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.
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?
A Regency time travel romance... What if you could escape across time, and find your soulmate?
Pure evil dispatches gorgeous Tara Ballantine across the centuries, to Regency England. Tara lands on Adam Jervoise, Earl of Hillingworth -- literally -- as he's riding through a bluebell wood.
Hillingworth is handsome, rich, and kind. He's also set to propose to an heiress.
When Tara realizes that she's falling in love with the earl, she fights the feeling.
At 24, not only is Molly Ballantine stunning, she has two sisters she loves, and a wonderful career. Then her eldest sister Tara vanishes, and her life disintegrates.
Molly's life is about to become even more chaotic. She wakes up in a brothel with a man who's too good-looking for her peace of mind.
22-year-old Priscilla Ballantine wakes up 200 years in the past, naked in the arms of handsome aristocrat, and master spy, Dominick de Roche, Lord Bellemieux. Priscilla's accused of spying, and is in danger of summary execution. She can't help thinking that she wouldn't be in such a mess if Dominick de Roche hadn't mistaken her for one of his contacts...
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