Lisabet Sarai, author of The Gazillionaire and the Virgin shares a #TechTip for using graphics in your blog @LisabetSarai #RLFblog

CEO Rachel Zelinsky just wants a business deal with geeky Theo Moore in Lisabet Sarai’s new erotic romance The Gazillionaire and the Virgin. Instead she finds herself aching to protect the sensitive, awkward genius – and to surrender to his kinky desires.

Lisabet Sarai, welcome to Romance Lives Forever. I’m Kayelle Allen, author and owner of this blog. Happy to have you here! We want to hear your tech tip, but first, please tell us about The Gazillionaire and the Virgin.

The Gazillionaire and the Virgin by Lisabet Sarai

Genre Contemporary BDSM Erotic Romance

Book heat level: X

She’s the billionaire. He’s the virgin. Still, he knows how to make her melt.

When Silicon Valley entrepreneur Rachel Zelinsky meets reclusive genius Theo Moore, she has a single objective — a deal to incorporate his AI software into her company’s popular virtual world. She finds Theo to be arrogant, sensitive and socially awkward, but his aura of power speaks to her carefully-hidden submissive side. Confused and aroused, she falls under his geeky spell.

Theo Moore can’t be bought. His past battles with poverty make him deeply suspicious of the billionaire CEO, though Rachel’s voluptuous curves and brilliant mind embody his ultimate fantasy. Too bad his knowledge about sex derives from extensive research and a stash of kinky porn rather than real-world experience.

Rachel may be Theo’s first lover, but Theo is her first true Master. One word from him, one touch, and she surrenders to bliss. It seems that love and complementary desire may harmonize their differing values, until Rachel’s unwitting violation of Theo’s trust tears them apart.

Tech Tip

Most blog platforms and website builders give you options for specifying the size of the images you use in your posts or on your pages. On Blogger, for instance, you can specify that an image should be small, medium, large, extra large, or original size, So even if your cover is 2000 pixels wide, too big to fit in your blog frame, you can make it display as only 400 pixels.

Given how busy we authors are, it’s tempting to be lazy and let the platform control the visual size of your images. However, this is a bad idea for several reasons. First of all, it slows down the loading of your posts, because the full-sized image will be transmitted over the network to the browser, even if the display has reduced resolution. (A typical 2000×3000 cover is close to one MB in size.) Second, it uses up your disk quota (if you’re using Blogger, at least), since Google stores all blog images as part of your “Photos”. Finally, and most importantly, the dynamic visual resizing of your images is not guaranteed to work with all browsers or display platforms. For instance, big images in posts sent to Triberr will sometimes show up in the feed at full resolution, which makes your post look terrible.

The solution is to resize your images before you add them to your blog or website. And my recommendation for doing this, at least if you use Windows, is a fantastic little program called IrfanView.

https://www.irfanview.com/

This is a brilliantly designed graphics utility package, with lots of functionality but a very easy and intuitive user interface. I couldn’t self-publish or blog without it. (Oh, and it’s free for non-commercial use.)

And here’s a bonus tip: when you are resizing an image (with any program), be sure you select “Preserve aspect ratio”. If you don’t, your image can end up looking stretched or squashed. “Aspect ratio” means the ratio of the width divided by the height (or vice versa). So common cover sizes of 2000×3000 and 1600×2400 both have the same aspect ratio (2:3), as do the common reduced sizes of 400×600 or 200×300. When you resize preserving the ratio, you only specify one dimension; the other will be adjusted automatically.

Occasionally you may want to alter the width and height independently but be careful as the results may be ugly. For instance, I use thumbnails that are 200×320 rather than 200×300 on my website, because that matches the aspect ratio used by one of my publishers. My self-published books, though, have a 2:3 aspect ratio. So I need to make the thumbnails for those books a bit taller than they’d be with a proportional resizing.

For more tech tips, you can download my free ebook Naughty Bits: The Erotogeek’s Guide for Technologically-Challenged Authors. It dates from 2013, and quite a bit has changed since then, but I think the content is still quite useful.

Where to buy The Gazillionaire and the Virgin

NOTE: The ebook is on sale during February for only 99 cents!

Amazon https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09SDY5XJ5/
Smashwords https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1132432
Kinky Literature https://www.kinkyliterature.com/book/811-the-gazillionaire-and-the-virgin-/
Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60397753-the-gazillionaire-and-the-virgin
Amazon (Audiobook)
https://www.amazon.com/The-Gazillionaire-and-the-Virgin/dp/B075WZS3TN/
Audible (Audiobook) https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Gazillionaire-and-the-Virgin-Audiobook/B075X1XN87

Lisabet Sarai Social Media

Lisabet Sarai became addicted to words at an early age. She began reading when she was four. She wrote her first story at five years old and her first poem at seven. Since then, she has penned plays, tutorials, scholarly articles, marketing brochures, software specifications, self-help books, press releases, a five-hundred page dissertation, and lots of erotica and erotic romance – over one hundred titles, and counting, in nearly every sub-genre—paranormal, scifi, ménage, BDSM, GLBT, and more. Regardless of the genre, every one of her stories illustrates her motto: Imagination is the ultimate aphrodisiac.
Website https://www.lisabetsarai.com
Blog https://lisabetsarai.blogspot.com
Twitter https://www.twitter.com/LisabetSarai
Pinterest https://www.pinterest.com/lisabetsarai/beyond-romance-blog-posts/
Goodreads http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/83387.Lisabet_Sarai
BookBub https://www.bookbub.com/profile/lisabet-sarai
Amazon Author Page https://www.amazon.com/author/lisabetsarai
Get to know Lisabet Sarai better by signing up for her email list: https://btn.ymlp.com/xgjjhmhugmghbsp;