Rhoda Baxter's Blog, page 5

Canva for authors: How to make a tropey marketing graphic for your book

Have you seen those graphics that have a book in the centre and then list all the reasons you should read it – with romance, it’s usually done by listing tropes. This works because romance readers tend to like tropes. You’ll often see social media posts that say ‘I love this trope – tell me more books that have it, please’. So someone scrolling through their social media feed might come across the image of your book cover and clock that they like a certain trope in it … and hopefully click thr...

Canva for authors: How to Design a book cover with curved text on it

I enjoy making book covers. Sometimes, you just need to make your text curve round to look good (especially if you have long words in it!). Here’s a guide to how you do it.

Earlier this year, I set myself a challenge to create 25 book covers based on titles generated by ChatGPT (you can buy them as pre-made covers and put your own title and author name on them). Doughnuts and Consequences was one of those titles.

In the video below, I show how I made the cover using several different free...

Canva for authors: How to show off your books on Facebook

You’ve written a book (or several books), so naturally you want to show them off wherever you can. If you’re on Facebook, why not put them on your page banner, so that anyone who pops past your page can see them?

Not sure how to make one of those? Let me show you.

In this tutorial I will:

Walk you through how to add your books to a Facebook bannerShow you how to make sure the important things (like your name!) don’t get cut off when viewed on a mobile phoneShow you how to...

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....