I finally figured out what Pinterest is for

Pinterest screenshot. Need to describe a gothic church? There you go.

Every time a new social media network comes along, I resist. I do not need one more thing to occupy my time. For a long time, I felt that way about Pinterest, despite some excellent articles about how authors can use Pinterest.

For example, Heather A. Titus, one of my writing buddies from New Authors Fellowship, has a great collection of Pinterest boards related to her writing and other stuff.

I finally took the plunge when I came home from the ACFW conference with a conference program book full of ads for books. I’ve designed a couple of book covers for myself, and a couple for clients. But since my graphic design training is all from the newspaper business, which is totally different, I know I still have a lot to learn. So I wanted to start collecting book covers.
   
As I flipped through the program book, I thought about clipping the covers I liked and then scanning them, but that seemed like a hassle. And then I thought -- Pinterest.

So there you have it. I now have Pinterest boards for different genres that I can use for design inspiration.

I haven’t started amassing “inspiration” boards for my writing, as Heather has, but I did find another benefit to Pinterest. Just by typing in a single keyword from a novel I’m editing, I was able to get a lot of visual references to help my client develop her settings. I didn’t repin those search results to a new board. I figure I’ll just re-do the search if I need to, because I expect to get a whole new set of results.

This service is useful, but addictive. I can see I’m going to need to monitor my time on it carefully. But it’s worth it.