Rhoda Baxter's Blog, page 5

Canva for authors: How to make a simple book cover in ten minutes

Designing book covers is a particular skill. Designing a book cover that sells in an a wonder of instinct and skill. So, if you can afford it, it makes sense to pay a book cover designer to make sure you have a book cover that sells.

But, what if you need a cover for something that isn’t going to recoup the cost of the cover – like short story or a newsletter magnet? Then, you have a couple of options. one is to buy a cheap pre-made cover. These are, as you would expect, covers that are alre...

Canva for authors: How to make a simple book cover in ten minutes

Designing book covers is a particular skill. Designing a book cover that sells in an a wonder of instinct and skill. So, if you can afford it, it makes sense to pay a book cover designer to make sure you have a book cover that sells.

But, what if you need a cover for something that isn’t going to recoup the cost of the cover – like short story or a newsletter magnet? Then, you have a couple of options. one is to buy a cheap pre-made cover. These are, as you would expect, covers that are alre...

Canva for Authors: How to make an ‘if you like this, you’ll love my book’ style graphic

What are ‘comp books’? Basically, it’s a way of saying ‘if you liked this, you’ll like this too’. If you like Agatha Christie, you’ll like Richard Osman’s cosy mysteries. If you like Stephen King, you’ll like this other horror book. If you like Sophie Kinsella, you’ll like Jeevani Charika’s book (grin).

This is a nice shorthand way of indicating to a reader in a hurry (and who isn’t in a hurry these days!) that your book is their sort of book.

In this step-by-step tutorial, you’ll find:...

Book review: Ghost Girl, Banana by Wiz Wharton

A lovely debut novel.
There are two storylines – one for Lily, who English and Chinese, but doesn’t feel she belongs to either race, and one for Sook-Yin (Lily’s mother) who left Hong Kong as a young woman and tried to make a life for herself first in London, then in Hong Kong, but dies when Lily was five.
When Lily finds that she and her sister have been left a substantial amount of money by a mysterious benefactor, Lily goes to Hong Kong to find out why.
I felt that the story really came aliv...

Canva for authors: Five exciting Canva updates (including animation!)

A few weeks ago, Canva unveiled a whole suite of new features. They’ve embraced AI in a big way and baked it into a lot of their image editing tools (and some of the writing tools).

To me, the most exciting thing was the new animation tool. Watch until the end of the video to see how I make birds swoop around on one of my book covers. I am generally very over excited about this development. You can probably tell from my voice.

If you want to buy an animated book cover for yourself, I have...

Canva For Authors: Book trailers

I remember looking at book trailers a few years ago and giving up because it seemed too complicated. I thought you needed to know a lot of a video and graphic design to make anything halfway decent.

Then Canva released video editing tools. Nowadays a lot of us edit videos on the fly for Tiktok and Instagram. If you can edit a video on Tiktok, you can edit a video in Canva. It’s quite easy.

Here’s a YouTube video walkthrough of exactly how to make a short video book trailer for your book....

Canva Cor Authors: Book trailers

I remember looking at book trailers a few years ago and giving up because it seemed too complicated. I thought you needed to know a lot of a video and graphic design to make anything halfway decent.

Then Canva released video editing tools. Nowadays a lot of us edit videos on the fly for Tiktok and Instagram. If you can edit a video on Tiktok, you can edit a video in Canva. It’s quite easy.

Here’s a YouTube video walkthrough of exactly how to make a short video book trailer for your book....

Love on the brain by Ali Hazelwood

I loved The Love Hypothesis, so I expected that I’d love Love on the Brain too. I did – it’s got a scientist heroine. I love the lab related dynamics and the sausage referencing (because they’re very true to life). The whole thing with the engineer who did one term of neuroscience patronising the woman who has a PhD and a whole bunch of papers in actual neuroscience is also very relatable.

The story is great. My only quibble is that Levi seems to be very similar to Adam from TLH. Come to ...

Book review: Do You want to start a scandal by Tessa Dare

Sometimes, you’re just in the mood for something light, fast paced and funny. This book delivers on all of those promises.
Charlotte is the youngest of three daughters and her mother is basically Mrs Bennett from Pride and Prejudice – anxious to marry off her daughters to rich men. Charlotte tries to save Piers from her mother and inadvertently stumbles into a scandal and an arranged engagement.
Piers has his own secrets, which means that he is in danger. He can’t protect someone like Charlott...

Canva for Authors: How to Make bookmarks in Canva

When you go to book events (or even just when you nip in the book shop), it’s handy to have something with your book cover on to give to people. I usually carry little business cards, but I find that people like bookmarks better. Besides, you can get more info on a book mark (like a QR code!).

A few weeks ago, I did a tutorial on how to create these bookmarks using Canva and then get them printed using a service like Bananaprint (whom I like because they’re reasonably priced and rel...