Inside Social Media at Ooligan Press

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Most of us have some sort of feeling about social media. But whether we love it or hate it, there’s no denying that it’s an important way for authors to reach their audiences. At Ooligan Press, we have a set of best practices for supporting our authors and their books through social media channels. As part of the “Inside Ooligan” series, here’s a look at what the Ooligan Press Online Content Manager does for our books in production. As with many elements of book production, it starts earlier than you might expect—about six months before launch. Here are some of the key milestones and tools that we use.

Social Media Strategy Document (SMSD)

The SMSD is the customized go-to social media guide for each book. It is a combination of branding, marketing, communication, and author/illustrator information. The strategy document gives a timeline for different phases of social media engagement (announcements, awareness, pre-orders, launches, and sustainment). It also collects information such as the author’s social media handles, types of posts for each platform, who we think would love to read this book, and ideas for engaging with audiences about the title. We start on this document about six months before publication, and collaborate to keep it updated through the launch phase of the book.

Campaign Schedule

Each book gets its own focused set of posts, which we call a “campaign”. The campaign is coordinated with objectives for each phase as mentioned above. For example, about 120 days before the book’s pub date, we share a well-designed announcement post. That is the prompt to start posting weekly content about the book, to generate interest, and grow its audience in the pre-order months prior to launch. As we get closer to the pub date, the pace of posts will increase and we start looking for posts from the author to share. Some of the tasks are dependent on book milestones—for example, we won’t have an author unboxing video until the printed copies arrive. The timeline for the social media campaign is integrated into the Ooligan Press Production Timeline template, so that the book’s project team and author know what to expect.

Third-Party Scheduler and Bulk Upload Sheets

Ooligan Press has several goals with social media. We want to connect audiences to our books, share information about Portland State University and our program, support and engage with other regional independent publishers, and be a voice for increased representation in publishing. That’s a lot of moving pieces and varied content! So we use a third-party social media scheduler to help us stay on track. We are currently using Buffer, which allows us to schedule content ahead of time, and also provides some key analytics for different campaigns and types of content.

To ensure that our posts look good and are easy to understand, and to maintain some consistency with many different folks designing content, we have an established approval process for social media items. Like many organizations, we use Bulk Upload Sheets to organize draft posts. Our Design Manager and Copy Chief are then easily able to approve posts or suggest edits. Afterword, the Online Content Manager can find everything that needs to be scheduled in one place. The Design Manager also provides a color palette, fonts, and approved images to create social media content for each book (drawn from the cover). This helps everyone stay consistent with imagery and makes the book’s content easy to identify visually.

Engagement with Authors and Author’s Followers

One of the most important things that we do in social media as a publisher is to amplify and support an author’s own social media presence. We always ask authors to tag us, share photos, and be as present as they can in this process. It comes very easily to some authors and others aren’t so involved, but audiences are really eager to know who is behind these beautiful covers and they love to see “behind the scenes!” While actively working with authors, the Ooligan social media team holds giveaways of advance copies or other book-related swag, posts live from events, and answers questions and comments about the book. We have also collaborated with outside publicists that authors hire. This process doesn’t end after a book launches and we are always delighted to share and boost an author’s social media efforts.

All publishers want to generate interest and excitement about each of their books, and to help readers find the books that are right for them. Social media is a key piece of that effort at Ooligan Press. Take a look at our social media accounts to see these tools in action! What are the most challenging or important parts about this process? We’d love to hear from you.

Preparing to Record an Audiobook at Ooligan Press: Scripting

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The Audiobooks Department at Ooligan Press is beginning the process of recording the audiobook for one of our upcoming titles.

When we identify a candidate for an audiobook, we start the pre-recording process once the copyedit of the manuscript has been finalized. Once we know that we have the final edited copy of the manuscript, we can begin the process of turning the manuscript into a script for a narrator to read.

Our goal with creating an audiobook script is to create simple visual clues for our narrator while they are sight reading the manuscript. We never expect our narrators to memorize the manuscript before coming into the recording studio to read. Rather, the audiobook narrator will sight-read the manuscript as they go. While this may seem to require little preparation for the narrator, they will actually need to practice different character voices ahead of time so that they can easily switch between narration and dialogue while sight-reading.

The scripting process we prefer to use at Ooligan Press uses a highlighting method with different colors for each main character to provide the narrator with visual context clues when sight-reading the script.

We assign each main character a highlighter color using the selection available in Google docs. We use highlighert colors rather than other methods so we can avoid introducing errors into the manuscript during the scripting process.

Below is an example of how we might script a manuscript with a third-person point of view:

Character A: “He ate the apple.”

Character B: “He did, did he?”

Narration: The characters stared at each other for a long while.

Character B: “Well,” Character B started, “I was planning on eating that apple for lunch.”

The third-person point of view is most common in the manuscripts that we publish at Ooligan Press, but books are also written in the second-person and first-person point of view.

Below is an example of how we might script a manuscript with a first-person point of view:

Character A/Narrator: “He ate the apple.”

Character B: “He did, did he?”

Character A/Narrator: Character B and I stared at each other for a long while.

Character B: “Well,” Character B started, “I was planning on eating that apple for lunch.”

When working with a script written in the least common second-person point of view, the format is the same as the first-person format.

And finally, once we have finished scripting a manuscript for audio recording, we can begin selecting passages of the manuscript to use for narrator auditions!

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Creating a Book Branding Design Guide: Why and How

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A section of Amazon book pages has been catching my eye lately. Authors and publishers have recently been getting creative with the “From the Publisher” section—taking advantage of the space to post some beautifully designed blurbs and headlines.

When I first noticed it, I immediately thought about how similarly designed blurbs would look in a social media campaign, or how elements from the designs could cohere a book’s tipsheets, press release, and other materials. As it happens, other managers at Ooligan had been thinking similarly.

At Ooligan, everyone is a designer, editor, proofreader, marketer, and publicity specialist. So, our efforts, while always noble, are not always cohesive and streamlined. Some book project teams have had beautifully designed social media campaigns (Short, Vigorous Roots and Court of Venom
are recent examples), others have had lovely designed tipsheets, press releases, and other marketing and publicity materials. But it varies, depending on the design interest and experience of each team. How can the design department support all project teams and cohere their design efforts?

A book branding design guide! Each book project team could use a design guide to help make each title’s marketing and publicity efforts easily recognizable, to help define and convey each book’s voice, and to help designers learn to work with design principles and implement brand guidelines—useful skills to have beyond our time at Ooligan.

I have worked with brand guides before in other organizations, dutifully following the guidelines for typography, color, logos, and aspect ratios. But I had never built one and wasn’t sure where to begin. Book marketing is about making people aware of the books they want to read but don’t yet know exist. Who wants to know about this particular book, and what do they need to know about it? And, how do we best speak to them? What is the distilled essence of this book? What makes it special? How can we convey that visually?

I turned to Adobe for help getting started, modifying their advice to better fit with our specific mission. The following elements form the new basic book branding brief for each title.

Color

I began by creating a color palette based on the book cover’s background color, plus a lighter and darker version, adding secondary colors that matched the tone of the book, hoping to keep our cohesiveness from becoming stale and to offer designers a little flexibility. I found through trial and error that an exact match to the cover materials is not as important as conveying the right mood, and made slight modifications to the color swatches used in the covers, including each color’s HEX values for consistency.

Typography

Selecting type was more complicated. At Ooligan, we use Adobe Creative Suite programs to design our books, along with the fonts Adobe provides us license for. But most designers in the press don’t have their own full-time access to the software, and many prefer to use Canva. Fortunately, Canva has loads of fonts available for free, and so we were able to choose some similar to what the book designers had used, selecting fonts for headlines and body text that complemented each other and matched the aesthetic of the book cover and content.

Images

We often go to Pixabay, Unsplash, and Pexels for images. Sometimes our books will have some of their own graphic elements to incorporate into our marketing and publicity campaigns. Canva also has quite a few little graphic elements available for free use. We put together a document with some photographs, png files, and Canva graphics for designers to use when creating their posts and documents.

Templates

The project managers can use the above elements to make templates in Canva for their team to use for the various social media dimension requirements, as well as blurbs and quotes for them to feature or incorporate into their designs. These design elements can also be used later in creating other marketing and publicly collateral.

Ooligan is a teaching press, and we are all learning every day. I see this new design process as an iterative one; we are already constantly adjusting what works and what doesn’t, and will do so with each new title. The team for The Keepers of Aris by Autumn Green, our next title to be published, has been busy designing away in preparation for their upcoming social media campaign and book launch. I look forward to seeing their designs!

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Why Influencer Marketing is More Important Than You Think

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Would you feel comfortable hiring an influencer for marketing purposes? A lot of startups, but also many traditional companies, swear by it. Others strictly stick to the classic marketing measures. What is it about influencer marketing that drives opinions so far apart? I have taken some of the most popular counter-arguments and contrasted them with my own view.

Argument 1: Authenticity
Influencers only promote products for the money and don’t care about their followers. To a certain extent, I agree. However, every form of paid advertising does the same thing. The difference is that influencers stand behind their advertising message with their own face and name, which should make them more careful in choosing what products they advocate for.

As studies show, the media channel we trust most in is Word-of-Mouth. No medium can compete with a personal recommendation, especially if you are familiar with this person—and yes, this includes influencers, even though most of their followers don’t know them personally. Good influencers are in close and friendly contact with their community, and through that, they achieve the feeling of belonging to a group for people in that community. While you could imply influencers fake closeness to their communities to make money, I think that many underestimate the group dynamic of a community that follows the same interest and, of course, the feeling of being the center of such a community. Because even if no one likes to admit it, no one becomes an influencer without liking being the center of attention.

Argument 2: Giving up control
When I hire an influencer, I have no control over the content spread about my product. First of all, it is absolutely possible to remain in control by creating a detailed brief for the influencer beforehand. However, I would highly recommend giving up some of the control.

When you book an influencer, you are not only booking an advertising channel, but also a whole personality that comes with it. They produce authentic content by often using the same way of speaking, imagery, et cetera. They are probably closer to the target group than you are. Furthermore, they have expertise or engage themselves in a certain topic, through which they achieve an opinion leadership in that area. That expertise can be in factual topics as well as in creative topics like dancing, makeup, and so on. Therefore, it is recommended to take advantage of their experience and involve the influencer in the creative process from day one.

Argument 3: Social media equals bad
As soon as I hire an influencer, I make myself dependent on the social media platform. As mentioned before, booking an influencer is more than just buying an ad space on a social media channel. Influencers are the rock stars of the digital age. Depending on their success and their target audience, they appear in TV, radio, newspapers, you name it. Some might even have a format of their own or have established a brand. Use this for content marketing in any media channel. By offering content instead of pushing ads in the audience’s face you will bypass ad fatigue, which occurs after people see a particular ad too often. Instead, you can place your product directly in the channel they choose to see.

However, what should not be forgotten is that social media is the most sought-after medium among the younger target group. It also facilitates a direct dialogue with them. Dialogue marketing has long been used as a very effective method, as you can get direct feedback from the target group or even use crowdsourcing for creating new content.

In the end, it is important to note that influencer marketing is nothing new in principle. Our buying decisions have always been influenced by friends, celebrities, fictional characters, and so on. Booking influencers on social media, on the other hand, is really new and combines a whole lot of very effective marketing methods among saving you a lot of work steps in the operative execution. However, it is important to remember that every influencer is also a human being who makes mistakes and can get into crises. Therefore, you should not see them only as a marketing tool, but you should always be in close contact with them and solve problems together. This way you not only ensure that your product doesn’t go down the drain together with the influencer, but also preserve your own authenticity.

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3 Insights Into Social Media for Authors

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Many debut authors feel overwhelmed and confused by social media. Everyone, including your publisher, tells you that you should be doing it, but social media feels like an unnecessary distraction from the real work of writing. However, social media can be creatively adapted to suit the unique work you do as an author. Used thoughtfully, social media can be a powerful tool to strengthen your writing, readership, and career.

With modern digital marketing tools like social media, it is possible for authors with even a modest marketing budget to expand their reach and connect with enthusiastic readers effectively and in a more targeted manner than ever before. Social media can help authors connect authentically with readers and fans, organically expanding an author’s reach and increasing the visibility of their books.

How does an author use social media to market their books organically? These three ways are based on an approach to social media that book marketing expert Jane Friedman recommends:

1) Use social media as a natural extension of the work that you’re already doing

Social media doesn’t have to be an awkward thing that you do because you have to. It can be a natural outpouring of the creative writing work that you’re already doing day in and day out. For instance, you can actually use social media to share some of your writing work. Enthusiastic fans can help promote your work among their network through organic sharing, expanding your reach as an author.

Author Cassandra Clare recently ran a Twitter poll asking her followers which character “snippet,” or brief excerpt, they wanted to see from her upcoming book, Chain of Thorns. Clare regularly shares snippets of her upcoming books on social media, generating interest and enthusiasm among her fanbase so that they are more likely to purchase her upcoming releases.

Clare also shares art of the characters in her storyverse created by devoted fans. Sharing fan art is a smart way to engage your fan base as fans adore seeing beautiful art pieces of the characters they love while the sharing of fan-created art requires minimal effort on your part.

2) Use social media as a testing ground for your future books

Friedman explains that social media is a form of content and can be thought of as a micro-publishing platform. Often, these tiny pieces of work that you share publicly on social media can be the seeds for a larger work in the future. For instance, illustrators may post quick sketches on Instagram that later become a full-length print comic book.

Yung Pueblo posted brief reflections on love and relationships on Instagram as an unknown writer. Gradually, he gained a following and eventually published two books, one of which hit the NYT Best Sellers list.

You can also use social media to gauge how readers respond to your work. Paying attention to which posts garner more likes and comments will provide valuable insight into what content resonates most with your fans. This incredible intel can inform your work positively, helping to shape it into something people will be interested and excited to read.

3) Use social media as a way to connect with readers directly and authentically

One of the main premises of social media is that it is a tool to communicate with others. For authors, social media is a way to directly communicate with readers in a two-way conversation. Some ways authors can engage with followers include asking questions, expressing gratitude, sharing experiences, and even expressing frustration.

When authors respond to Twitter questions from followers or thank readers for praise of their books, they come across as more authentic to anyone who happens upon the exchange online. They appear less like a distant figure and more like a human being which leaves a more positive impression on followers.

For the author, it can be gratifying to see evidence of readers benefiting from and enjoying your book that you worked so hard on for years. Social media is a way for authors to discover small moments of joyful connection with enthusiastic readers, which can help fuel your excitement for the work that you’re doing today.

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Inside Ooligan Press: Your Manuscript is Accepted! Now What?

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Note: This is part of the blog series “Inside Ooligan Press”, about how we take a manuscript from an idea to a professionally published book.

So, you wrote a killer query letter and submitted a proper proposal. You won over Acquisitions and we pitched your project to the press successfully, then we offered to publish your book: now what? For the sake of transparency and in an effort to demystify this crazy little thing called publishing, I humbly offer you an inside look at what you can expect when working with Ooligan Press.

Once you get notified that our pitch was successful, we enter into the contract negotiation phase of the process. We are a small, not-for-profit press that generally cannot offer author advances. However, authors are compensated for their work, receiving industry standard royalty rates for trade paperbacks based on cover price and units sold, paid out biannually after publication. The Publisher and author negotiate terms of the contract including dates and deadlines for revisions, the final manuscript and any additional materials, and publication, among other things. This process generally takes about two weeks, give or take, during which time it is encouraged that the author has a trustworthy individual review the contract with them.

Once the contract is signed, we will typically go straight to work with a light or heavy developmental edit, determined by the Acquisitions Editors when we evaluate your manuscript. As a teaching press, we accept manuscripts that are strong and show immense promise, but that offer learning opportunities for the members of the press. This includes the need for editorial work. Expect to do revisions! The Acquisitions Editors lead a team of editors in reading and analyzing your manuscript to determine what is working and what needs work based on our knowledge and experience. We craft an editorial letter full of our critiques, compliments, and suggestions for revision and deliver it to the author for review. We follow up with a phone call or video chat to discuss the letter if the author feels it would be beneficial to do so. The DE process takes about a month, sometimes more. Then the author gets to work on revisions, for which they also get about a month to complete, though timelines may vary based on the project.

During development, your title may change. Sometimes it is necessary to tweak the title, or change it altogether, but not always. Acquisitions Editors must consider best practices for title generation and consider whether yours is appropriate for the genre and market, the literal and connotative meaning of the words or phrases used, and whether it encapsulates or represents the content found within the book. If we feel a change is necessary, we provide the author some alternative titles to consider and deliver them with the editorial letter. While the author’s input is taken into account, the final title is decided upon by the editors.

While we are hard at work developmentally editing your manuscript, you will be completing Ooligan’s Author Questionnaire: a document that will be used by all departments to produce and promote your book. While this questionnaire is lengthy and can feel slightly invasive, the author can of course choose which questions they will and will not answer depending on their comfort level.

Upon delivery of the revised manuscript and questionnaire, the author is then introduced to their Project Manager: the person who will see the project through the rest of the way. They are responsible for keeping the production of your book on track and are your primary point of contact for questions and concerns after acquisition and development.

Your manuscript will undergo copyediting by a team of editors, led by Ooligan’s Managing Editor. Depending on the needs of your manuscript, this may be a light, medium, or heavy copyedit. We use The Chicago Manual of Style as our primary style guide. This process may take one to two months depending on the time of year and the current stages our other titles are in. The author then receives the edited manuscript and reviews and implements the editorial suggestions, for which they typically get a month to complete.

While these editorial processes take place, your book’s dedicated project team, led by your Project Manager, has already begun their work crafting the sales hook, back cover copy, and so much more. They work with the managers of each department, Acquisitions, Editing, DEI, Digital, Design, Marketing, Publicity, and Social Media, to create a master plan to produce a quality book and launch it into the world. But wait, there’s more.

Be sure to check out future installments of this blog for a look at more stages of the production and promotion process at Ooligan Press!

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Using Sponsored Ads on Social Media to Sell Books

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Our blog post from October 2020 by Erica Wright, titled Marketing to Millennials: Native Advertising, explains the types of sponsored content that appeal the most to millennials. But how does an author or publisher go about purchasing and targeting sponsorships for social media ads?

Sponsored content is a type of promotional media that’s paid for by a publisher or author but shared by another brand, social media platform, or influencer. As Marketing to Millennials: Native Advertising tells us, native advertising is the most effective method of content creation because it blends in with the other types of content one might encounter on social media.

Sites such as bookinfluencers.com connect publishers and authors with social media users who focus their content creation on reviews of literature (aka book influencers). This is a sponsorship option that does not require a publisher/author to create or promote their own material. Rather, the publisher/author pays influencers to review or promote their books, making it a rather hands-off promotional opportunity, but the cost varies.

When posting content on Instagram or Facebook, certain posts can be turned into advertisements that will appear in the app users’ feeds with identifying information (disclosures) that they are ads. The advertiser then has access to the metrics which detail audience engagement with the ad, which can inform future sponsored posts.

Meta (the company that owns Facebook and Instagram) now features a “brand collabs manager” tool that allows influencers or creatives to connect with publishers/authors looking for help promoting their books or social media pages. When Facebook and Instagram accounts are linked to each other, ads placed through one social media outlet will automatically be shown on both Facebook and Instagram.

According to Kindlepreneur, there are a few key settings to utilize when placing ads through social media outlets such as Facebook and Instagram. At the Campaign level, during which you will set your campaign objective, selecting the “traffic” objective will send ad viewers to a book product page for the lowest cost. Word-of-mouth marketing just might sell the most books. For this reason, book-centered marketing strategies should attempt to drive “traffic” to a book to increase the audience’s exposure to the book title and cover, and improve familiarity with the book’s brand to further improve the effectiveness of word-of-mouth marketing. Other objectives available at the Campaign level include: brand awareness, reach, engagement, app installs, video views, lead generation, messages, conversions, catalog sales, and store visits.

At the Ad Set level, advertisers have the opportunity to select the target audience, which uses demographics such as location, gender, age, interests, and language. There are also options for selecting placements for the ads, such as social media news feeds vs. stories. Meta offers an option to decide where to show ads if the “Automatic Placements” option is selected.

While placing paid advertisements for books might be intimidating at first, I hope these tips will make the process a bit easier to navigate and encourage publishers and authors to have fun with their content creation and drive traffic to their books.

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Social Profit in the Process of Publishing Poetry

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Many avenues come to mind when we think of marketing a book. Social media, public-facing events, local outreach, and more—there are numerous ways that authors and their teams can work to get consumers interested in the upcoming release. However, the one genre that seems to be overlooked here (leaving the responsibility to therefore fall on the writer) is poetry. Such has been the case since the debut of poetry collections, but I would argue that, in order for the genre to reach its full potential of artistry and audience, the marketing style must become a collaborative process.

For an example of how things are currently run, you could turn to the writer-friendly website pw.org. There, folks who have hopes of getting their work out there can find different guides and tips on how to do so. What’s interesting is their webpage devoted to publishing advice for writers of poetry collections. Poets & Writers almost immediately states that poets should first look into small presses to have a great success rate at getting published, and also at finding people who will be more devoted to helping them develop their work: “We suggest you begin your search for a book publisher by looking at small presses and university presses [. . .] they do not have the resources of larger publishing houses and offer smaller advances, they are usually more willing to help you develop as an author even if your books aren’t immediately profitable.” This suggests a contention between large publishing houses and new poets in the sector of marketing. If larger publishers are unwilling to help new poets develop, then the responsibility lies with poets to first seek out smaller journals, magazines, and publishing houses to get their work out there and make a name for themselves. While this is a concept that is in practice with other genres, it does seem to occur most often with poetry.

And this goes back to the beginning. You could think of poets such as Ezra Pound or Edgar Allen Poe, who both have been remarked as having enough determination and entrepreneurial spirits to get their work published (because they had to). Or Walt Whitman, who first self-published in 1855 before he was taken seriously. The list goes on, of course, and still continues to be added to in the twenty-first century.

In today’s marketplace, self-promotion is a given. The hardship of success for writers, though, comes from the fact that just about all areas of art and creativity are (and I’m trying not to sound harsh) over-saturated. With growing technology and various social media platforms, artists of all kinds are competing for a spotlight. Knowing that, the evidence is clear that poets’ being left to their own devices (literally) for self-promotion of their work just won’t cut it. If the marketing teams at publishing houses would combine their industry knowledge of the booksellers market with the personality and intimacy of the artists’ identities, we’d find an equation for achievement. And while you could argue that using a business to market oneself could be construed as “selling out,” this is a position of privilege—and naivety. New-to-the-scene writers can’t deny promotion if they have no platform to begin with; and the refusal of established artists to collaborate only serves to maintain the divide that disadvantages those hoping to break into the domain, and the benefits of a better relationship would go both ways.

Of course, there is much to gain from simply being on the receiving end of poetry; but there can also be financial security for businesses. In working around poetic language, moguls with a tendency toward the practical can learn new ways to market for their own benefit. As one article puts it: “There’s no doubt that poetry is profitable for brand managers and marketing researchers both. Poetry improves our prose (Stern, 1998). Poetry stimulates our synapses (Sherry & Schouten, 2002). Poetry transports us to the secluded bower of creativity, imagination, management.” Studying verse and the imaginative minds who write them can teach a manifold of pathways for reinventing language. In my experience, that’s the best thing about poetry: reshaping speech for the purpose of distinct, unique expression. By observing this skill set, managerial teams can obtain a better understanding of how they could morph their outreach ideals to draw more people in.

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Designing Basic Social Media Images for Your Book

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Are you lost when it comes to designing social media images for your upcoming book? This step-by-step guide walks you through the process of creating basic social media images to promote your book, including the preferred image dimensions for several social media platforms.

  1. Determine Your Platform(s) and Dimensions

    2. What social media platforms do you want to promote your book on? Popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have different suggested image dimensions that are their “best fit.” Because you want your book’s online promotion to be professional, you should follow these suggested dimensions. According to Sprout Social, the suggested dimensions for visual content on each platform are:

    • 1200 x 630 pixels for Facebook
    • 1080 x 1080 pixels for Instagram
    • 1200 x 675 pixels for tweets sharing a single image on Twitter

  2. Choose a Design Software

    3. Adobe Creative Cloud is the industry standard for graphic designers, but because social media posts are more ephemeral in nature, it’s perfectly acceptable to make your designs using free software like Canva. If you don’t have access to an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription or are worried about being overwhelmed by Adobe’s software, Canva is a free and easy design software that I recommend.

  3. Set Your Dimensions and Upload Your Cover

    4. The dimensions of your design should be based on the social media platform(s) outlined in step one. Social media posts aimed at promoting your book should incorporate the book’s cover, so you’ll want to upload it to the design software you’re using or have the file ready to incorporate into your design later.

  4. Find and Download a Copyright-Free Image that Complements Your Cover

    5. You want a copyright-free image that emphasizes the cover without being too busy or distracting, but you also want to stay away from images that are obviously meant to be “background” rather than the focal point of your design. If your book has a cover design brief, try selecting simple images that follow the tone and color scheme outlined in the cover design brief. Images like these will naturally go well with your cover because both designs are working from the same brief. If you’re unsure where to look for copyright-free images, websites like Pixabay, Unsplash, and Pexels are safe, user-friendly platforms to start your search. Although these websites offer copyright-free images, double-check each website’s search settings to ensure that “copyright-free” isn’t a search feature that you need to turn on before starting your image search.

  5. Upload and Position Your Image

    6. Check that the image isn’t blurry at the size you need to fill your design’s dimensions. If it’s blurry and you’re familiar with Photoshop, you can try sharpening the image there, but a blurry image most likely means you should choose a different copyright-free image for the background. Position the image over the dimensions of your design in a way that gives the design the best crop lines possible. In other words, make sure that the dimensions of your design don’t cut off the background image in a way that’s distracting.

  6. Place Your Cover

    7. Since your cover is the focal point of the image, I recommend centering it in your design. Canva and Adobe both have guides to help with this. However, if your background image has a unique border, some type of visual element on one side, or if the dimensions make the cover look “off” when centered, try aligning the cover within the background image using the rule of thirds or aligning the book cover to something in the background image. The goal is to have the placement of the cover within the design appear natural. The goal of centering or aligning the cover within the background image is to keep the cover from appearing as though it “floats” in the design.

  7. Download and Preview Your Design

    8. For this last step, simply download your design (I recommend downloading it as a PNG file) and review your work! Double-check that your cover is positioned the way you intended and that nothing shifted during the download process. Be critical of your work and ask yourself if the focal point of the design is the book cover. Once you’re pleased with your design, you’re ready to write a caption for your image and post.

Congratulations, you’ve designed a basic social media image for your book!