Book Marketing: Covers, Colors And Branding

In our first authors’ writing group meeting this year we discussed book marketing, as well as websites, branding, and colors.

Several authors were planning their covers for upcoming releases, and a couple of questions came up:

• What are the best colors for book marketing?
• How do you find great colors for a cover?

Book marketing: branding with colors

Colors are an easy way to brand your website, as well as your covers. It’s a struggle however. Your designer needs you to decide on colors, and you may even create a mood board, but the consensus of our group was that choosing colors is hard, and mood boards don’t help much.

You need tools. Luckily, members shared some excellent tools which can help.

Color tools: easy tools you can use today

Adobe Colors is one of my favorite tools.

You can use it to choose colors for a book cover, your website — or for anything else.

In the image above, you can see Adobe’s color wheel, which helps you to choose colors you love — and they’ll match too. Use the color wheel to send your designer the exact HEX or RGB numbers of the colors you want.

You can even choose colors from an image you have.

Use Adobe Colors to select colors from an image

In the image above, I’ve imported a book cover into Adobe Colors so that I can choose colors from the cover, and save them. You can import images from anywhere.

You can even import from photographs you’ve taken on your phone. Adobe Capture CC is an amazing tool which uses your phone’s camera to capture images, colors, and fonts from anywhere.

One of the members of our group is a watercolor artist, and snapped one of her paintings into Adobe Capture, so that her designer could use the painting to create a cover for her upcoming release.

Choose from artists’ palettes for book marketing

Kuler is now Adobe Kuler, and you can choose from the most popular color palettes uploaded by artists and designers.

The above image shows the most popular palettes uploaded in the past 30 days.

Book marketing tip: revamp your older covers to reflect your brand

Here’s a tip from one of our members. After publishing several novels, and launching a new series, she’s had the covers of her published books redone.

She says: “Readers have thanked me, because they weren’t aware of my older books. Sales have gone up.”

Have you got older books which could do with a makeover?