Land of Mountains

by Jinx Schwartz

A ten-year-old’s new home on an exotic Caribbean island proves so fascinating she quickly forgets she doesn’t want to leave Texas. After all, where better than a jungle world teeming with voodoo, mystery, and a really pesky zombie, to indulge her favorite pastime: snooping.

Get lost in Lizbuthann’s new world of adventure with her parrot, Peewee, and her horse, Wishes, in this humorous and mysterious tale set in a time and place when little girls ran wild and free.

Based on the award-winning author’s childhood in Haiti, with a dollop of characters who existed only in her vivid imagination.

Grandmother approved for all ages.

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SECOND LIVES: The Journey of Brain-Injury Survivors and Their Healers

by Ralph B. Lilly, Diane F. Kramer, Joyce Stamp Lilly

“Discharged from a hospital just means you’re not dead.” These words of Ralph B. Lilly, M.D., describe his early struggle to recover from a traumatic brain injury. Lilly was a forty-four-year-old practicing neurologist sitting on his motorcycle at a red light when a drunk driver rear-ended him in 1980. In the ICU, after regaining consciousness and being told what happened, he asked, “What’s a hospital? What’s a motorcycle?” This tragic experience transformed his life and his approach to his neurology practice: doctors treat those with brain injury; but loved ones heal them. This memoir weaves together Ralph Lilly’s experience with a collage of stories about his patients and their healers. After his recovery, Lilly retrained in the emerging field of behavioral neurology, which focuses on behavior, memory, cognition, and emotion after brain injury.

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Creating Your Author Brand: The Font Edition

Last week, we talked about using brand colors to communicate who we are at a subconscious level. Another way you can visually convey your brand values is through your choice of fonts.

According to an article from Envato Elements,

“Fonts that provoke a psychological reaction can be used to make a brand feel more trustworthy, friendly, or aspirational… Because human beings are more engaged with visual content than written content, the appearance of the text (i.e. the font) on a brand’s logo, advertising, and other output is more important in determining brand perception and brand memorability than the written content.”

Did you catch that? The appearance of the text is more important than the written content!

As writers, that’s a hard pill to swallow. Aren’t our words everything? However, when it comes to marketing our books, we have to take off our writer hat and put on a different one – a hat that guides us to be intentional about all the details we put into getting our books into the world.

Here are some examples of what different fonts communicate.

On the practical side of choosing fonts for your brand, inspiration is always around you! From billboards to popup ads on your phone screen, you see hundreds of different types of fonts every day.

You can also find font ideas on these websites:
Canva
Elementor
Fontpair
Shutterstock

Once you have an idea of where to begin, here are some things you want to consider as you put together your brand fonts:

Choose 2-3 fonts for your brand
Why? Because they each serve a different purpose. You’ll want one font for your headlines and one for your text. They might be the same font with a different weight (semi-bold, bold, ultra-bold vs. normal) or they may be two completely different ones.

Check to see if you can manipulate them
Can you make them bold? Italic? Can you underline them? If you are using Canva, it’s easy to tell – those features are dimmed if they’re not available. You want to choose fonts with the most flexibility.

Make it easy on yourself
Some fonts are more obscure than others, and some are only available on certain platforms. Once you’ve found the fonts you love, make sure they are available to use on places like your website, in Canva, and other platforms you use frequently (think Microsoft Office 365 or Google products.)

Using fonts to communicate your brand values requires intention and a bit of research. If you’re interested in learning more about creating your author brand, sign up to be the first to hear about our workshops on this topic and more!