Ally Aldridge My Books, Ocean Heart, Publishing, The Soul Heart Series, Tips, Writing

How I did my cover reveal

I couldn’t wait to show off my cover, and it was the first real piece of marketing I paid for. That’s right, your cover is an important part of selling your book.

Don’t judge a book by it’s cover…

A book with an eye catching cover will naturally attract more attention. It also should communicate what the book is about, so your ideal reader picks it up.

DIY Cover

It’s fine to make your cover yourself. But, if you do make sure you have permission to use any images, fonts, or any other element in your design. You may need to buy certain licences from the creator to use them.

If you want to design your own cover, check out author Elexis Bell’s blog post series on the topic:

Step 1: Creating a cover

Step 2: Creating a cover

Step 3: Creating a cover

Professional Cover

Commissioning a professional can ensure you make the right impact. Check their portfolio and testimonies to see if they are right for your book. You may find it useful to check out my post on how I found my cover designer.

Cover Reveal Images

You will need to prepare the images for the cover reveal. My Cover Designer included a social media package which included social media banners, 3D Renders and an IG version.

Ocean Heart – IG Social Media Image

The 3D Renders have been so useful. I often add them to various social media posts I’ve made. I’d highly recommend them.

3D Render

I am fortunate that my cover designer created me 3D renders of my paperback and my eBook. However, if you don’t have that privilege, here are some ways you can obtain one.

  • BookBrush helps authors to create images to market their books, including 3D renders. You can try it for free or pay for more options.
  • DIY Book helps indie authors create covers and has a tool to easily create 3D Renders.

Stock image

You may want to utilise a stock image within your social media post. Make sure you have permission to use it. Here are my favourite sites:

  • Unsplash is a resource of images by photographers made available for free.
  • Pixabay is another great resource for free images.

I like searching for flat-lays I can add my book and text to.

Decide on a date

There is a lot of division on when to do your cover reveal. What it boils down to is personal preference.

One successful author recommend 6 months, or as soon as possible. Another, suggested 3 months at most, as they struggled to keep the momentum going. A lot of authors said only a month.

I started mine during the 1st week of September, with the full reveal on 7th September. My book was on preorder on 1st October, and released on 1st December. This worked well from me.

Cover Reveal Teaser

Cover Reveal Teasers

You should have already been talking about your book and generating interest. As your cover reveal approaches you want to incite interest. You can capture peoples curiosity with a partial reveal, announcing the date you will reveal all…

How I created my partial reveal pics…

I created mine by using a torn paper image from Unsplash.

I edited the image in a free app called Adobe Photoshop Mix . I cut out the part of the image where I wanted my book to show through.

I uploaded the cut out image and my cover to Canva. Canva is my favourite app for creating Social Media posts. It was here that I added the text.

If you have Book Brush, you can use their templates to achieve something similar. Personally, I prefer Canva as I have more freedom to do what I want. However, if you are stuck how to start, you might find Book Brush easier as the templates are specifically for authors.

Of course, you could achieve a similar affect by wrapping your book in paper and tearing a teaser rip in the paper. Then take a nice photo. You may still wish to use an app like Canva to add text.

Cover Reveal Team

You can ask friends, family, and/or fans to support you by sharing, liking, and/or commenting on your reveal pic. The more engagement the pic gets, the better it will perform in the algorithm.

Make sure the post is public and that you use hashtags your ideal reader follows. It’s okay to tag the book title but it’s unlikely anyone will be following that hashtag yet, so choose ones that describe the themes and genre of the book.

I was really fortunate that a number of my IG followers were willing to share my cover to their IG stories and I had loads of lovely comments on my post.

If you don’t have anyone to help, you can pay for a cover reveal service. On 1st Nov, I used Xpresso Book Tours for a Book Blitz and was really impressed by how many signed up. They also provide a cover reveal service which I’m sure would be just as good.

Cover Reveal Image

You need a nice picture of your book for social media.

  • Manually: Again, you can do this manually by taking a nice picture of the physical book.
  • Digitally: I didn’t have a physical copy so I created my image digitally.

I mainly searched Unsplash for flat lays, books, beach, ocean, mermaid, and any other theme relating to my book. I then edited it in Canva.

Keep up the momentum…

Once you have done the cover reveal, you must keep up the momentum until release (and beyond).

It’s a waste of your time to get everyone excited about your book and then let them forget. Once you’ve shown off your gorgeous book, got them excited, you need to keep reminding them it’s coming. Get then to sign up to your news letter, and you may want to have a preorder option.

It can help to set aside a day to come up with content ideas. Then, schedule the content ahead of time so you can space it out and consistently post. Here are some good apps for this:

  • Preview: This app is free and enables you to see how your IG content will look on your feed. You can schedule post reminders or to post automatically.
  • Facebook Business Suite: It’s free to use and enables you to schedule posts to FB, IG and Twitter.
  • Planoly: The free plan enables you to schedule to two platforms for free. I paid for extra features during my launch month in Nov, so I could schedule videos.
  • Hootsuite: The free plan enables you to schedule posts to FB, IG and Twitter. You can pay for more features.
  • Later: Allows you to schedule posts to Instagram.
  • IFTTT: A useful app for sharing posts you posted on one platform, to another.

I also regularly schedule my blog posts. There’s no reason you can’t do your cover reveal on your blog. You want to spread the word so why not on all your social media platforms.

Ocean Heart Gallery

The first image, with the shells, candle and yellow blanket is one I took of my physical book on my bathroom floor. The others, I created in Canva using images from Unsplash.

I added some of these to my Facebook group album and told my street team and blog tour team, they were welcome to use them. Having a bank of images of my book enabled me to keep posting fresh content to IG, in the lead up to my book launch.

I hope you found my cover reveal experience useful. I’d love to hear your thoughts and what worked for you.

[kofi]

Redfae Bookshop is my Affiliate Bookshop.org Shop Link.

You may also enjoy:

The Making of The Blurb

How I chose my cover designer

The Benefits of Having a Formatter

The Process of Publishing a Novel (Step 1)

Ally Aldridge Blogging, Software, Uncategorized, Writing

Create with Canva Beginners Course Review

What is Canva?

I must confess I am in love with Canva and been using it for a few months.  I started off using it on my laptop and then I discovered there is an app.  Now I can use it anywhere.

Canva helps you create visually effective images for a wide host of reasons.  I used it a lot to create my blog titles and images for tweets and Instagram.  I also have used it to create a party invitation for my son’s birthday party.  I discovered the site via Wattpad when looking for software to create a novel cover.

Here are some examples of what I have created:

What is Create with Canva?

This company is currently offering a free beginners course for people that want to get better at using Canva.  They also have a resources page with useful information and recommendations for blog host sites and other courses you can pay for like how to earn from you blog with affiliate marketing.

Free Beginners Course

I found the course via Twitter and enrolled.  There are five lessons and each lesson is delivered daily to your inbox.  The lessons are bitesize YouTube videos and just 5 minutes long.  You can join their Facebook page to have access to the course in full right away.  Here is what I think:

Dashboard tour: 

This is sent out with the ‘welcome’ email and is an introduction to Canva.

Lesson One: Working with templates, text and color

This covers the basis of using the templates on Canva.  How to amend the template and colour theme.  How to edit the text, add more text and resize.  I thought I knew most of this simply from using the site but they did teach me a new trick – spacing!  Everything in this class used the free features in Canva.

Lesson Two: Working with images in Canva and uploading your own images

This was about using the images in Canva and how to add your own.  Again, I thought I had this sussed but they taught me some new tricks.  I make use of the free images in Canva (there is a vast collection), however, I didn’t know that some of the free images are cropped and you can change the cropped area and use some of the hidden parts of the picture!  There were other tricks they taught that I expect I’ll be making use of in the near future.

Lesson Three: Working with free photos, frames and grids

This lesson started by introducing collages – a feature I have never considered using (seriously missing out).  They taught us how to use different photo layouts from scratch and for Instagram.  Finished with how to use and edit backgrounds.

Lesson Four: Working with shapes, lines, illustrations and icons

This started off nice and simple with adding elements to your design.  I haven’t really used this part of Canva and through watching the lesson I saw how useful they can be.  Gillian also covered some useful time saving short cut keys and how to group objects.

Lesson Five: Getting organized in Canva, creating templates and batch producing designs

This was incredibly useful and I haven’t used any of the features covered.  I learnt how to create a brand theme in Canva (rather than saving notes on my phone), how to sort my files in folders on Canva and how to make a batch of designs.

Would I recommend the course?

Yes.  It starts of quite easy so it is suitable for absolute beginners. It also is likely to uncover a trick that you haven’t worked out on your own, enabling you to get even more out of Canva.

When I signed up, I was worried that it was going to be five lessons telling you why you need to buy the premium service but it didn’t. Every feature I was shown how to use was using the free features available to everyone.

I honestly don’t know how Canva do it. If you haven’t got an account on there you need to go create one.

Presenter – Gillian

The course is presented by a lady named Gillian who has a nice clear voice that is easy to understand and not irritating. You don’t see what she looks like as the video is showing what is happening on the screen.

Links

Canva:  https://www.canva.com/

Create with Canva:  http://www.createwithcanva.com/