You Know What They Say About Books and Covers
What’s in an Image?
A Brand by any other name…
If you read my last couple of articles you’ll know I’m an Aussie author living in Texas and trying to figure out how to launch her career.
So much of anything to do with marketing is about image. Which is going to be a bit rough for me since I’m terrible at design and have no sense of what is, as the kids say, hip.
I mean, jeans and a t-shirt is fancy for me. Because of the jeans. Normally I wear trackies (or sweatpants for my American friends). So when you tell me that I need to cultivate a brand image and incorporate that into my social media posts and I break out in a cold sweat and don’t listen to whatever else you tell me I’m meant to be doing.
Branding is everything
Everything I read is telling me to get a professional headshot to use across the board, because people like to see who they’re dealing with.
So naturally I made a logo with one of my dog’s photos and I use that instead. I then added a merch shop to my website, mainly because I wanted a mug with Smug Pom on it. Did I mention I’m awesome at business? But I love my mug, so it was totally worth the time I spent on that instead of writing…
Anyhoo, I’ve carried that over onto my social media. All the experts agree that it’s important to balance your social media so that all your posts aren’t about asking people to do something for you. Cause that would be annoying, and why would you want to follow that page?
As I mentioned before, I’ve put up a couple of posts (and then boosted them) encouraging people to sign up to my newsletter to download Regent, my prequel novella. So to balance that out, I’ve put up a few posts about me and my life. Which has naturally translated into a bunch of pictures of my dogs.
I still have no followers — which is weird, cause my dogs are cute — but despite Facebook encouraging me to pay to boost those posts as well, I’ve decided to leave it for now. I’ll keep posting, but I can’t imagine anyone’s going to want to follow me until they’ve read at least the novella, but more likely the first book in the series (Royal). Which they will totes love. (I hope. Gulp.)
Home renovations
In my research I’ve noticed that a lot of people refer to your website as your ‘home on the web’. I like this analogy because I made my own website and I feel like it looks about as good as if I made my own home.
So my next project (in amongst everything else) is to clean up the website a bit. I’m not talking overhaul, more tinkering here and there. For my overall colour scheme, I’ve gone for the aesthetic of black and white (‘cause as I said, designally challenged), and then I added fancy backgrounds with colours that match the relevant book cover.
I also built a landing page for Regent, my prequel novella. Because I remembered that the course I’m following (Mark Dawson’s Launchpad) suggested it’s best to send people somewhere they won’t get distracted from signing up.
Previously I had people coming to my homepage, so they had to then scroll and find the form, and there wasn’t even a picture or description of the book they were getting on that page. Big thank you to the people who still signed up!
So I made a page that looked like this:
I’m sure you have frogs living in your backyard that could do better. But at least now it’s about the book they can get and the form to fill out is right there.
I designed an ad for Facebook that I’m currently trialling, and so I found a different background for this page that ties in with what they would have clicked on to get here. Now it looks like this:
I think it looks a bit better. But my home page looks more similar to the first landing page. It’s currently spruiking Royal, which has a blue cover, and so the background is a fancy blue wave thingy. That probably needs a fix too, but I have design fatigue from fixing Regent. Which just means I don’t know what to do with the home page just yet.
Sigh. For now, I’ll just keep testing and adjusting. Maybe I’ll design a new Facebook ad and that will inspire a change again!
Tune in next time for a subscriber update!
Cheers, K.T.
