April 27, 2023
Do you need an author logo? Logos are the way that businesses quickly and effectively promote themselves through marketing and their products. The bright red and white scrolling font of a soda company provides instant recognition for drinks branded by Coca Cola, while the presence of an untitled “swoosh” immediately connects a product to the athletic powerhouse Nike.
Good logos are like a calling card for businesses around the world, providing not only name recognition but also a calculated emotion or feeling evoked from the design and color of the logo itself. But since the use of a logo can help to market anything from a huge corporation to a single person, creating and strategically implementing an author logo is a great way to help you to define your brand as a professional writer.
Wrong. Having an author logo, even a simple one, can help you unify your marketing materials and help to build a recognizable brand for readers to look for when they reach for a book to read.
A logo is at the heart of all branding and marketing of a business, so creating even a basic author logo can help you to attract and retain an audience so that you can get books into the hands of more readers over time. So where can you use an author logo?
Author Website: Your author logo should be integrated into your author’s website both on the landing page to provide instant brand recognition as well as on your bio page. A shrunken version of your author logo can even be used as an icon, badge, or in place of bullet points throughout your site.
Books: The most obvious place you should place an author logo is on your book’s cover or even the spine of your book if the logo’s shape and size lend themselves to a small location. While the front of your book should include your name near the title, a graphic logo would work best on the back cover where it won’t compete with your cover’s design and color scheme. A black and white version is ideal to use inside of the book along with a list of your other publications or on an About the Author page.
Marketing Materials: The most effective use of an author logo is on all the printed and digital marketing materials you will create. Print your author logo on your business cards, on letterhead, and use it in your email signature. Anytime you print or send out marketing items like your newsletter or an email announcing your attendance at a literary event, include your brand in all correspondence.
Promotional Items: Anytime you provide a promotional item, make sure that your name sticks around by affixing your author logo to the product. Promotional or gift items like a book bag, a baseball hat, or even a t-shirt sporting your logo are a popular way for authors to extend the marketing surrounding their writing projects as well as promote specific books or projects.
Social Media: Using your author logo across all platforms is the easiest way to consistently advertise your personal brand. When readers are seeking you out and they see the familiar logo, they are less likely to be misled into following a lookalike user as well. An author logo is also perfect to use on group pages you run as well, providing another familiar brand visual that will reassure fans that they have landed on the right page with their favorite author.
While you can always engage the services of a graphic designer, many authors decide to design their own logo by following a few basic steps. Logos can be simple or complicated in design, but author logos that are easy to decipher at a glance will be the most versatile to use for authors and may even be easier to convert to a black-and-white version for different uses.
The first step in designing an author logo is to choose the type of logo you want. Each style of logo offers some way to represent your name whether it is through your initials, your first name, or your full name. Some logo styles are clean and classic while other provide opportunities for you to integrate graphic elements, colors, and impactful shapes into your logo.
A Combination Mark logo combines your name with a graphic element.
An Emblem Logo adds a slogan or catchphrase to a combination mark logo.
A Lettermark Logo utilizes the author’s initials and may or may not include a graphic with the logo design.
Wordmark Logos integrate fancy font styles along with a full name. Wordmark logos may have backgrounds with a defined outer shape as well that provide more impact.
The next step in developing a logo to use as an author is to think about the branding details that customize the look and feel of the logo. Choosing these details intentionally can help you bring your logo to life as well as take your brand in the direction you want with the mood, tone, and feel that your colors and graphic elements provide.
Color: Next, select a color or combo of 2-3 colors that are common for your genre along with a neutral like black or white. An author that writes horror, for example, should not choose a pastel color palette because it will always seem out of place when paired with published works sporting genre-appropriate cover colors. You may decide to keep your logo black only, which is a good option for a simple lettermark style logo.
Graphics: Emblem and combination logos both employ the use of a graphic that is integrated into the logo. For these, choose a meaningful graphic design element that connects to you as a person, as a writer, or to your work. The graphic should be recognizable at a glance and not contain too many details so that it will look familiar when it is used in both smaller and larger sizes than the logo was designed.
Many author logos employ the use of literary symbols, graphics that indicate growth or change, as well as graphics that are relevant to their specific genre or book themes.
A logo provides continuity throughout an author’s marketing efforts because as an author, you will be easily recognizable by that branding, whether it is used as your avatar on social media or included on every book cover that you design. When potential readers see the same logo design on your website, social media platforms, and ultimately on your books, it will build credibility with them to see your professional continuity.
For readers who have yet to discover your work, having a conscientiously designed logo that reflects what type of writing you do can help you more quickly gain an audience. A logo helps take the guesswork out of who you are as a writer and creator since the tone and genre implications are already included in the logo’s design.
And for authors that publish more than one book or produce written projects in other mediums, the logo becomes a recognizable icon that readers will come to connect with the author, making it much easier to build a dedicated audience. The quick, at-a-glance recognition that a logo offers authors is hard to replicate with almost any other kind of marketing strategy.
Since a logo is designed to be simple yet memorable, it is flexible enough to be used in almost any size and is not marketing-specific for a single use. And while your logo may develop and grow as your authorship matures, keeping the elements of your author logo consistent will provide lasting marketing opportunities because it will become your own personal Nike “swoosh” to your readers.
Finishing your next self-published book will entail tying up a lot of loose ends like designing your book’s cover art and formatting the front and back matter pages. When you have a personal logo to use, finalizing your book becomes a little bit easier because it simplifies one of those steps on this book as well as any future books you decide to write.
And working with a trusted printer like Publishing Xpress is another way that you can ensure that your book will look fantastic when it arrives from the printer. Publishing Xpress has helped authors for decades bring their manuscripts to life with their quality materials and on-demand printing and their cover design experts can help you find the best way to incorporate your author logo into your next project.
So whether you want to print a small run of previous books that include your new brand, you are ready to develop your latest project’s cover design, or just want to explore other printed materials that you can use your new logo on, Publishing Xpress can help you get started.
© 2024 Publishing Xpress. All Rights Reserved.
