Affinity Publisher Help
In Today's Journal
* Re Yesterday's Post
* A New Short Story
* Affinity Publisher Help
* True Pulp
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
Re Yesterday's Post
I believe in you and your abilities. To help you along the road to believing in yourself, I'm offering a free book. No strings. Here's the deal.
For the next week, I'm giving away copies of Quiet the Critical Voice and Write Fiction. To get your copy, you only need to
At checkout, enter the coupon code MHGUD585KD.
You can download the book in .pdf, .mobi, and .epub. Free.
A New Short Story
"A Hit, and an Egress" went live Friday on my Stanbrough Writes Substack. This is short dip into the Blackwell Ops world. Go check it out. It's free.
If you enjoy the story, please click Like. Comments are welcome too. Both help with my Substack algorithms. Then tell Everyone else.
Affinity Publisher Help
Book cover designer Tiffany Gray left a comment with a link to her 'playlist' of all the Affinity tutorials she's used to learn the program(s) for her work.
I'm not a visual learner. I'm the type who needs a book open next to me so I can refer to it as I progress through the steps, and I don't personally like the clutter of having to absorb a lot of extraneous nonsense as I do so.
Come to think of it, that's probably why all my writing how-to books are straightforward and to the point with no fluff and no extraneous regurgitation of rules you've heard a thousand times from other sources your whole life.
For me to learn from a video, I would need one titled "Specifically and Exactly How to Insert Photos into Affinity Publisher and Then Put Words on Them to Create an Ebook Cover." See? No wasted time, no extra unnecessary crap, no frustration.
I don't even need to know how to word-wrap text. They nearly always 'wrap' the text with too much space between the first line and the second and succeeding lines. If I want text on two lines on a cover, I type it once, then copy-paste the frame, type the rest of it, then position the two frames where I want them. Meh. Who needs wasted space on a book cover? Hint: Not Me.
And please don't say, "Calm down, Harv." I'll have plenty of time to catch up on my foot-dangling and calming down when someone flushes my cremated ashes or, you know, when I'm taking a dirt nap. All of that's up to whichever people I leave behind and how inconvenienced they wanna be by disposing of me.
But until then, my time is my own, and I wanna keep moving forward. Your results might well vary, but for me, life is to be experienced, not witnessed. No lollygagging, no popcorn and YouTube videos, no silly BS. That just ain't how I roll.
Even in the book I ordered, I plan to use only one section of it. I'll probably cut that section out and save it in case I need a refresher in the future, but I'll probably drop the other two-thirds of it into the trash. Hey, all you gain by dragging your feet is thin soles. (grin)
BUT seriously, if you're a visual learner type, and if you have or are planning to buy Affinity Publisher (to save money, I recommend buying the whole suite: Publisher, Designer, and Photo) you might want to check out the videos.
Affinity is a great alternative to paying a monthly or annual rental fee to those Adobe people for Photo or In-Design or whatever else. With Affinity, there's none of that subscription crap. You buy it, you own it, as it should be.
Remember the old days, when you could actually OWN stuff in exchange for a bunch of wrinkled-up green and dirty-white money?
Anyway, I know most people aren't like me, you fortunate ones. (grin)
You can find Tiffany's Affinity tutorial playlist here.
And thanks, Tiff.
True Pulp
Just in case you didn't see it, I'm repeating what I believe is a really good offer.
Donate $10 to the TRUE PULP Kickstarter and you'll get not only the TRUE PULP anthology, but I'll send you both
the Echoes of Hemingway anthology AND
my 10-story Mobster Tales short story collection
Here’s the description of Echoes of Hemingway:
The 20 stories in this anthology cross the genres from noir to action-adventure to literary to science fiction to fantasy and more.
The anthology features 13 authors from bestsellers to prizewinning prolific professional storytellers to amateurs. And every story had its seed in a story or novel by Ernest Hemingway.
And here’s the description of Mobster Tales:
This 10-story collection runs the gamut from the hokey to the humorous, the wannabes to the would’a-beens, the chilling to the childish to the deadly serious.
There are 8 stories from Harvey and 2 from his borderline psychotic persona, Eric Stringer. If you enjoy some grit and noir, come along for some fun.
If you like great fiction with strong characters, you don’t want to miss either of these collections.
Of Interest
Hardboiled and Noir Are Not the Same
The Numbers
The Journal…………………………… 860
Writing of Blackwell Ops 46: Sam Granger | Still on the Ghost Trail
Day 1…… 1814 words. To date…… 1814
Day 2…… 2645 words. To date…… 4459
Day 3…… 1507 words. To date…… 5966
Day 4…… 1664 words. To date…… 7630
Fiction for June………………………. 31666
Fiction for 2025………………………. 495118
Nonfiction for June………………....... 16320
Nonfiction for 2025…………………… 142470
2025 consumable words…………….. 631078
2025 Novels to Date…………………….. 12
2025 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2025 Short Stories to Date……………… 27
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………..... 116
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 297
Short story collections……………………. 29
If you are able, please support TNDJ with a paid subscription. Thank you!
If you’re new to TNDJ, you might want to check out these links:
Oh, and here’s My Bio. It’s always a good idea to vet the expertise of people who are giving you advice.
Questions are always welcome at harveystanbrough@gmail.com. But please limit yourself to the topics of writing and publishing.
Thanks for the shout out - I hope it helps video learners!
I also have an Atticus 'step-by-step' list for making clean copy for Atticus to format manuscripts, no videos or extraneous steps in that one, for people who use or want to use Atticus.
And if folks just want someone to "do it for them" (either covers or formatting) I have great prices for people who say they follow Harvey!
Lots of good info, Harvey. As far as cover design goes, I'd like to mention Lesia, also known as German Creative on Fiverr. She has been doing almost all of Cap Daniels' books for years and is really good. And her prices are super, super low.