So, you published a book, now what?
If you speak to anyone who has had experience self-publishing, their first advice would be to promote the living daylights out of it. Well, that’s just fine and dandy but how exactly do you do that?
The easiest way to get your book to gain traction is with graphics. We live in a visually dense world and if you want to get your book in front of readers, you better make it pretty! Unfortunately, creating gorgeous, jaw-dropping graphics is time consuming and I don’t know about the rest of you folks but I would much rather spend that time actually writing.
I have heard a lot of people rave about Book Brush as a graphics tool and finally got my act together to give it a try. Full disclaimer, my background is in photography and design which will highly influence my thoughts on the application.
When I first signed into Book Brush my initial thought was: “Wow! How simple!”. The layout of the platform is very minimal with only a few tabs making the learning curve unbelievably easy. It took me a total of three minutes to figure out where everything was which, compared to the months I spent learning Photoshop, is a huge improvement! I was also incredibly impressed with the basic modifications you can make to your designs, allowing for faster graphics creating.
With that said, the minimal options offered are also what slightly detracted me from the platform. Font types are somewhat limited and while I love the buttons and logos that are offered on the platform I would appreciate having at least the option to create my own shapes.
I was able to make the following images in under ten minutes using the semi-custom selections:
The best part of Book Brush for me was definitely the book renderings. These normally take quite a bit of time to build in Illustrator but thanks to this platform, I was able to create one in seconds. After this, I was sold!
Book Brush offers a free and paid version and while at first, I thought I could get away with the freebie, I soon found myself reaching for a credit card. The yearly payment was not too crazy ($96/year) and offered a LOT more options to play with. For example, if you want to have the full selection of book renderings and be able to use their templates (which are great unless you have a fully branded look for your books), you’ll likely find yourself upgrading. There is also the option to create promotional videos on the paid plan and that in itself is worth the big bucks!
I’ll likely still use Adobe Creative Suite for a lot of my graphics but I can’t say that I’m disappointed with this platform and do encourage others to check it out.
Until the next time.
Stay magical,
Alexis.