Canva For Authors

Canva for Authors: Templates – the simplest way to make book marketing images

| Rhoda Baxter

Making book marketing images can be daunting. After all, we’re writers, not graphic designers (unless you are a graphic designer, in which case, you already know all this stuff and more). So how do you make pretty images if you haven’t got a clue where to start? Canva templates, that’s how.

In this video I go through the two types of templates – the ones available in Canva itself (usually for free) and the ones that you can buy from places like Etsy for a small fee. They really are the simplest way to get your book cover and a nice review quote onto a good looking image that you can share on social media.

Click on the red play button in the image below to watch the YouTube video.

If you’ve found this tutorial useful, please share it (and subscribe to my YouTube channel – I’d be very grateful).

If you’d like a free Canva template – sign up to my newsletter here: https://jeevanicharika.com/canva-for-authors/

You can sign up for a free Canva account here: https://www.canva.com/join/optimistic-rum-humor*

* This is an affiliate link. It doesn’t cost you anything extra, but it gives me some intangible benefit- I haven’t figured out what yet.

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

| Rhoda Baxter

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 elements in Canva and also how to make text curve to the right amount so that it lines up properly.

Just click on the play button in the middle of the image below to watch the video on YouTube.

If you’ve found this tutorial useful, please share it (and subscribe to my YouTube channel – I’d be very grateful).

If you’d like a free Canva template – sign up to my newsletter here: https://jeevanicharika.com/canva-for-authors/

You can sign up for a free Canva account here: https://www.canva.com/join/optimistic-rum-humor*

* This is an affiliate link. It doesn’t cost you anything extra, but it gives me some intangible benefit- I haven’t figured out what yet.

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

| Rhoda Baxter

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 banner
  • Show you how to make sure the important things (like your name!) don’t get cut off when viewed on a mobile phone
  • Show you how to line them up nicely so that it looks good

Just click on the play button on the image below to view the YouTube video.

If you sign up to my newsletter, you will get a free template of this Facebook banner (with the ‘important stuff’ area marked on it, so that you don’t have to guess). You can drag and drop your cover images into the frames. You will need your own Canva account to use this. You’ll find it here: https://jeevanicharika.com/canva-for-authors/

If you’ve found this tutorial useful, please share it (and subscribe to my YouTube channel – I’d be very grateful).

If you’d like a free Canva template – sign up to my newsletter here: https://jeevanicharika.com/canva-for-authors/

You can sign up for a free Canva account here: https://www.canva.com/join/optimistic-rum-humor*

* This is an affiliate link. It doesn’t cost you anything extra, but it gives me some intangible benefit- I haven’t figured out what yet.

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

| Rhoda Baxter

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 already made. You can change the example text to your title and author name and you’re good to go. (Did you know that I sell pre-made book covers. Check them out here. For under £25 you can have a nice cover for your book or short story with minimal hassle).

I’m not a designer, I’m a writer, but I have spent several years tinkering with Canva and other photo manipulation software to learn how to use them. One of the things I’ve learned is how to make simple book covers. This tutorial shows you how you can make them too.

A few people have followed the instructions in the video and made their own covers and they look splendid. This example is for a romance novel.

Click on the play button to watch the video on YouTube. I suggest following along and pausing it so that you can make your own cover alongside.

If you’ve found this tutorial useful, please share it (and subscribe to my YouTube channel – I’d be very grateful).

If you’d like a free Canva template – sign up to my newsletter here: https://jeevanicharika.com/canva-for-authors/

You can sign up for a free Canva account here: https://www.canva.com/join/optimistic-rum-humor*

* This is an affiliate link. It doesn’t cost you anything extra, but it gives me some intangible benefit- I haven’t figured out what yet.

If you want to buy a premade book cover, go to my Etsy shop – https://rhodasauthorstuff.etsy.com/

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

| Rhoda Baxter

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:

  • A walkthrough of how to make a comp book graphic
  • Some suggestions as to how to choose which books to include
  • A suggestion of where you can make this much easier by letting someone else do the work for you (for cheap)

Click on the play icon to watch the tutorial on YouTube:

If you’ve found this tutorial useful, please share it (and subscribe to my YouTube channel – I’d be very grateful).

If you’d like a free Canva template – sign up to my newsletter here: https://jeevanicharika.com/canva-for-authors/

You can sign up for a free Canva account here: https://www.canva.com/join/optimistic-rum-humor*

* This is an affiliate link. It doesn’t cost you anything extra, but it gives me some intangible benefit- I haven’t figured out what yet.

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

| Rhoda Baxter

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 three of them for sale on Etsy right now. I’m hoping to add more with time.

Just click on the play button in the image below to view the YouTube video.

If you’ve found this tutorial useful, please share it (and subscribe to my YouTube channel – I’d be very grateful).

If you’d like a free Canva template – sign up to my newsletter here: https://jeevanicharika.com/canva-for-authors/

You can sign up for a free Canva account here: https://www.canva.com/join/optimistic-rum-humor*

* This is an affiliate link. It doesn’t cost you anything extra, but it gives me some intangible benefit- I haven’t figured out what yet.

Canva For Authors: Book trailers

| Rhoda Baxter

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. I’ve used my own book Picture Perfect as an example. Just click on the red play icon to watch.

How to make a video book trailer using Canva – a step by step tutorial

First I had to reduce the blurb to a three sentence ‘set up, details, hook’ formula, which took hours and hours. Then I spent some time poking around in Canva’s video library to find some videos of snowy landscapes and a New Year party (both of which feature heavily in Picture Perfect). I found a langrous rendition of Auld Lang Syne in Canva’s audio library.

I have a Pro subscription to Canva, but a lot of this stuff is available in the free library too. Also, if you only have a free account and really, really want to use something from the Pro library, you can pay a one-off fee to download it. The fee is usually only a few dollars.

Once I had the videos, audio and text all gathered together, putting the video together was fairly straightforward. Watch the clip on YouTube to see how it’s done.

Suzy Hull, who asked me about book trailers in the first place, made her own version using my instructions and it looks AMAZING.

If you find this video useful, please share and tell all your writer friends.

Canva for Authors: How to Make bookmarks in Canva

| Rhoda Baxter

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 reliable.

Here’s the video on YouTube. As always, please like and subscribe and/or share with anyone who might find it useful.

If you have anything that you’d like me to cover in a future tutorial let me know and I’ll do my best to teach you how to do it. Oh, and come back and show me your bookmarks!

Canva For Authors: How to Make a short animated Ad for your book

| Rhoda Baxter

I made this YouTube video just before Christmas when I was putting one of my novels down to 99p as part of a Christmas sale. It walks you through the process of making a short animated video to advertise your special offer. It’s really not as hard as you might imagine.

Here’s the video on YouTube. As always, if you find it useful, please share. You know how all YouTubers ask you to ‘like and subscribe’? That’s because the number of subscribers and the number of likes makes a big difference to how YouTube treats you. You need a 1000 subscribers in order to any advertising revenue. So, yeah … please like and subscribe. Or just tell your friends who might find it useful.

If there’s anything you’d like me to show you how to do, pop a comment under the video. If you do make a video, tag my on Twitter or FB and show me. I will retweet it!