In my recent post I wrote about my selling exclusive copies of my book that includes a hand written, signed personal message. So how did I do it? Well first of all I was inspired by a virtual book tour I viewed on youtube a few months ago, where the author (can't remember who now) said the only downside to conducting such a tour is that customers couldn't purchase a signed copy. That didn't work for me. I say where there is a will, there is a way and I believed that in this day and time, with the technology we have at our disposal, I would find it. And find it I did, and best thing about it, is that it is very cheap to implement by simply using a pc graphics tablet. I purchased one for £16/$23 on Amazon and got to work on practicing writing with it. It took a bit of getting used to, but finally I was able to write out the uppercase and lowercase alphabet as well as my signature into a font creator template that I downloaded from yourfonts.com. It cost $9.95 to have the site generate my copyrighted personalized font in my own hand writing, which I then installed to the fonts directory in my computer.
Hardest part over, I opened my image editor (I use GIMP) and wrote out my personal message with my newly created copyright font and saved it as a jpg image. It was now possible to insert the image of my message into the document of my manuscript and save it as a pdf which I uploaded to my Lulu account. Voila! I effectively created a unique selling point, a huge incentive for people wanting a copy of my book to purchase through my Lulu store. Of course this is better for me as an independent author, as it pays higher royalties than Amazon and all the other online book retailers out there.
This can also be used as a method of creating custom messages on your ebooks for your customers at no addition cost (aside from your initial investment).
Here's a sample of what I mean:
Yup, that there is a sample of my messy handwriting all right!
This wasn't a tutorial so much as it was about putting the idea of the possibilities this has out there. If you have any questions, post a comment and I'll do my best to answer. ;)
Click image to visit my official bookstore 
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Wow. I like your idea very much. Its completely unique and creative. You have completely explained how you carried out but so many questions are coming in my mind. What if I wanted to add an image to my signature ?
ReplyDeletedigital signature Adobe Acrobat
You could add an image in the same manner. After all, your signature itself would be an image.
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