Promotional designs to sell your book

Along with having a good book cover for your work, authors should also think about the promotional designs they are going to need to help sell their book to a larger audience. When you look at current trends, self-publishing continues to grow and as such, every day there is more than 4,000 new indie books being released.

What this means for an individual self-publishing author is that you must do more to reach your audience.

To be fair, most authors appreciate this and have plans in place on how to reach readers once their book is live (and in many cases, prior to launch too). These plans may include building a website, starting social media campaigns, organizing advertising on Amazon and other book sellers, along with launch parties and book signings (however, the in-person events are a little quieter due to the pandemic).

So, what materials will you need?

Well apart from a JPEG of your book’s cover, 3D renderings are a good place to begin, these give a more tangible view of your book to an audience and allow you to place the image into a multitude of backgrounds (make sure you have a PNG version of your 3D image for this). You can use them in social media posts, upon your website and even in flyers or on printed bookmarks.

Next would be banners for your social media, for your profile pages they can project a consistent and professional image for you as an author. Most banners will either show just your current book, or if you have a series of books, they could show all of the titles you have. The main thing here is to keep them consistent, so that the banner you have for Facebook relates to the one you use on Twitter.
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These banners for social media can also be adapted for use on your author website, the dimensions will need to be adjusted, but the layout and feel of the design can be similar, and again, it will give both a professional and consistent view. 

​Instagram is another very popular social media platform for authors and one which can really help you connect with new and existing readers. But as it is image based, you will need to have some good images to highlight your work. Using your 3D renderings here can be great and if you get creative with the backgrounds, you can really capture your reader’s imagination. 

Along with standard banners you can also look at using a GIF, this is normally a banner with some animation to it which when posted upon your Facebook page or Twitter feed can really help your post to stand out among the constant stream of other posts. Leading on from GIFs would be author promotional video’s, these can also be a great way to get noticed, but they can be very expensive to have created.
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If you are having a book signing or launch party, then having flyers, bookmarks, posters and even T-shirts and mugs created are great options, we have seen authors get very creative with where their book cover and details have been placed. Most printers such as Vista print, offer so much in the way of promotional designs that you can find a gimmick which will help you to stick out and get readers to remember you