I’m not a designer and I will never pretend to be one, but I still had to design an awful lot when beginning to promote my books. It takes a lot of patience and creativity, which is natural for a writer, but instead of words, you work with colours, shapes and images.

Firstly, I knew that as an author I had to build myself a brand. I needed a logo that would identify me. I also needed an image to help reinforce my name – something representing King. A crown or a lion came to mind, but I found something far more innovative. I used the king piece in chess, flipped it and made it into a pen. Perfect. I also chose a colour scheme for my logo and settled on red, black and white – some very strong colours which I use on my business cards too.

However, when it comes to colours, I don’t just settle for those three. Whenever I get a new cover for my book, I always go through and check the hex codes (unique codes for colours) and save them. You may have noticed my website which originally had a red background is now navy – a colour that appears on my new cover as opposed to my old one. However,  the colours red white and blue will always be key colours as the correspond to the flags of the two nations at war in my book series.

I also created graphics such as icons for my social media which are smaller versions of the book covers. The 3D book covers that appear on my homepage may look cool but took days to make! Certainly worth the effort though!

Back in January, I carried out “quote Tuesday” for the promotion of Atlantic Split, using images that could be settings in the book. I’ll be doing something similar for At Liberty To Live which means I need more images. Generally, I use pixabay, pexels and unsplash for my images as these are royalty free and have a wide range. I also use these sites for my blog headers.

I also created book trailers which you can see on my social media pages. These are quite basic, but again, I used my core colours and found music from BenSound which again is royalty free as the backing track. His collection is very much worth checking out!

However, the biggest part of design, I couldn’t do justice. Whilst I had a clear idea of what I wanted from my book covers, I didn’t have the skills to create them, so I paid a designer to do this for me. Bespoke Book Covers are absolutely fabulous – amazing to work with and always willing to help. They gave me four gorgeous covers and I can’t wait to eventually show you the final two. Something as important as your book cover, it’s worth getting done properly and boy, did they deliver.

Whilst design may seem daunting to those who aren’t used to it, a lot of time, I just use Paint, PowerPoint or Photoscape (free Photoshop) to design things. All are quite easy to get to grips with and don’t take a lot of prior knowledge. However, if you feel like you’d like things done properly from a professional, I highly recommend my cover designer and Reedsy have a great selection of professionals are reasonable rates. Becoming a self-published author is a lot more than just writing, it encompasses a huge amount, but if you’re like me, you’ll love the creative control and you may even find designing quite fun.

Atlantic Split is the first book in The Luke Bright Series and is available to purchase NOW! Please follow me on my blog and my social media links below and use the links on my website to purchase a copy if you have not done so. Don’t forget to leave a review! The second book, At Liberty To Live will be released in AUTUMN 2018. Thank you once again for taking the time to read this blog post.

N.A.K.