Creating an Author Promotional CD Using PowerPoint 2003

In today's literary market, knowing nifty, handy little ways of creating promotional materials is a boon for the middle of the road writer and/or author who has mortgage payments like all the rest of us mortals. There are a lot of cheap, thrifty ways to create a variety promotional materials for yourself and your work; ranging from websites, newsletters, email newsletters, free networking communities like Myspace and Shoutlife, and if you've caught two of my previous articles, create and posting video book trailers on your blog or Myspace. There's even an online printing company - VistaPrint - that'll give you 250 business cards for only the $5.95 shipping and handling charge. They're not ornate, but you can create very clean and professional looking cards online with little or no graphic arts experience at a very reasonable price.

One thing that would be very nice to hand out at author events such as book signings, lectures, or even to have stacked on the counters of your local book stores would be promotional, executable CDs promoting your work/works and yourself as a writer/author/speaker. Most upper echelon folks can afford to have bright, shiny DVDs made up with all sorts of in-depth videos and other goodies, and those are nice to have, especially because you can pop them into TV DVD players and DVD-ROM equipped computers, but DVD burners are still pretty expensive, DVD compiling programs somewhat bulky and hard to manipulate, and the rates most professionals would charge folks could easily but a sizeable dent into our grocery budget.

However, if you happen to own or have access to a computer with a CD burner, (blank CDs are infinitely cheaper than blank DVDs), and Office 2003 on Windows, then you can easily create an executable promotional CD that would be nifty things to hand out at almost any kind of event imaginable. Also, if you've got a fan base of sorts already, you could plug into a kind of "Open Source Marketing" idea, pioneered recently by T.L. Hines, bestselling author of Waking Lazarus, and distribute your finished PowerPoint files, zipped up by a compression program like WinZip, and recruit an army of fans burning PowerPoint presentations of your latest fiction/nonfiction release and spreading the word to the masses. If you're worried about sending information about your work to folks; worried about creating a design and having someone rip it off, you can even set password-protected security on your PowerPoint Show, so you're the only one who can open it and edit.

Word of warning: this is not a tutorial on how to use PowerPoint, but a tutorial on how to utilize PowerPoint to create an executable, promotional CD. Basic to intermediate PowerPoint skills and experience is needed for this article to work for you. That being said, let's break this article down into three parts:

1. What Content Do You Want On Your CD?

2. Setting Your Slides Up With Animation, Sound, Slide Order and Hyperlinks

3. Burning And Compiling Your CD

What Content Do You Want On Your CD?

This is of course is completely up to you, but there are some basics you'll want to include on your CD and have assembled before you begin working on your PowerPoint show. This is important, because it'll be a pain to be in the middle of the PowerPoint and decide you want to link to a certain type of content and then realize you don't have it on hand.

So, what do you want on your CD? First of all, the basics: author information. You of course need to let folks know who you are, your qualifications, awards, publication credits, college degrees, and any other notables. Pictures are a must too, both professional and candids, just to show you're human, of course! Next would be information/media files for featured work. If you're creating this to promote your first/latest novel, you'll need plot synopsis, endorsement blurbs, digital image of book cover, any other images that might be relevant - maps, timelines, main characters. If you're going to have a sample chapter or chapter one, you'll want either a Word document or .pdf document, (read by Adobe's free Acrobat Reader), so you can link to that. Do you a video book trailer for this novel? You'll need that too, and depending on the video's format, you can embed it right into the PowerPoint, or link to it as an external file (not recommended). Some additional items to consider would be videos of you at book signings, any lectures or presentations you may have made, readings at book stores, sneak peaks into the writing process & the life of an author or a presentation you gave to students.

Most of these videos, if downloaded in Windows Movie Maker, can be made into video files that can be included on an 'Additional Media' slide. If your book cover went through multiple design phases, you can also include digital files of the rejected covers; folks always like to see that sort of stuff, especially concept art that may have been created for your novel. Finally, an additional item could be audio/podcast files. Using pretty basic software, even Windows Movie Maker, you can record yourself talking about a variety of writing related topics, have someone conduct an interview with you, or even construct a fictional monologue by either the hero or villain of your story.

Finally, if you've been published multiple times, this would be an excellent opportunity hawk your other wares as well. You should create a bibliography slide that will feature your most recent and readily available works, and you'll need cover art and plot synopsis for each work as well.

Setting Up Your PowerPoint Show

Open up PowerPoint, skip any wizards, and select new. Also, to sidestep all the annoying pre-made and center-justified text boxes, right click on the first empty slide, select 'Slide Layout', and when the possible layouts opens on the right side field, select the blank one. That way, we get to create all the text boxes according to our specifications.

Now, go over to the left where you're the thumbnail of your first slide is in a column, select it, copy it, and paste five more slides. Now you have a basic six slide template from which to start from. I'd have in mind an idea of what you want for each slide. For example purposes, let's use the layout I've included as Image 2.

Your opening slide should be like the menu screen of a DVD, and we're going to set it up along those lines. Be careful to do this right, because we're going to copy and paste this menu and put it on all the slides. As far as text color, background color - you're on your own, but just keep in mind that something appealing yet easy on the eyes is the best choice. Also, keep in mind the tone of your work - hot pink and fuchsia are not the best choices to market your horror novel. Anyway, just in review, changing the background color is as easy as right-clicking on your slide and selecting 'background'. Text can be changed by clicking the Asomewhere on your toolbar above.

Click "Auto Shapes" on the left hand side, and then click "Action Buttons". This is where we can get our "DVD" like buttons. There are three buttons you should put on the bottom of every slide; the 'home' button, and 'forward' and 'back' buttons, respectively. When you click on any of these, the familiar old 'target' bulls-eye comes up; click and drag to create your button. The 'Action Settings' box will come up, automatically set for 'first slide' - home; 'previous slide' - back; 'next slide' - forward. I wouldn't change these settings. When you've situated these three buttons in some innocuous place that should be uniform for all your slides, you'll go ahead and set up every slide according to the chart I made, (Image 2), with whatever tweaks you want to make.

A couple of design tips to keep in mind:

background image: for those of us who are a little handier with graphics and perhaps Photoshop, maybe you have a nice background image you'd like to use for your PowerPoint to spice it up a little. However, keep this in mind: make sure your image is something subtle that won't distract viewers from all of your important information (Image 3). Anyway, a quick way to a background image in there is right click on the slide, go down to background, drag the pull-down bar at the bottom, select 'Fill Effects', and the click the 'Picture' tab on the upper right. Click 'Select Picture', and you can browse your computer for the desire graphic. The picture should be of the highest resolution possible, and a big enough file so it won't get distorted too much. I'd recommend 1049 x 691.

Inserting Pictures: Go to 'Insert', down to 'Picture', and to 'From File'. The more picture to load, however, the longer it will take computers to read the CD, especially slower and older computers.

Inserting Video Clips: To insert the video clip of your movie or behind the scenes clips, go to 'Insert', 'Movie or Sounds', to 'Movie from File', and browse your computer for your file. When you select that file and go to insert, it's going to ask if you want it to play automatically, or only play when clicked on, and that depends. If it's a book trailer, you'll probably want that to start automatically. If it's behind the scenes, interviews, or commentary, you'll want to select 'click to play'.

Note: PowerPoint works best with movies made in Windows Movie Maker; those ending in .wmv, and it doesn't support Quicktime files.

custom animation: the quickest way to animate any objects on your PowerPoint is by right-clicking on that object and selecting "Custom Animation" from the pop-up menu box. This will open the Animation controls on the right. A couple things to keep in mind when you're animating objects: 1. make your effects simple, subtle, and not a distraction to your overall presentation; 2. adjust the speed of the animation so you're at a 'happy medium' - not too fast or slow; 3. Finally, don't forget to adjust the 'Start' setting for your animation to 'after previous', so each animation will occur automatically after the previous ones. You want your promotional CD to have a certain level of interactivity, but all the animation should occur automatically, just like on a DVD.

All set? Here we go.

CD Menu:

There are two types of menus we're going to look at; stripped-down, functional and simple, and a more ornate style. Remember, presentation is important, but the quality of the product you're marketing is ultimately what's going to "hook" an audience. Sometimes an understated approach works best, while all the "bling" in the world won't make up for it.

Click on the text box tool - the 'A' in the lined box - and create a text box where you'd like your menu to be. Remember that PowerPoint textboxes are a little different than Word or Publisher; they don't drag to different sizes, the box expands with typing.

Think of nice headers for what each slide is going to represent; I'm going to use the following: 'Main' for the introduction slide; 'The Novel' for the slide about your work; 'Media Section' for the slide containing cover art, clips, rejected cover art, behind the scenes, etc; 'The Author' for the biography page; 'Other Works' if there are any, and finally 'Purchase' for stores - both brick & mortar and online - where the work can be purchased. Also, tweak the spacing and try to make them as even as possible; I'd just make sure there are the same amount of spaces between each heading; for my example I used ten spaces. Also, if you have six menu options like this, I'd put three on top; three on bottom, skipping a space in between like so:

Main The Novel Media Section

The Author Other Works Purchase

The titles of these entries aren't set in stone, and you can tweak them to fit any of your needs. For example, if you have no other works because this is the first, replace 'Other Works' with something like 'Commentary' - because maybe there's too much of that to fit in the Media Section - or 'Reviews', with clips of reviews you may have gotten.

Next, you'll need to 'hyperlink' each option to it's corresponding slide, and it's going to look exactly as it sounds, like hyperlinks on the Internet, which we are going to do later as well. First, click in the textbox and highlight only one heading, not the whole thing. Once you've done that, 'right-click' and go down to 'hyperlink'. This will bring up the hyperlink box, but it will be asking you initially for a website address. Along the left side you'll see some buttons; click on 'Place In This Document' to link to a slide in your presentation. Pick the corresponding slide, which will be listed as 1., 2., and so forth - it shows a nice little thumbnail on your left just to be safe - and click 'Okay'. Once you've done that, repeat the process until all the headers have lines underneath them and are "hyperlinked". To make the menu look more professional and uniform, do your menu options in the same font, preferable the font you did your work's title in.

Once you've done that, click in the outside border of the text box, right-click and select 'copy'. Now, got to ever other slide and paste this on your slide, preferable in the same spot on each to give it that nice, uniform look.

Burning the CD:

In PowerPoint 2003, burning multiple batches of CDs is extremely easy; it does all the work for you. When your presentation has been checked, proof-read, and you've run it to your satisfaction, save the project to your hard drive. Then, go up to the toolbar to 'File', selecting 'Package For CD'. A dialogue box will pop up with the default destination as your CD Drive, (make sure you have a CD-R or CD-RW in your drive), and it will also ask you if you'd like to 'copy all linked files'. This is a definite YES, because if you've included multimedia files such as book trailers, video or audio clips, selecting this option will copy everything to the CD automatically.

After this is done, select 'Finish' or 'Package to CD'. It will burn your CD, and as a nice bonus, you can burn multiple CDs at one time.

Promotional CDs; quick as that. Happy burning.