Tag: Confessions of a Podcast Goddess

BBB Awards in Dallas

Enjoy a video clip of the Book Buyers Best Awards!

The Spicy Contessa

“Ready, Aim, Podcast!”

by Jina Bacarr

Does size matter?

When conference goers at the recent Romance Writers of America convention in Dallas, Texas talked shop, the question “Does size matter?” came up at frequent intervals, especially at the Passionate Ink luncheon (RWA Chapter of erotica authors).

They were comparing megapixels.

Megapixels? What the heck is a megapixel? you ask. With the explosion of digital cameras available on the market, it’s a hot topic and one you can’t ignore when choosing a camera. My first digital camera was a cumbersome Sony 1.3 megapixel, which used 3 ½ inch floppies to record pictures. Imagine stuffing your purse with twenty floppies. Not fun. Now I use a Canon PowerShot SD600 that’s small and light and weighs less than six ounces. I love it.

So what is a megapixel? Here’s my interpretation: Digital camera images are made up of rows of colored dots, something like the Impressionist painting style known as Pointillism. These colored dots make up a canvas or rectangular grid that gives you the whole picture when you look at it from a distance. If you’ve ever stared at an Impressionist painting in a museum, you know what I mean. Up close, it resembles a bunch of colorful dots (black was not included in the Impressionist palette), but viewed from far away it becomes a breathtaking panorama of the artist’s vision.

When you shoot a picture with your digital camera, you are the artist and these same dots are called “pixels.” Each pixel used in a digital camera is either red, green or blue (usually with twice as many green pixels). How many dots or pixels are on a page? Rows and rows, like wildflowers swaying in a field. For example, an picture of you at the RWA conference on a web page might be made up of 500 rows each with 400 pixels in each row. The total number of pixels is 200,000. That’s a lot of wildflowers.

According to experts, these pixels contain a number of different brightness values, usually 256 in screen displays (I prefer 1024) or 4096 in camera images. Because digital camera images are generally larger than this, we talk about their sizes in terms of Megapixels (Mp). 1 Mp = 1 million pixels. So the 200,000 pixel image of the hunk you want to use for the hero in your next book is 0.2 Mp.

Want to make your pictures smaller? This is one time it’s easier to drop a few pounds, I mean, pixels, than it is to gain them back. To increase the pixels or dots, you have to guess the values of the extra pixels you need. Some software programs claim to do this, but like fad diets, they’re not always successful.

So, how many pixels do you need? If you’re buying a camera to view your pictures on your web page, you’ll need fewer pixels–1.3 will suffice. If you want to print them on standard 4×6 prints or make postcards of your latest bookcover, you’ll need at least 1.5-2.3 Mp; for enlargements of 8×10 for your author head shot for your press kit, you’ll need 4-5 Mp.

Although I primarily use my Canon Powershot for my website images and video, I bought a 6 Mp because I wanted the option of changing the size of the images. I usually shoot 1600 by 1200 so I can reduce and crop to a smaller size.

Now if could just figure out how to drop 5 pixels, I mean pounds, with the click of a mouse…

Jina Bacarr spent many hours studying the size of…hmm…pixels in Impressionist paintings for her latest Spice book, NAUGHTY PARIS, a time travel about the raucous and erotic world of 1889 Paris.

Location, location, location…

Confessions of a Podcast Goddess

Part 3: “Girls Just Want to Have Podcasts”

by Jina Bacarr

When podcasting burst onto the scene, they said it was a man’s world. The stats backed it up: “Wired magazine noted that at last week’s [November 2005] Portable Media Expo in Ontario, 15 percent of the 2,000 attendees were female and that users of Yahoo’s new podcasting directory were 85 percent male.” OC Register

Not anymore. Girls rule the airwaves with podcasts featuring women hosts talking about everything from caring for your animals to astronomy.

So what are you going to talk about? Here at OCC, we have published authors as well as pre-published. How about a show with a writing theme? Good start, but to gain a following you must give listeners and viewers a “hook” for your podcast. For example, romancenovel.tv interviews romance authors, including Nora Roberts, Rebecca York, and Christina Dodd, while Grammar Girl’s podcasts consist of five minutes of grammar tips each week.

I write erotic fiction so my podcasts, both audio and video, have a sexy theme. This often leads to my podcasts getting “banned” from video sites because they assume I’m promoting . This recently happened to me on Google Video re: a PSA (Public Service Announcement) podcast I did a few months ago in response to a letter “Dear Abby” received from a mother who was concerned her teen daughter was reading “trashy” romance novels.

In my video podcast, “Dear Jina”– An erotic fiction writer speaks out about what teens are reading, I talk about how romance novels reflect a positive attitude toward sex for teens. My video has received nearly 15,000 hits, but someone took offense and complained, so Google de-activated it, deciding it was “.” After a few anxious emails back and forth to Google, the problem was resolved and my video is once again “live,” but you have to be prepared for anything in podcasting.

For my audio podcasts, I want my podcasts to reflect a certain sophistication. I decided on “In the Zone with Jina Bacarr: Hot topics with a cool point of view” because it doesn’t limit what I can discuss. So far, I’ve talked about the sensual world of the geisha (I get email from listeners who tell me they’ll never look at a geisha in the same way again after hearing they don’t wear panties), strippers and the art of the tease, the history of erotic fiction from the Greeks to Fanny Hill to Spice Books from Harlequin.

I also record audio podcasts for OCC each month. I call it Romancing The O.C. I talk about our upcoming meeting, guests, local authors, book signings, contests, as well as conduct author interviews.

I always end my podcast with my sign-off: “And don’t forget, put a little romance in your life. Read a romance novel.” That’s important. Come up with a slogan that reflects your show and your personality. And don’t worry about the length of your podcast. It can be five minutes or thirty minutes, but the longer the podcast the more megabytes it will take up on your computer hard drive and your website. You can also “park it” on video sharing sites like Google and Daily Motion [we’ll talk about these sites in future blogs].

So, what’s your podcast about? Book reviews, writing tips, interviews? Do you have an interesting hobby that plays into your writing like Debbie Macomber and her love of knitting? Do you love to travel then use your experiences in your books? Are you a techie with weekly tips to help writers? The possibilities are as endless as words in a dictionary. Pick out what interests you and people will be talking about…your podcast!

Tune in next month for Part 4 of Confessions of Podcast Goddess when I’ll be talking about shooting video on location–I’ll be in Venice, Italy speaking at La Biennale arts festival.

Jina Bacarr is the author of The Blonde Geisha and coming in July 2007, Naughty Paris. Jina writes erotic adventure for Spice Books. “Get Caught in the Act!”