Dallas Comet Teasers

The client—my good friend Jaymee Jacobs—wanted teasers just like mine. With that easy requirement, I blended her pull quotes with sophisticated images of her characters. Jaymee's romances are more cerebral and quiet, and these teasers fit her style.

Let's look at these teasers and see what design ideas you can learn from them.

It's good to have common elements, so that viewers recognize your style. Here the Dallas Common banner is the same, the font for the author name mimics the font on her covers. That's how you develop a personal brand. If you've paid for good covers, you want to echo those covers in your teasers. If possible, find out what font was used for the author name and use that in everything.

For the full series teaser, I used a background to call up Dallas, the home of her fictional hockey team. It's easy to find a good image and then take the colour out of it. Having a neutral background makes the covers pop, but you also want to use an element from the covers. So a sepia background works better than a black and white one would, because the covers have that slightly sepia quality to them.

Just a note on text. It's more effective to use minimal text that a viewer will take in at a glance. While as authors, we may fall in love with our words, too many words overpower the visual and negate it. The best teasers combine text and visuals.