🐄 Branding is good for you (and doesn't have to hurt)

This will only hurt a little. View in browser Hey! I have a jam-packed email for you today on author branding, tools to grow your business, a handy tutorial for you, some killer deals, and news of a big change at BookBub Ads at the end too. Best get started then! Author Branding You don't need to be a branding expert to create a solid brand identity for Author You.  I'll go further: you don't even really need to know what branding is… which is handy as its one of those amorphous concepts which everyone uses a little differently anyway. This is one of those cases where Google might not be your friend. What I suggest is much more important is this: having some basic competence with all the freely available and easy-to-use graphic design tools that proliferate in 2020. And those skills only need to be basic to pull off some rather professional looking graphics and ad images – even if you have no artistic ability whatsoever. When I say I have no artistic ability whatsoever, people might think I'm exaggerating, but I genuinely do have no artistic ability at all. Not even a smidgeon. I can't draw a straight line with a ruler. A color blind person would have a better chance of matching two swatches. And I have marked difficulty in visualizing things as well. My partner is an artist and one of her (many!) constant frustrations with me is she'll show my something she's working on, and then explain a change she is considering and then she looks up to see my big, dumb, blank face – totally lost. And yet I can turn out professional looking graphics in a jiffy. I do all my own graphics – website, emails, course, ads – every single thing is made in house by me, in minutes usually, except for my book covers which I still outsource. What sorcery is this? Design Tools For Everyone The tools available these days are just so powerful that even design dullards like me can turn out pro-level work – and without too much effort either, once you invest a little time in learning how to use these amazing tools that are freely available. To show you what you can do, I made a YouTube video this week walking you through my process for creating winning BookBub Ads images. BTW: be sure to check all the resources I post in the description of each video as they are incredibly useful and tailored to whatever I'm yabbering on about – and most of them are free! This is a method that almost anyone can follow, and one which completely uses free tools as well. (If you go to my YouTube channel, you'll find a similar over-the-shoulder tutorial a few months back for Facebook Ads too, or a guide to creating your first BookBub Ads if that's more your speed.) It's really great to be able to create ad graphics (and website images and newsletter headers and Facebook Cover photos and reader swag) from the very cover art that adorns your books – and exhaustive testing across a range of genres confirms that doing so almost always improves your return on investment, usually by boosting conversion by a considerable amount. Handling Tricky Covers However, it's not always possible to use your cover art in the background. As you can see in the above video, I had a little bit of trouble with the cover I was sent, but managed to get there in the end. Other covers can be more trouble again. For example, one of my historical novels uses this lovely textured map effect in the background of its vibrant, green cover – both of which are important story elements that were neatly reflected by the designer. However, this lovely design also makes it very difficult to design promo graphics for. Or difficult for non-designer/no-artistic-ability me, at least – actual designers might scoff at that challenge! The solution was to take a slightly different approach and use a stock photo as the background instead – but one which still tied in nicely with the cover design and the themes of the book. And I think it turned out very well! I especially like the 3D-effect from that map-wrinkle, which is what you can get when you use professional-grade stock photos (and spend quite a bit of time searching their considerable archives!). Using appropriate stock photos also saves you from any legal entanglements – just make sure you are getting royalty-free images, and not ones which you either don't have the legal right to use (finding it "on the internet" doesn't qualify!) or where you have some archaic license to only use the image 1000 times or something, which just isn't suitable in a digital world anyway. Best Stock Photo Sites According to all my graphic designer friends – as you can imagine, stock photos go through their hands like a greased hog – Shutterstock is the best stock photo site out there. But it's really, really expensive. DepositPhotos is a very solid alternative, but it's still pricey if you buy credits directly from DepositPhotos.  Instead, I usually wait until somewhere like AppSumo does a big DepositPhotos deal – and they have one of those going once or twice a year. Almost every year they do a big sale on this around Black Friday, and I will certainly let you guys know if that happens again. For those who want something now, then you have other options. AppSumo Deals I should have done this ages ago and I would have saved A TON of money, but I just signed up to AppSumo Plus – which won't be suitable for everyone as it cost $99 a year, but it could be a great option for those who buy 2-3 things a year from AppSumo anyway because it gets you 10% off everything you buy, as well as other benefits like access to exclusive deals and access to KingSumo Pro. That 10% perma-discount would have saved me quite a bit in 2020 because I'm a bit of an AppSumo junkie. Just in the last year or so, I've bought Krisp (noise reduction app), Sociamonials (social media scheduler), HappyScribe (video/podcast transcription software), Flixier (cloud based video editor), Clapboard (screen sharing software for videos), KingSumo (viral giveaways), a couple of DepositPhoto deals, and probably a few things I can't remember too. While I tend to be quite frugal as a default, AppSumo has a 60-day no-questions-asked returns policy, so I can buy something, try it out, and get my cash back if I can't find a good use for it. And I'm generally cheap enough to force myself to use find some use for anything I buy, even if it's not the original intention. For example, I started my YouTube channel because I was guilty about having a $100 microphone gathering dust on my desk (originally purchased to start a podcast which hasn't quite happened yet). And then I bought Clapboard for my YouTube channel… but ended up mostly using it to create my course. Anyway. Where was I? Ah yes, stock photos. So… the reason I finally snapped up AppSumo Plus was to avail of a rather tasty deal that's only available to AppSumo Plus members. Yay Images (affiliate link) is doing a lifetime deal for just $59 – which is quite an incredible offer, and gives you access to a gallery of over 12m images, which should be enough to satisfy most needs. Now, I haven't explored Yay Images fully as I wanted to let you know about it before the deal disappears, but I wouldn't suggest signing up to AppSumo Plus just to snap up this deal. But if you do buy a few things from them every year and/or would get value from getting free access to KingSumo's viral giveaways, then it might be worth it for you. I've been putting it off for ages, but I plan to get into King Sumo's viral giveaways soon, and report back. That might seem contrary to all my exhortations last week to focus on building up your email list in organic ways, but my list is big enough now – and almost exclusively organic too – that I can afford to play around with this stuff on a bigger scale now. Plus, I have a plan to corral these new names until they prove their worth so they don't mess with the good thing I have going on email-wise. Alternative Email Solutions I picked up another deal from (seriously, stop me) AppSumo today for just this purpose. SendFox is their own in-house email service and while I'm certainly not recommending that you use it as a replacement for MailerLite, or whoever you use as your primary email client, I think it could be very useful for specific circumstances. SendFox only costs $49 for a lifetime deal – for unlimited email sends! That's an affiliate link as well, of course, but you should really consider if it's suitable for you before purchasing. The deal is available for everyone, not just AppSumo Plus subscribers, like that Yay Images deal above. But is it suitable for everyone? Probably not, to be frank. Again, I haven't played with it in any detail, but my first impression is that it's quite pared back and will be missing a lot of the features that a service like MailerLite or ConvertKit or Active Campaign will have. And I strongly suspect they won't have the sender reputation of any of those companies either – meaning your emails will probably land in less inboxes, all other things being equal. However, it is cheap and has few limits*, so if you have something like an e-commerce shop which has a lot of automatic transactional emails, or a blog with lots of subscribers who want to get automatic emails when a new post drops, or if you are an author running things like viral giveaways. (*Edit: looking at the small print SendFox limits you to 8,000 contacts used per month on the basic lifetime deal, but I should be in no danger of exceeding those limits for what I have in mind anyway, and if want to go truly limitless, it's a relatively inexpensive upgrade – you just stack more codes to increase your limit – just FYI.) My plan is to: generate lots of potential subscribers with a viral giveaway import them into SendFox rather than MailerLite so my subscriber count doesn't go through the roof with what will likely be a very mixed bag of subscribers – which pushes up costs, of course funnel them through a lengthy onboarding sequence which will weed out all the freeloaders cull the list in a more proactive way that I usually do to root out anyone who is disengaged and then the key part: have all this activity take place outside of MailerLite so it doesn't impact my other lists if lots of people unsubscribe or open rates are terrible etc. Ultimately, I will move the "graduates" over to MailerLite once they have proved themselves and treat them as normal, regular subscribers from that point onwards, and I will be continuing my regular email activity on MailerLite as normal while all this is going on over at SendFox. And who knows, maybe I'll find other uses of it too. That's usually how it goes! Big Changes At BookBub Hope this email today gave you some ideas for your own little publishing house. Before I head off for a wander into the forest, let me leave you with one last video I also recorded this week – because BookBub Ads made a pretty major change to its system which seems to have flown under the radar. That's it! I'm off hunting for pine-cones… Dave P.S. Foraging music this week is Sandie Shaw with Long Live Love. DavidGaughran.com Broomfield Business Park, Malahide, Co. Dublin, Ireland You received this email because you signed up at DavidGaughran.com. Unsubscribe