How to make a Facebook ad from your book cover

Also, how to remove the title and just keep your cover image

Hello again

This week’s video was in response to a question that someone asked. Angela wanted to know if I had any suggestions as to how she could make a Facebook ad from her book cover when she couldn’t ask her designer for the background image. We had a brief discussion about licences - if you’ve bought a book cover you should (please check your licence) have the right to use that book cover image for the purposes of marketing your book as well as putting it on the cover of the book. 

Your rights are only to the composition as a whole, not the individual elements. So if the designer bought three images from Shutterstock and combined them to make one image, you can use the final image, but not the component images. 

You can ask your cover designer for the layer file (which will contain all the separate components) - depending on the licences they have for the original elements, they may or may not be able to give them to you. 

More generally, you can ask for a copy of the image without text as well as the image with the text on it. I know I always supply both. In fact, I usually supply the Canva file, so that you can amend the text if you win an award or become a Sunday Times bestseller or something. (If you want me to design a cover image for you, just reply to this email to get in touch!). 

Now that’s out of the way, let’s look at what happens if, for some reason, you have the book cover, with the text, and can’t get hold of the background image by itself. It took me a while to work it out, but you can use Grab Text (Canva Pro feature) or Magic Erase (also a Canva Pro feature) to remove the text. It may not be as cleanly done as if you had the original layer files, but in a pinch, it will probably do.

In this tutorial I show you how to use Grab Text to remove the text, use a combination of Magic Grab and Magic Erase to remove some pictorial elements from the image and, somewhat randomly, how to make a gold(Ish) coloured sticker.

Here’s the tutorial. Just click on the play button to view the YouTube video.

Do you have any questions about how to do something in Canva? Let me know and I’ll see if I can help.

As always, please help me out by sharing this Substack with your authors friends. I really appreciate it.

Regards

Jeev