River City Heroes Teasers

My first paid job! Author Elle Rush confessed to me that she hates doing teasers, and since I love doing them it's a match made in heaven. 

This series is in the romantic suspense genre, so I had to adjust the fonts to suit. No flowery or light fonts would work. If you need advice on what font goes with what genre (like wine and dinner!) Derek Murphy has put together a visual list for you. I used the Thriller category and found that the fonts were all solid and upright. In addition, when I researched suspense teasers and covers, the vibe was dark and mysterious. 

You can always adjust the photo you choose, by darkening and blurring it to get the right look. You can see how cheerful the original stock photo was. I chose it because the heroine is a blonde reporter, so I wanted someone doing journalism work. This was as close as I could get.

I both darkened and blurred the photo. This is easy to do in Canva. The mood of photos is important. The changes I made increase the mystery and give a feeling of night, being alone. The added benefit of darkening is that it makes your words pop. To get the most "word pop," use light or warm colours (yellow, red, blue) for the font. Warm colours advance while cool colours (blue, purple, green) recede. In this case, I added a drop shadow of black to compensate for the places where the background was light. Instead of quotes, we used descriptive text.

Again, I tried to maintain common elements between each teaser: same font, same colours, same layout. For the colours, I picked colours out of the cover: light silver grey font, rusty orange from the cityscape. I took the red in Capture from the calendar image. The fewer new elements you use in a teaser, the better. Two or three fonts, max. Stay in the colour palette of your cover or image.  Don't forget that the viewer can see the cover too and will take information from that.

What do you think? Suspenseful? Exciting? Would you like to try one of Elle's books?