and is filed under Novels and with tags: animate gif using Gimp, animated book covers, how to animate your book covers, how to make your book covers move, rotate from one book cover to the next, switch from one image to next . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.