Tania Arpa

Author: tashaloo

  • How A Book Cover Happens: Better at Weddings Than You

    Fun fact: for years, I had always wanted to use this concept for a book cover. What I had in mind was a single figure of a woman with her back to the camera. Everything was in black and white, except for the woman’s red dress.

  • The Lockdown Journal

    It’s called The Lockdown Journal. This is where I talk about what it’s like being an indie creator during the current COVID-19 pandemic. The show will be on a limited run — one hopes this pandemic doesn’t last all year — and will have a new episode every Wednesday.

  • VIDEO: Cropping Tutorial (Photoshop)

    So, like so many of us, I’ve been stressed out by recent events. My productivity has gone down so much it’s not even funny. So I decided to do something new instead of just staring at the laptop screen for hours.

  • A Japanese bookshop in Hong Kong

    On a recent trip to Hong Kong, my traveling companions and I found a lovely shop Japanese bookshop. As a moderate consumer of Japanese TV shows, Japanese movies and the occasional j-rock band, I felt duty-bound to check it out.

  • 5 Signs Your Website is Outdated

    A business website is like your Facebook profile photo — you don’t want it to make you look old. And unlike getting plastic surgery for yourself, no one will judge you for giving your website a facelift. I generally think people ought to do whatever they want to their faces so long as they hire…

  • Where I write a ridiculously long post explaining why your company or blog needs a Mailing List

    Mailing lists continue to be an effective marketing tool for companies and websites. Yes, marketing on social media sites are quite popular (and I recommend you do that too), your reach is entirely dependent on their terms. For instance, Facebook alone decides whether or not a person sees your company page updates on their feed.…

  • Book Design: Playing Autumn by Mina V. Esguerra

    I’ve actually done a cover for this story before. It was for the original, novella-length version of Playing Autumn, which was included in a limited-run romance anthology, and published as a limited-run print edition. The new version is a novel, and the romance is a bit steamier. So Mina asked me to do a “spicier”…

  • Web design: Responsive design for websites — is it for you?

    Too many websites these days (including a couple of mine!) are stuck in the days before mobile devices became a thing. And by “became a thing”, I mean it became a popular choice of machine to view websites on.