Rhoda Baxter's Blog

Book Review: Bold Moves by Emma Barry

The book is about Scarlett, who is a chess champion – a Grand Master, and Jamie, who is a TV producer who wants to adapt her memoir into a TV show. Scarlett and Jamie have a lot of history, not all of it good, some of it great, from when they were teenagers. There’s a cataclysmic event that happened when they split up, and the effects of this are still reverberating down Jamie’s life, certainly, and possibly Scarlett’s as well.
Bold Moves is about a lot of things – hope, longing, healing, lea...

Book review: Happily Ever After by Jane Lovering

Andi is a woman raised by books. Mostly by gothic romances, by the sound of it. She gets a job cataloguing the library at Templewood house, and sees everything through the prism of the books she’s read.
But the house is spooky – there are phantom footsteps in the night and a ghost that walks around at night and a gardener who pops up at odd times. The people in the house are pretty strange too. There’s a the love lorn, but scary, Lady Tanith and her handsome son Hugo, a disagreeable housekeep...

Book Review: Wish You Weren’t Here by Gabby Hitchinson Crouch

I read this because a friend recommended it to me as ‘hilarious’. And it really was hilarious. It was a breathless run from start to finish.
The Rook family hunt ghosts. When they get called out to a small seaside town, they expect to find a few ghosts, nothing too difficult. What the actually find is the apocalypse.
I loved the dynamics between the family members and the very grounded nature of the fantastical elements. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and would read the rest of the series.

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BIG NEWS: Award nomination for The Winner Bakes It All

I can finally tell you that The Winner Bakes It All has been shortlisted for the romantic comedy award at the RNA Awards this year! I’m very excited to be going down to London for the award ceremony.

This is the fourth time I’ve been shortlisted for an RNA award – and the third time in the romcom category (Girl Having A Ball, A Convenient Marriage and Playing For Love were all shortlisted when they were published). Fingers crossed that this time I won’t come home empty handed.

Just lo...

Canva Tutorial: how to extend an image using Canva’s magic edit tool

You know how sometimes, your image is just not tall enough or wide enough for what your need? Here’s what to do if you need to extend it a bit. This uses Canva’s generative AI (based on Dall-E, possibly), so it has all the usual foibles of AI, but it’s improving all the time.

Here’s a step by step guide. I recommend doing the extending in sections, so that the AI had lots of reference material around the area it’s trying to fill. Sometimes the results are hilarious, but most of the time, it’...

Canva tutorial: How to use Canva Colour Edit to change colours

As the name suggests, you can use Canva’s new Colour Edit feature to change colours of parts of your photo. It also lets you separate out of the foreground from the background, which is really handy if you just want to make the background a bit darker, for example.

Here’s a tutorial on how to use the Colour Edit feature and a few examples of what you can make with it. This would be a super useful tool to use when making book covers.

Just hit the big red play button to watch the video on Y...

Canva tutorial: How to animate your book cover

Have you ever wanted to make your book cover come alive by animating parts of it? Now you can do that easily in Canva. Most of this is available on Canva free, so there’s nothing stopping you now!

Just hit the big red play button to watch the video on YouTube.

You can sign up for a free Canva account here: partner.canva.com/Jeev*

If you want to talk to other authors about how to use Canva in your book marketing, come and join the free Canva Tips for Authors Facebook group at faceb...

Canva tutorial: How to animate your book title #2

Continuing on from last week’s tutorial, here’s another step by step tutorial on how to animate your book title. What happens if you have a book where the title is particularly fancy and difficult to separate from the background? That’s where Canva’s AI image features come in. You’ll need Canva Pro for some of it.

Just hit the big red play button to watch the video on YouTube

You can sign up for a free Canva account here: partner.canva.com/Jeev*

If you want to talk to other autho...

Canva Tutorial: How to animate your book Title #1

Adding a little bit of movement to your posts makes them stand out and can stop people from scrolling past. One nifty way to do that is to add a bit of animation to your book cover by animating the title. Here’s one way to do it. I’ll post a second method next week.

Just click on the big red play button to watch the video in YouTube.

You can sign up for a free Canva account here: partner.canva.com/Jeev*

If you want to talk to other authors about how to use Canva in your book mar...

Canva tutorial: How to make Rotating Text in Canva

Sometimes, you just need your text to go round and round and round…

Here’s a step by step tutorial on how to make rotating text in Canva. You can ‘stack’ animation effects so your can make the text fade in and then rotate.

Just click on the big red play button to watch the video on YouTube.

You can sign up for a free Canva account here: partner.canva.com/Jeev*

If you want to talk to other authors about how to use Canva in your book marketing, come and join the free Canva Tip...