Five years ago, when I started my publishing company, Daily House, I spent fourteen thousand dollars on branding. It was so expensive that I had to take out a small business loan to hire designers and branding experts. However, as indie authors, we have the opportunity to create the same kind of branding for a fraction of the cost and time.
The key to building a brand as an indie author is to start with your cover. Your cover serves as the perfect source document to set the themes, colors, and overall style of your brand. By isolating themes from your cover and combining them with the contents of your book, you can generate daily content for all social media platforms and apply it to your promotions and ads.
To get started, you’ll need a tool like Canva. Once you have Canva and your cover design, you can identify the fonts and hex codes used in your cover. Canva can help you isolate these codes, or you can obtain them from your designer. Import your cover image into Canva and use the Brand Hub feature to create a style guide based on your cover. This guide will provide you with a selection of colors and fonts to choose from.
Choose around five colors from your cover as your branding colors and apply them consistently across your social media platforms. Use the fonts from your cover for your title, subtitle, and text. Three fonts are usually sufficient for a cohesive brand.
Once you have your colors and fonts, you can start importing headshots of yourself, mood board images, and any other visuals related to your book into the Brand Hub. This will help create a style guide similar to what professional designers would create for you.
Canva’s Brand Hub also allows you to create templates for various social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and more. You can generate daily content directly from Canva using AI tools or tools like ChatGPT to generate engaging posts. Canva’s text-to-image AI and content generation AI can also be used to create images of your characters, settings, and quotes from your book.
By utilizing Canva and other AI tools, you can create an entire branding package, including templates for social media posts, t-shirts, business cards, presentations, and more. The possibilities are endless, and the best part is that it only takes a few minutes and costs a fraction of what professional branding would cost.
I hope this article has inspired you to explore the potential of AI and tools like Canva for your author branding and promotion. Share in the comments how you have used AI in your branding and promotion efforts and let us know your favorite tools. Happy branding!
