Creating a Newsletter--The Body by Rochelle Weber, Publisher #MFRW Newsletter

Last month, we discussed creating the first page of a newsletter. For some authors, that’s all you’ll need. Others may go further. You may want to add another page with a blurb and an excerpt of the book your guest author’s promoting. And, of course, you’ll want to include buy-links for the book. I don’t think I mentioned this before, but I always work with both rulers visible. I use them as guides when placing text boxes and artwork.

In the MFRW Newsletter, we have headers at the top of each page. You can use your banner. All of ours have our logo, and since we showcase numerous books in various genres, we have banners for each genre, as well as some that just have our logo. Once you’ve designed a basic banner, it’s easy to adapt it if you wish to do so. Maybe you’ll just want to use a slightly shorter version of the header you created for your first page. All you need to do is go into IrfanView (or whatever photo editing software you’re using), pull up the jpg of your header, and resize it.

To resize artwork in IrfanView, click on the Image menu, and then Resize/Resample. You’ll see “Change Size Here and Width and Height boxes. Choose “pixels, cm, or inches”—whichever you’re most comfortable working with. Be sure to click “Preserve aspect ratio (proportional).” I also like to click “Apply sharpen after resample.” Then adjust your height. I suggest using headers that are no more than 1.5 inches tall. You may have to stretch it out a bit to fit it across your page. If that’s the case and the text and artwork appear stretched, you’ll want to go back to IrfanView (or whatever photo editing software you’re using) and shorten your artwork a bit more (maybe down to one inch) so you can catch it at the corner and stretch it out symmetrically. I prefer 150 dots per inch (dpi). It’s dense enough to post on the web, but doesn’t take up as much bandwidth as 300 dpi.

Next, I add a box for the page title. That can be the title of the book, the author’s name with (Cont.) or (Cont. from Page 1), etc. I use a short box, about a half inch tall, as wide as the page, or at least from margin to margin. I use a font like Arial Rounded MT Bold in about 18 points in this box. For MFRW, we use pink text in this box, but you can play with your text. On the left side of the screen, there’s usually a toolbar with an icon that shows a skewed capital A. If you click on that, it will give you a bunch of special text formats to choose from. Or, you can highlight the text and click on the icon in the Home ribbon that shows a capital A underlined in red. You can go in there to change the color of your font. If you click on “more colors,” you’ll get a palette of colors, and you can also click on the Custom tab at the top to tweak the colors to your own taste. I keep a list of the color formulae for the header/URL Link/box line pink; the rusty/brown for the in-text titles, and the gold for the artwork frames.

Once I have the artwork prepared, I create text boxes for the writing. I do my writing in Word and then I can just transfer it to the text boxes in Publisher. My preferred font for text is Garamond 11, and I use the ruler in Word to set up my indentations. I inherited a Mensa newsletter that used Garamond 11 and I liked it, so it’s become my standard.

After I’ve transferred the material to Publisher, I hit Control/A to highlight everything in the text box. Then I go to the Format menu and click on Paragraph. In that menu box, I can set my justification (usually justified), set the spacing I want above and below each paragraph and between lines. I use 1.15 spaces between lines. It gives just a smidge extra space there. You want to put a lot of information into a small space with a newsletter, so you probably don’t want to go with double spacing or even 1.5 lines’ spacing. I suggest spacing your lines no larger than 1.25 lines.

Finally, place your cursor where you want your artwork to go, and go to Insert Artwork from My Computer. There’s an icon for it that has what looks like a photo of a mountain on it, but I’m not sure if that’s a regular part of the toolbar, or if I added it when I customized the Publisher toolbar to suit my needs.

That, I think, takes care of the body, unless you want to add a Masthead. We can discuss that next month.

Rochelle Weber is a Navy veteran and holds a BA in Communications from Columbia College in Chicago with an emphasis on Creative Writing. “Would you like fries with that?” Her novels Rock Bound and Rock Crazy are available in both e-book and print. Her third novel, The Thin Person Inside, will be available in multiple digital formats from MuseItUp Publishing, Inc., in May, 2015. She edits for Jupiter Gardens Press, and is the Publisher of the Marketing for Romance Writers Newsletter, winner of the 2013 Preditors & Editors Readers’ Poll for Best Writers’ Resource.

Rochelle battles bi-polar disorder, quipping, “You haven’t lived until you’ve been the only woman on the locked ward at the VA.” Her song, “It’s Not My Fault,” won a gold medal in the National Veterans Creative Arts Competition. She lives in Round Lake Beach, Illinois. She has two married daughters, four grandchildren, three step-grandkids, and one step-great-grandkid. Two cats allow her to live with them and cater to their every whim.

You can access the MFRW Newsletters at:

https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/MarketingForRomanceWriters/files/MFRW-Newsletters/

Or:

http://issuu.com/mfrw/docs

Interviews for Newsletters

Back again.  This month I’m talking about how to do interviews for your newsletters.  Interviewing an author for your newsletter is basically the same as doing so for a blog.  However, if you’re printing your newsletters and mailing them out or if you want to keep them to a format that looks like a page, you have space issues that differ from those involved in posting a blog.

As far as the questions go, they’re pretty much the same.  “How did you start writing?”  “What inspires you?”  “What is your ‘process’?”  And the fun ones—“Long, hot, sudsy bath or steamy shower?”  “Steak or lobster?”  “Chocolate or Cheesecake?”  “If you were stranded on a desert island…”

Or, you can interview a character.  “Why do you think someone would write a story about you?”  “Tell me about your hero. How did you meet him?”  “Why don’t you think your relationship with him will work?”

What other material do you plan to use?  A blurb from your guest's book?  An excerpt?  Buy links?  Contact info? It helps to figure out in advance how much space you have in your newsletter and how much space you can give to each item.  Back in the days of electric typewriters, one page of pica type double-spaced equaled three-hundred words.  Using Garamond 11 point type, justified with 1.15 line spacing, I can fit about 200 words in a text box that measures 5.5 inches wide by 4 inches tall.

How long your interviews, blurbs, or excerpts run will depend on whether you want to start them on one page and finish on another.  If you do so, don’t forget to add (To be continued) at the bottom of the first page, and (Continued from Page *) at the beginning of the piece when you pick it up on another page.  I suggest you present intros to both your guest and a taste of what you’re doing on you’re doing on your front page, and then get to the meat of your interview, blurb, excerpt, etc., on the inside.

 

It helps to set up a template to work from and a submission page you can send to your guests so you don’t have to type the same thing over and over.  You could maybe come up with twenty questions and ask them to chose five to answer, and then provide space for their blurb and excerpt, letting them know the word count you can accommodate.

 

In journalism, there are two major principles:  the six Ws—Who, What, Where, When, Why and How, and the Inverted Pyramid.  Always give the meat of the story first, and then go into details later.  The smaller the detail, the farther down the page it belongs.  That’s why journalists fight for headlines and stories on Page 1 “above the fold.”  The six Ws are in a specific order, which should not be tampered with.  People want to know who did what to whom.  Next they want to know where and then when. They’re less interested in why or how.  That info can go on page three below the fold.

Now, I’d like you to meet my next Assistant Editor, Barbara Donlon Bradley.

Writing for Barbara Donlon Bradley started innocently enough. Like most she kept diaries, journals, and wrote an occasional letter, but she also had a vivid imagination and wrote scenes and short stories adding characters to her favorite shows and comic books. As time went on she found the passion for writing to be a strong drive for her. Humor is also very strong in her life. No matter how hard she tries to write something deep and dark, it will never happen. That humor bleeds into her writing. Since she can’t beat it she has learned to use it to her advantage. Now she lives in Tidewater Virginia with two cats, one mother in law—she’s 85 now—her husband, and teenage son.