If you happen to be working on or planning out your author website or blog, this will be a handy post to read. For clarity, I am not an affiliate of the below site and I do not get anything if you decide to get any of the below goodies from Creative Market.

Author Website and/or Blog

I just found out about this nifty giveaway from Creative Market and downloaded a copy for myself. You do need a free account from Creative Market, but I’ve never received any spam from them. The only time I get an email is when they have a new set of freebies available or when one of the items I already have has been updated, which is handy if you’re using one of the WordPress themes on a production site.

The freebie they’re now offering is an ebook on building a new blog coupled with some free templates and a media kit. That last part is why I snagged a copy. Many authors have a basic blog but lack the professional touches like a media kit. I have a basic one on my website because I noticed my friend Kevin J. Anderson had one on his blog.

The kit is available for free and is geared towards GoDaddy, who is co-sponsoring the giveaway. The information in the ebook is useful no matter which website host you use. I would recommend InMotion Hosting, HostGator, or Dreamhost. If you enjoy playing around in Linux or having dedicated resources, I’d recommend InMotion Hosting’s Virtual Private Server (VPS) setups, which is what I use. I like the option of logging into the Linux server and playing around with the system. They also have excellent tech support that will actually converse with you at your level of technical expertise. They don’t answer your questions with copy and paste snippets from a script.

The free kit is available at this link: creativemarket.com/blog/blog-design-ebook  (opens in a new window or tab)

Get Free Goodies From Creative Market Every Monday

I’ve been using Creative Market for several years now. I’ve purchased several quality items from them, including magazine templates for Adobe InDesign, flyer templates for Photoshop (or any compatible image editor), icon sets, a book template, and several sets of fonts for use on my covers. I’ve never purchased a lemon yet, except for some line art vector images of lemons.

Every Monday, Creative Market gives away six free resources. They can range from fonts to logo designs to WordPress templates and everything in between. Once you pick up something, it acts as though you paid full price for the items. You get free updates, for example. I particularly like that there is a DropBox feature that allows you to send the items direct to your DropBox instead of downloading each one separately. This way, your new items can be sync’d to your computer all at once in the background. If you prefer downloading one at a time, that feature works great too.

Just to give you an idea of what you can expect, the giveaway that is active as of the date of this blog post includes:

• Bernal Sans font kit
• Classic & Essential Watercolor Kit, which is a set of watercolor graphics
• 40 Flex Line Backgrounds, which can be used as a background for your website or as a background for images on a cover
• Watercolor Galaxy Image Set, which is particularly nice in my opinion
• 30% Off Merry Christmas Set. Don’t let the 30% portion of the title throw you off, this is a nice set of Christmas graphics for cards or any other use (and it’s a full set)
• Fantastic Fruit, which is a hand-drawn vector set of fruits

Hey, it looks like I get to pick up another lemon this week with Fantastic Fruits…and it’s the good kind of lemon!

Every Monday, you can get your free set of six resources from this link: creativemarket.com/free-goods (opens in a new window or tab)