Natasha Duncan-Drake's Blog

How to Efficiently Create Short Vids for Book Promotion on Social MediaSo I am still in the stages of implementing the social media strategy outlinedbyKate- Alyne Digitaland am having to change up because slideshows for books don't seem to be cuttingit anymore. It's all about vids now.

Now Kate gives a verycomprehensive method for creating the vids in Canva, but it uses functions ofCanva which are part of the purchased packages. Now, since I already have Adobe(which I use for many thi...

Slideshow Book Promotion on TikTok

Prerequisites: Windows 10 or 11, Android phone

So I am dipping my toe into TikTok these days (oh woe is me 😆) and I'm trying out a strategy from this successful young lady over here: Kate- Alyne Digital. It involves posting TikTok slideshows with significant scenes from a book to get readers hooked, and make them want to buy the book.

She has many YouTube vids about it, so if you want all the details check out her channel.

This post is simply a cheat sheet of eve...

How to Batch Save Layers in Photoshop

There is an option to save each layer as its own image in Photoshop, which is very useful if each layer is its own complete image.

File > Export > Layers to File

However, if, for example, we have lots of text layers we wish to save, all with the same background/foreground (see below), or we have lots of different icons we want to save all with the same background, this is not sufficient.

Example of text layers with the same BG
If we use the Layers to File optio...

eBook How-To Updates for 2025

So my pages on where to upload eBooks and how to format an eBook have needed updating for a while and I have finally gotten around to it. One has completely changed, since my methods for creating eBooks is now totally different, and the other has more information and some other changes. I hope someone might find the information useful, since when we're first starting out this can all be a bit of a mystery. 

Where to Publish eBooks

Updates include:

the addition of what...

Kindle Book Download - The Faster Way - Before the 26th Feb 2025So I saw a post on Tumblr yesterday, which I am sorry I cannot find again. It was talking about how Kindle are removing the download ability on the 26th Feb and one response mentioned a Tampermonkey script to help with downloading all of our Kindle books. If someone can point me to the post, I will credit the person who mentioned it - thank you.

Well the script makes it about half as frustrating to download everything as the only wa...

How to Check for DRM in Calibre

If you, like me, are downloading all your Kindle books before Amazon take away the ability to do so on the 26th Feb 2025 and are using Calibre to keep them all catalogued, you may be wondering about DRM.

Unfortunately, it is a fact of life that some books with have DRM, which makes them unreadable on anything except the Kindle anyway. The only way you figure this out is when you go to view the books and it says it can't open them because of DRM.

There is a really q...

Don't Lose Face!Writing Tip - How Not to Forget What Your Characters Look Like

For much of my writing life, I wrote fanfic, before I decided to turn my hand to being a professional word jockey. I still write fanfic from time to time because it's fun, and the one thing we don't have to worry about it describing our characters, because everyone knows what they look like. Oh, we describe their wounds or their clothing in loving details, and maybe their moles because we can, but with TV and movies t...

Auto-Syncing Subtitles on YouTube

Subtitles are things that are often overlooked on YouTube vids, and as good as AI is getting at creating auto-generated subtitles for vids, there is nothing quite like having personally uploaded, accurate ones for quality control.

However, I have found they can be a little tricky, and doing them manually by hand takes forever!

One way of doing this is paying a company to create a subtitle file from your video and just uploading this. However, for those of us on a...

Stuffed Potato & Parmesan WafflesGluten Free & Vegetarian

This is a partial repost, but also an updated recipe from back in 2020. The original recipe is for plain potato & parmesan waffles, but my lovely twin just gifted me and my hubby a stuffed waffle iron, so of course we had to try it out. These are so very delicious, I had to share.

As I mentioned, the original recipe is based off of Nigella's Garlic & Parmesan waffles from her book, "At My Table". This is just a different take on the recip...

Free Horror Book for HalloweenHappy Halloween one and all.

As has become a tradition for me and Soph at Wittegen Press, we like to give away a free book for Halloween (link and instructions at the bottom). It started when we heard about Neil Gaiman's All Hallows Read way back in 2012, where the idea is to give books as a Halloween treat.

Soph and I created eBooks to give away from 2012 to 2021. We took a little break in 2022 for family reasons, but now I am back to continue ...