Winning Hard

I got an urgent request from Lisa B. Kamps who is—surprise, surprise—a hockey romance writer. We all hang out in teams in case you were wondering. She needed some teasers for her new book launch. And the situation was urgent because her regular designer lives in Puerto Rico and still doesn't have proper electricity and internet. Let me hop on my soapbox to say that it's shocking that after two-plus months, the situation is still in crisis. Electrical power is a basic need.

Okay, off the soapbox now. Lisa's request is a big challenge because she already has a strong visual brand and a great designer who does her covers as well as her graphics. Here's one of her current teasers:

 I studied Lisa's teasers to figure out what they had in common and came up with the following:

• soft, diffuse images
• use of book cover fonts but not book covers themselves
• mixed fonts for emphasis

Diffuse Images

Fading your images is a great way to make your words pop over a complicated image. To fade an image, just find the Transparency adjuster on your image and play with it. For most images in this series, I went to about 75% transparency, but some require more. You want to see the image and the text. For this one, the transparency went all the way down to 27%. Is that like having the speakers go up to eleven?

Book cover fonts

If your designer does your graphics, then this step is easy-peasy. But if you do your own graphics, it's more challenging. Here is Lisa's cover:

The options to get graphics that mimic your cover fonts are:

- get your cover designer to give you a graphic of the book title with a transparent background. Then you can plunk it into your teasers and size it up and down. Your designer may charge you extra for this because it's more work.

- buy the same fonts as your designer uses, and use them in your graphics. This would work in Photoshop or with paid versions of Canva and PicMonkey.

- try to mimic the title/author fonts, which I did here. Not a perfect match for sure, but it has a similar feel. 

- Also, use the same title/author fonts for each teaser. This will remind readers that it's the same book and hopefully remind them to buy it.

Mixed fonts for emphasis

Lisa, who is extremely organized, supplied me with multiple quotes (as well as her logo, cover, and the teaser examples I requested!) Regular readers of the blog know that I am all for short quotes, but I was intrigued to see that Lisa's designer regularly uses long quotes with the soft-focus backgrounds. An ability to use long quotes that give readers a real insight into the book, or remind readers what they like about an author's books.

I'm sure you've seen mixed fonts before, it's when you emphasize a certain phrase or word with a different font or colour. The idea is that when readers skim, the key words will pop out at them. But as with any graphic technique, you have to watch out or risk ending up with something that looks like a ransom note.

If you're looking for examples of fonts that look good together, there are a couple of sites to check out. Try Font Pair  or Typ.io. You can just have a look around and educate your eye. To date, I've recommended using only one or two fonts per teaser, but again Lisa's teasers feature several different fonts. Clearly, we can learn a lot from professionals!

So here are rest of the teasers I did for Lisa. While the book and author fonts remain the same, pretty much everything else changes. To emphasize key phrases, I used a variety of methods: 

• highlighting words with colour 
• increasing size of text (you'll have to create a separate text line for this in Canva.)
• changing font. Cursive fonts are more intimate and romantic.
• highlighting text with a background box. (Add a box from Elements, resize it, put it behind the text,  and then make it transparent.)
• spacing lines or isolating words. 

And in the end, Lisa loved all the teasers! If you like them too, you may enjoy Lisa's new book about a female hockey team. The only happier ending would be if the power was restored in Puerto Rico. Having studied the graphics created by Jay Ahern, Lisa's designer, I think she does a great job. Since she'll be looking for work once life gets back to normal, I would suggest checking out her designs and hiring her to do your complicated graphics projects. But try to do the simple ones yourself, that's why we're here!

Ideas to steal:
Adding transparency to photos.
Mixing fonts for emphasis.


The next post will be the last one of the year (sad trombone) but it will be a doozy. I'm giving you a step-by-step guide to making a teaser. #authorgraphicsfordummies #notcallingyouadummy #Ithinkyoureawesome #butdesignchallenged