I’m intimidated by Instagram Stories.

Whenever I create one on my phone for my personal or Build Book Buzz Instagram account, I spend too much time playing around with options and figuring out which ones might work best.

When the Young People do it, they create something interesting and engaging in just a few minutes. Me? At least 15 minutes. At. Least.

So, with the goal of getting better at this, I went looking for how-to information. I found videos, guides, templates, tools, and author examples.

If they help me, they might help you, right? So here are links to the information I found that was most helpful to me. I hope some of it helps you, too.

How-to articles

If you like to learn by reading step-by-step instructions, you’ll appreciate these articles.

Instagram Stories: What They Are and How to Make One Like a Pro

HubSpot is one of my go-to sites for marketing information, and the company didn’t disappoint with this step-by-step tutorial. It’s written for a business audience, but don’t let that stop you. Authorship is a business, so this is a good fit for you.

Within the article, Hubspot links to Instagram Story templates you can download after completing the opt-in form. I’ve included that information below, in the “tools” section of this article.

How to create an Instagram Story

Mashable’s instructions are geared to personal, rather than business, Instagram accounts, but the information still applies. If you have two Instagram accounts – personal and author – it’s best to practice with your personal account, anyway.

Instagram Stories 101: Our Guide to Stickers, Effects, Key Settings and More

Don’t let the “Making an Insta Story is a lot like Snapchat” subhead in this CNET article scare you off (because, really, are you a big Snapchat user?). There are some good details in this one.

How-to videos

I usually prefer to learn how to do something by reading an article or a book, but in this case, I get more from video. It helps me to see cause and effect in quasi-real time.

How to Make Instagram Stories – Tips & Tricks

This Techboomers video is broken into two parts. One is for novices, the other is for more experienced Story creators. At the start of the video, the instructor tells you where on the timeline you’ll find advanced instructions for adding more bells and whistles to your Stories.

I like that this one shows the process without a distracting human on screen.

How to Easily Create Attractive Instagram Stories

Speaking of distracting humans, that’s what you’ll find on this video from Social Media Examiner, another excellent source of marketing information.

While I found the presenter’s effervescence a bit overwhelming, she does a great job of walking us through this in a way that’s clear and understandable. And I love the time-saving and mistake-preventing tips in her instruction.

Be sure to watch this one if videos help you.

Tools

I love any tool that takes me through a process that’s new or intimidating to me. I found a couple that I think you’ll like as much as I do.

VistaCreate

VistaCreate offers a “point-and-click” design tool. The best news (for me, anyway), is that you can use it on a computer, not just a phone. That’s music to my boomer ears.

Create a free account, then get started. The site walks you through the process step-by-step, starting with selecting a template from its collection. This is the first tool I’m going to use for Build Book Buzz.

Canva’s Instagram Story Creator

If you already use Canva, you know that it starts with a template. In addition to linking to templates, this Canva link gives you an overview of all the options you can use to create Stories there .

I like using Canva, so after I’ve created a few with VistaCreate, I’m going to try Canva, too.

Instagram for Business Kit

I’ve downloaded several free templates for different types of content from Hubspot before, so I wasn’t surprised to see the company offers them for Instagram Stories, too.

It has partnered with Talkwalker (I use its version of Google Alerts) to create an “Instagram for Business Kit” mentioned above. When you download that, the system takes you to another page where you can also download eight Instagram Stories templates and 14 post templates.

Author examples and ideas

How Authors Use Instagram Stories to Connect with Readers

BookBub lists 16 Story content ideas with examples of each. Ideas include sharing sneak peeks of an upcoming book and asking for reader opinions.

I also recommend subscribing to the BookBub Partners Blog (partners = authors). You’ll receive an email every time there’s a new article.

Instagram Stories for Writers

In addition to sharing visual examples, writer Susan Shiney links to the Instagram accounts of several author Instagram accounts that she admires.

100 Instagram Story Ideas for Authors

Self-publishing services provider Shayla Raquel lists 100 ideas broken down into nine categories. Bookmark this link and you’ll never be at a loss for ideas.

My commitment

In order to get better at creating Instagram Stories, I need to create more of them.

So, I’m committing today to creating at least one Story a week for my Build Book Buzz account. I’ll create some from my phone and I’ll use some of the tools listed here, too.

Want to join me? 

If you want to join me, drop a link to your author account in the comments so I can follow you. Tell us what you’ll commit to.

It’s not something I look forward to, and that’s not just because good hair days don’t come around very often.

It’s because:

• I don’t like appearing on camera (see reference to good hair days above)
• I’m not as familiar as I’d like to be with the technology involved

But I know that because YouTube is the second most popular search engine, I need to load more videos into the Build Book Buzz YouTube channel. This will help more authors discover the free book marketing tips and advice I offer on this site and in the free Build Book Buzz newsletter.

Fortunately, you and I can create videos without appearing on camera — just create a  video with PowerPoint instead, using your slides as the basis of your video.

To help anyone who is just as new at this as I am, I’m sharing the steps I took to create this PowerPoint-based video that I just uploaded. I hope it saves you time, since you’re spared all of the Googling I did to figure out how to do something that’s new to me.

Here’s the video; scroll down for the how-to:

Start with a PowerPoint presentation

With the help of Google, I discovered that if you’ve got PowerPoint 2010, you can save your presentation file in a video format and work with that. I don’t, so I needed Plan B.

I knew that Windows Live Movie Maker, the free software I use that was pre-installed on my computer, lets me create a video from pictures/images, so I looked in the “save as” options in my PowerPoint file to see if I could save it in JPEG (image) format.

Yes!

That arrow is pointing to a drop-down menu that lets you save the file in many different formats. I selected “JPEG File Interchange Format.” When I selected “save,” a new window popped up, asking me, “Do you want to export every slide in the presentation or only the current slide?” I selected “Every slide” from the three options.

That step created a new folder with each slide as a JPEG image. I added them into my new video file in Movie Maker by selecting “add videos and photos” from the “home” tab.

With the images in place, I played around with the software’s auto movie themes to see which one I liked the most. The option I selected added a “slide” at the beginning (the “Build Book Buzz” text that moves across my first PPT slide as the video starts) and three slides at the end for production credits. I could have deleted those extra slides at the end, but I left them in because just between us, adding silly stuff for the end credits is my favorite part of video-making.

How to add narration

With the video portion done pretty quickly, I was ready to add narration. I knew I had to create and add an audio file, but didn’t know how, so I turned to Google again. I found a super helpful video that showed me how to find the computer’s recorder software and then how it use it. (Tip: It’s as easy as pressing the “start” button.)

The instructions told me to type “sound recorder” into the search box. Bam! There it was! Clicking on the search results brought up the recorder software.

To make sure my audio is good, I always use an external microphone, an Audio-Technica ATR-3350 Lavalier Omnidirectional Condenser Microphone. I plugged it in to the side, turned it on, and practiced my narration by speaking while the video ran through in “view/preview full screen” mode.

The video moved too quickly, so I had to adjust the settings so that each image stayed on the screen longer. The default was 7 seconds; I bumped each one up to 12.5 and that seemed to be good enough.

After a few more practice narrations while the video moved through, I was ready to record it with the sound recorder. It wasn’t perfect, but I would have been working on it all day if perfection was the goal. Some days, good is good enough.

I added my recorded narration to the video by going to the “home” screen, selecting “add music” from the toolbar, and selecting the audio file. It was really that simple.

I played the file to make sure audio and video were in sync, saved the file, and uploaded it to my YouTube channel.

I hope this level of detail helps anyone who had the same questions I had. So now it’s my turn to ask a question:

What’s your best video production tip for newbies? What tip can you offer that might either save us time, or improve our video quality?