by Mary Feliz, reprinted with permission
If you’re bored by your own promotions, you’re doing it wrong.
I like a professional look and find design fun, but my design skills and experience are meager. That means I’m apt to waste a lot of time doing it.
I don’t have professional training, but I cut my teeth on early desktop design programs. In the olden days, I used various Adobe tools like PageMaker, InDesign, and Photoshop to create graphics. When I used them all the time and bought the software outright, those programs seemed worth their steep price tags. In the last several years, Adobe moved to a subscription model that prices its software out of reach of most authors, particularly those who are inexperienced designers who don’t need overwhelmingly powerful tools.
Luckily, lots of smaller companies leapt into the breach to offer tailored tools for writers that make it easier than ever to develop high-impact promotions to punch up your social media. How can you make sense of them all? Trial and error is the only way that worked for me. Other people’s recommendations will rely on subjective criteria like personal budget, skills, objectives, and esthetic preferences. For what it’s worth, I offer you a few tools that work well for me and you might find worth checking out.
Warning: None of the examples I show are perfect design. But they are decent representations of what a novice can do with online software.
At the very least, they’ll give you some idea of what’s available and may help you define criteria for selecting tools that work for you.
Here are five tools I use regularly:
Book Brush: A new favorite
Book Brush offers easy-to-use, professional-looking templates for still images and videos. They have a very limited free service that is, essentially, a bait-and-switch come-on to get you to buy their paid service. But the free program is worth trying. If it suits your needs, great. If not, their paid service is moderately priced at $8/month.
What I like: They don’t allow much tinkering with their templates, so it saves time. I’m tireless when it comes to tweaking images and layouts. It also offers more 3D options than other programs.
What I don’t like: Their very limited free service.
Here’s a Twitter post I made with Book Brush…
Canva: Reliable and flexible
Canva is design software nearly as flexible as professional software. Use their stock images and templates to get going quickly, or tailor your own images with your own photos or paid stock photos. The free version is robust. The paid version is just under $10/month.
What I like: Lots of templates. Flexibility to work with outside photos. Ability to tailor images for various social-media uses (Facebook and Twitter headers and posts, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.)
What I don’t like: At times I find it a little fiddly. They offer so many options it’s easy to get overwhelmed. In other words, a time sink. If you want a 3D image of your book, you’ll need to make it outside Canva and import it.
A promotion made with Canva. It should’ve taken about ten minutes, I spent thirty. It would’ve taken even longer if I weren’t familiar with the program:
3D Mockups: Essential
This online service takes your 2D book cover and pops it onto stock templates (jpg or png) of hardcovers, paperbacks, phones, readers, and tablets. If you’re working with Canva or another layout program that doesn’t create 3D images, this service is a must.
What I like: Free. Easy. Fast.
What I don’t like: It’s so simple, there’s nothing to dislike.
Two images made with Canva, demonstrating the difference a 3D image can make:
iStock photo: Pricy, but worth investigating
We all know we can’t pull photos off the internet and use them in our promotions and blogs, right? Images are the creative work of artists like us. We need to respect their legal rights.
For that reason, and the fact that I distrust sites offering free images, I subscribe to iStock photo. Other stock-photo houses offer smaller price tags, but I like the quality, breadth, and search function in the iStock database. Pricing ranges from $29 per month to $99 per month, or you can buy the rights to one photo at a time. Because of the steep price tag, I recommend subscribing when you have a new release and then unsubscribing after you’ve downloaded all the photos you need for your promotion, plus a few more credits to use between releases. I think professional photos help many of my blog posts and social media posts gain more attention.
What I like: Wide range of images that help punch up my blogs and posts and spark ideas for new posts when I’m stumped. Reliable and trusted.
What I don’t like: It’s pricey, but that helps convince me that iStock actually pays photographers for their images.
A Canva image I made using an iStock photo:
Squarespace: Modern, flexible, web templates
I have enough graphics experience to make design a bit of a nightmare for me. I like modern clean designs, hate out-of-balance layouts. Because my skill is limited, I’m frustrated by design tools that don’t make it easy. I looked at a wide variety of website design software. Only Squarespace offered the flexible up-to-date templates that worked for me. Everything else, even easier-to-use programs, seemed old-fashioned and cluttered. My mystery series began in Silicon Valley, so I wanted a design that reflected the cutting edge, or at least avoided looking stuffy. I haven’t looked back. I designed my first website myself and updated it a few months ago with the help of the professionals at Collaborada. I continue to do most of the work myself, though I pay Collaborada to pop in occationally to optimize my SEO (search engine optimization).
What I like: Great customer service with patient advisors. A fresh look.
What I don’t like: A little more complicated than some other web design sites, which is a bit of a hurdle in the beginning. More expensive than Wix and Weebly. Lowest price is $12/month.
Mary Feliz writes the Maggie McDonald Series of cozy mysteries featuring a professional organizer turned amateur detective and her sidekick golden retriever in California’s San Francisco Bay Area.
Address to Die For, the first title in the six-book series, was named a Best Book of 2017 by Kirkus Reviews. All of Mary’s books have graced Amazon’s best-seller list. A resident of Northern California for decades, she now lives on Monterey Bay.