Creating great book promotion graphics

I love Canva. I use it for the graphics I create for my own social media channels, I use it on behalf of publishers to help them create graphics for social media or advertisting, and I use it on behalf of authors, creating templates for them to use.

It’s a ‘freemium’ tool (free with a paid option) that I happily pay for every single year because I use it nearly every day. This is not an ad for Canva. (Although, if you’re reading, Canva, and want me to do some ads for you, I’m open to it – I love you!).

What I love about it is that it’s designed to be really easy to use for non graphic designers (I am not a graphic designer). That being said, it still takes a bit of getting used to, and I’ve seen some *not great* book promotion graphics in my time. If you’re creating your own book promotion images, a) sign up for Canva Mastery for Authors (this IS an ad for that), and b) have a read below of my top tips for creating strong graphics…

1/ Do your research

Start a folder on your computer or phone that you can save visuals into. Then, when you see a great book marketing asset (or, frankly, an image or video of any sort that you like the look or feel of), take a screengrab and pop it into the folder. You could also keep a note on your phone (I like Google Keep, as it syncs between all my devices, but there are lots out there), with links to great videos, ads or anything you spot that inspires you.

Want someone else to do this for you? Sam has actually pulled together a huge archive of creative resources for you to browse, for free, where you can see what publishers and other authors are doing, and get some inspiration.

2/Cut your text right back

If you want to share a review, pull out one key line. If you have a tagline to share, make sure it’s as tight as possible. If you want to share the tropes / key themes of your book, cut them back to one or max two words each. If you want to share tips or learnings or advice, stick to one point per image and share it as a carousel, instead of a single image with tons of text on it.

Often, when we create graphics, we make them on our desktop, and Canva zooms in a bit so we’re often looking at them 2x-3x the size that they will end up being on a phone. Try to remember how the end viewer will be seeing your graphics, and make sure that someone who is casually scrolling their phone can immediately read the text you have shared.

Ask yourself: What is the one key takeaway you want someone to get from this graphic?

3/ Use legible fonts

Sticking with the ‘make sure people can read it’ theme, use legible fonts. I love a handwriting font, but most of them are either clearly not real handwriting or quite hard to read. If you want to use a handwritten font for any of your text, keep it to a bare minimum and make sure that you can read it easily, without letters being easily confused for other letters.

For example, in one video I recorded for the Canva Mastery for Authors course, I was trying to find a font to match the font the designer had used on the cover. I found one that looked similar, but all the ‘L’s looked like ‘B’s. Not ideal, and really not a great user experience, even though it looked pretty. These graphics are useless unless people can actually read what they say.

I CAN read all of these, but some of them tax my brain a bit more than others!

4/ Make use of the book cover

If you are traditionally published, your publisher will have paid an awesome designer to create your cover. If you are are self-published, you’ll hopefully have paid a great designer to do it, or you’ve spent hours looking at market trends, analysing them and applying them to your own cover design.

Either way – your book cover is an amazing visual asset that many businesses do not have. Please use it. You can create super easy 3D mockups of your book here, or use one of the many mockup templates Canva has in its image banks.

As well as using the actual cover, pull elements from the background to use in your designs. What colours are featured on the cover? Can you use that in your background or in the font colours you choose? What images are present on the cover? Can you use these in some way on your graphics? For example, in one of the tutorials I did within the Canva Mastery for Authors training, the image had some confetti in the background. I searched Canva for confetti, found a visual that I liked the look of, and added that to the asset I created.

5/ Make sure that you have the right to use any photography you use

This includes imagery from the cover itself. Sometimes, stock images are used on book covers, and those images are only usable within the exact context of the cover itself. Speak to your designer or publisher to see whether you are able to use individual elements from the cover. There have been only very few incidents that I can think of in my career where it hasn’t been ok to use elements from the cover in graphics, but it’s always worth checking. It’s just about the rights that have been acquired when the illustration or photograph was purchased.

On the other hand, never ever (ever) Google an image and use what you find off a search engine’s results. I have heard of multiple incidences of authors, publishers and other organisations being approached be a collections agency representing somewhere like Getty Images, where an image has been copied from Google search results and used in the background of a book promo image. Please don’t do this.

Places like Canva, Adobe Express, Unsplash and more all have images and graphic elements that are usable within the public domain, so start with those.

6/ Create a wide range of options

Even if you ignore the various whims of the social media algorithms out there (which I recommend, life’s too short), different people respond differently to different images, and some people respond better to video than static imagery.

With that in mind, I think it’s always good to create a wide range of options of graphics. This gives you a bank of imagery to choose from when you want to share your book cover, which can then help make it easier for you to share something about your book or your writing journey, because you know the image is already taken care of.

Some different ideas for images could include:

Book + tagline (create multiple of these!)
Book + price
Book + release date (or share a countdown to publication)
Book + reader review
Book + tropes / key themes from the book
Lifestyle image of book in a relevant background
Photography of the book
Teaser trailer pulling the hook out into a video
Longer, more cinematic trailer pulling out hook + reviews

And that’s just for starters. Don’t forget to access the free Creative Archive for tons of inspiration, then sign up for the Canva Mastery for Authors training to improve your Canva skills and start making your own versions!

7/ These graphics are PART of your content plan, not the whole thing

Having great images and videos is incredibly useful to reinforce to anyone who comes to your author platform that you have a book, this is the book, this is why they should love it. But the images / videos themselves only tell one part of the story.

Where you share images promoting your book, consider how you can use the caption to give people more of an insight into the book, your writing, your life as an author, your challenges, your wins. Share photographs of you and videos of you chatting about life beyond the books. Please don’t just share sales message after sales message and expect to get people lining up to buy from you.

If you’d like help coming up with your content strategy, you can start with this post, or you can drop me an email for one-to-one support. I love to help stuck or overwhelmed authors review what they are doing and come up with a better plan to connect with their readers.

So – those are my tips. What are yours? Are you a pro at using Canva? What mistakes do you see authors doing that you wish you could share with them? Are there other areas that you struggle with that you’d like us to add tutorial videos on? Is there anything you’d like to add to the above? I’d love to hear your thoughts!