Which do you think will get your audience engaged?
Here… I’ll answer that question for you:
How I made this Transient Visitors GIPHY?
- I drew the character.
- Then I wrote a prompt to make it dance in PolloAI.
- Then I downloaded it to Canva to prop it correctly.
- Then I uploaded it to GIPHY.
- Then I downloaded the GIPHY from GIPHY
- Then I uploaded the GIPHY link here through the wordpress image block…
And now I can’t stop. Here is the GIPHY for Transient Visitors Month 2.
And then one that is a little more doctored up in GIPHY:
I plan to do this for other characters as well. And of course for the Transient Visitors castle. Endless potential here:
📘 Let there be Life! Why GIPHYs Matter to the Self-Published Author
Turning your characters into GIFs and uploading them to GIPHY is more than just fun—it’s a strategic branding move.
GIPHYs are shareable, searchable, and mobile-native. That means they show up in Instagram stories, Facebook, iMessages, newsletters, blogs, texts (especially those group texts that you can’t shake!) and even Slack channels. They also increase avenues of creative expression for you as a marketer of your self-publishing books.
What about for your self-published novels or other image-less self-published work?
I get it. You are a writer and not an illustrator. Your novel has words. Very little images. Or no images at all. This can be a tad more challenging than if you have a children’s book with dozens of images material ready to get moving. It’s a challenge, though, that is surmountable with a little creativity. Thankfully this is currency that the self-published author is full of!
First, be tactical with your cover art. Whether you are drawing it or photographing it or paying an illustrator or designer to do it, keep in mind that the more you can do with your cover design the more places you can put it. Also, just because your novel is about the real world doesn’t mean you can’t have illustrations as the logo for the story. My novel Mooncalfs is about real people but it has a cartoon cover that lets me play with GIFS.
Authors do this all the time. One of the inspirations for Mooncalfs is JD Salinger’s magnum opus The Catcher in the Rye. Look at that cover art. Imagine what you could do to market a book with that horse carousel carton image on the front. If I were JD I’d be galloping that across cyberspace until Holden Caulfield stopped complaining.
Along with the title, there’s also the option of adding an occasional drawing inside the novel to give it a little visual life. Doing so has the added benefit of giving the reader a word vacation. I, for one, love when I reach an image page in a novel. I love even more when that image page is half of a page and the other half contains words. That way it counts as a page number rather than a numberless supplement.
Why does that matter? Reading page stats baby! Watch out Goodreaders!
Author Kurt Vonnegut put his drawings into his novels. Look no further than the felt-tip drawings in Breakfast of Champions as evidence of that.
That being said, in the event that you want to remain a purist with the novel and keep it all words, maybe think about adding some images to play on your the about the author section. Once again we can draw inspiration from Vonnegut, who used to draw himself. Below is the cover art for his book A Man Without a Country.
This is one of my “About the Author” illustrations of myself. In hindsight, it is less skilled and far creepier than Vonnegut’s. Work in progress I guess.
Afraid of having to draw or animate (at least for GIPHY’s you shouldn’t be…if I can do it so can you)?
Solution: use real people and real images to make your GIPHY. Presently, simple cartoon GIPHYs that I draw are quicker and more efficient for me to deploy. So that’s what I’ve used in my self-publishing marketing. However, that could change. You never know when you’ll stumble upon your dog doing something silly enough to monetize.
Aaaand…it already happened.
I used Clara, my dog, to tell the reader to run off the page towards a poem I wrote about a fellow pooch. The poem is titled “Manumit“. While not directly related to my novel or monetization like the Transient Visitor covers above, the Clara GIPHY is a passive inroad to that eventuality. The goal is to get the reader to think the Clara GIPHY is funny, and so they will check out “Manumit”. The goal after that is for them to like Manumit enough where they’ll see Mooncalfs advertised on the page and think, ‘what the hell’. I’ll throw Dave a bone to get Clara a bone.
Additionally, adding tentacles to your work that you have not monetized, like my poetry in this case, gives me incentive to pump out a book of poems! Get them reading “Manumit” to buy Mooncalfs now. Get them to read “Manumit” to buy my book of poems later. That’s what I’m thinking.
So go ahead—start your GIPHY. I promise, it will be done in a JIFFY.
David O’Boyle is an indie author exploring both the wonder of childhood and the mystery of adulthood — sometimes in the same sentence.