Category Archives: Books on Billboards

Using posters to publicize your book

Fancy seeing the cover of your book on a billboard, bus stop, subway/metro station? Think it’s impossible? Too expensive? What if I told you, you could get two posters for your online advertising for the low price of £15. Here are four posters done by Gary Walker of Look 4 Books.

posters

A Shadow in the Past

Nineteen-year-old Sarah Shand finds herself thrust back into the past. There she struggles to keep her real identity from a society that finds her comments and ideas strange and her speech and actions forward, unlike Victorian women. When Sarah verbally confronts confining social practices, including arranged marriages, powerful enemies commit her to a lunatic asylum. After falling in love with the handsome Laird of Weetshill, Robert Robertson, she must decide whether to find her way back to her own time or to remain in the past with him.

posters

The Consequences Collection

The Consequences Collection is an eclectic compilation of twelve stories ranging from non-fiction through creative non-fiction to pure fiction, in prose and poetry.

The story of a Scottish Home Child is based on fact and told from the child’s point of view; The Mystery Woman of Kinettles is a non-fiction article on the appearance and subsequent disappearance of a woman’s body near the Wellington County House of Industry (Poor House) in 1879 Southwestern Ontario.

Some of these stories are lighter than others, and some might even beg you to leave the lights on.

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Gary’s posters are unique to each book which makes them even more popular with the authors he supports. The two below are the most recent ones he did for me.

From a touch of medieval…

posters

to a modern setting…

posters

You can see more of Gary’s work on pinterest or on his Books and Life blog.

Which one of these book posters to you like best?

 

BOOKS ON BILLBOARDS

Celtic Connexions is thrilled to have the creator of look4books.co.uk, Gary Walker, here with us today. Not only does Gary support indie authors on this site, but he also creates fabulous billboards with their covers. This is the one he did for my debut novel, A Shadow in the Past. I’m thrilled beyond words.

Books on Billboards

So settle in Gary and make yourself comfortable in our ‘hot seat’. You work in a completely different field. How did you get interested in photo manipulation? How long have you been doing it?

I have been seriously doing this work for around 18 months. The reason for me getting interested in this would be better suited to your second question

What made you decide to do “books on billboards” for Indie authors?

I had written two books which I had published independently. They did fairly well on Amazon Kindle for the first few weeks, but then I noticed a sharp fall off of sales. At this time I had no interest in Social Media, so knew nothing of the marketing possibilities of using images with links to my book selling pages on sites like Twitter and Facebook. By the time I had gained this knowledge I had already decided to remove my book from Amazon. I then made the decision to help other independently published authors by putting their books on my website www.look4books.co.uk and began to design posters for them.

When did you start your website look4books.co.uk?

The website has been going for a number of years, it began life as an antiquarian book selling, and information site. I had been a collector of old books for more years than I care to remember.

Of all the billboards you’ve done so for authors, do you have any particular favourites and will you share them with us? Was it the degree of difficulty, the type of billboard the author wanted, or the way the colours from the background worked with the book cover images?

A lot of questions there. To be perfectly honest the answer would probably be all of the above, and sometimes none of the above. What I’m trying to say is I just know when a poster really works. It also helps when I get feedback from the author themselves, be that positive or negative.

Many thanks Melanie for inviting me to do this interview.

Thanks for coming over today. It’s been great getting the ‘inside scoop’ on your work. Here are a few more examples of Gary’s brilliant book posters.

Books on Billboards

Books on Billboards

Books on Billboards

Books on BillboardsYou can see more of Gary’s photo manipulation genius on his Pinterest board book posters.