Monthly Archives: February 2020

How to Design Low-Cost Social Media Book Marketing Visuals

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By Books Author Denise Turney

Author Denise Turney Twitter social media book marketing profile
Twitter Social Media Book Marketing Page

Social media book marketing can do one of two things. Go down this marketing road and you could spend loads of time (I’m talking hours each week) only to yield small results. This is a path of frustration and disillusion. I know. I’ve been on this road before.

You could also find a way to tap into the right social media book audience, connect these book lovers to an effective message and watch your book sales increase. Visuals, especially when combined with clear audio, are great ways to marry the right message with the right audience.

Social Media Book Marketing Design Tools

Here are virtual marketing design platforms that save you time. These design tools are intuitive. You can figure out how to use them in as little as a few minutes. Even more, pricing on these design programs is inexpensive. I’ve used more than one of the below tools to design book marketing visuals in less than 10 minutes. Because I generally reuse designs, after I create the designs, I save them as a PDF or JPEG.

That way, I can publish the designs to several social media platforms. It’s a cool way to keep social media book marketing messaging fresh. As a tip, include your website URL (or the URL to the site that you want readers to click on) on the actual design). And now, to the low-cost book marketing design platforms:

  • Affinity – https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/: Affinity Publisher works with iPad, Mac and Windows. Book marketing visuals you can create with Affinity rival top professional marketing designs. The Windows version cost $49.99. Images are crisp, sharp, definitely attention grabbing.
  • Bootstrap – https://getbootstrap.com/:  Blog headers, one-page websites, book marketing visual carousels and analytics are a few design options at Bootstrap. Similar to Canva, Bootstrap offers themes you can use to kick off new book marketing designs. You have to install the program to use it.
  • Canva – https://www.canva.com/: I love Canva because of how easy it is to use. There’s the option to select book marketing designs like book covers, posters, postcards and social media posts. You can use existing designs, plop in your own images or edit Canva templates. There are free designs and low-cost designs. Another feature that I love about Canva is their print options. I use this to create postcards that I snail mail to media, book clubs, etc.

More Book Marketing Design Tools

  • Constant Contact – https://www.constantcontact.com: Although I don’t consider Constant Contact to be a true book marketing design platform, Constant Contact does have templates you can use to create newsletters and presentations that you can push out to target book buyers. Cost depends on the size of your mailing list; but can be as low as $39.99 a month. Recommend using Constant Contact, or a similar program, if you plan to use the program to automate and maintain your contact list.
  • Fixma – https://www.figma.com: Pricing for Fixma start at “Free” and works up to $45 a month. Pricing depends on the number of editors working on your designs.
  • Keynote – https://www.apple.com/keynote/: This application uses the Cloud to let you design and edit presentations.
  • Pixelmator – https://www.pixelmator.com: Great design tool to build out book marketing visuals, especially if you have design experience. You can buy a package for as little as $39.99. Pixelmator is built to edit existing designs.

Marketing books and selling books is ongoing, persistent work. It takes vision, passion, commitment and drive. You have to make the right choices often enough to scale. The above book marketing design tools could help you to deliver effective messaging about your books to the right book buyers.

Love Pours When You Receive Love as It Is

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By Books Author Denise Turney

Love pours and flows everywhere that you are. Yet, love seems evasive, hard to grasp and experience, let alone hold onto. Could part of the reason why you feel as if love is separate from you, a place where you aren’t, be due to how you define love?

Love Pour Over Me picture of woman smiling toward sky
Love Pours Over Me Book Picture

What Is Love?

For example, do you think of love as a warm inner feeling? Or maybe you associate love with intuition and a sense of inner knowing. Even more, love might feel like an adrenalin rush. Depending on your childhood, you might even think that love requires sacrifice.

Believe this and you might seek out a partner, colleagues, neighbors and friends who you deem worthy for you to sacrifice yourself for. When this occurs, you might give up your opinions, beliefs and passions so the other person can fulfill their beliefs and passions.

In extreme cases, you might become mute while around these people, judging these “special” people as more important than you are. But this route leads to frustration. Because no one is “special” or better or less than anyone else.

Love and Sacrifice

Years could pass before you realize this truth, especially if the dance of sacrifice is playing out in an intimate relationship. That’s when the relationship might be severely shaken. Why? You might feel as if you’ve given a lot more than you’ve received. Furthermore, you might feel like you’d given a lot more than the other person is worth.

And this is a major reason why love is not sacrifice. After all, what would love need? If love has and is everything that’s truth, why would love need sacrifice in any form?

Perceptions and beliefs about what love is, particularly as it regards sacrifice, can make love feel far away, like it’s only for the lucky few. Lack of forgiveness also makes love seem faraway, unreal.

Forgiveness Opens You So Love Pours

You may have heard the saying you get more of what you focus on. This alone, could be a key motivator to forgive. Focus on a wrong you perceive that someone has done to you, and you could get more chances to be wronged, definitely not the way to feel love’s presence.

I learned this lesson the hard way. When I perceived that someone had mistreated me, I told myself that I’d be dumb not to dislike her. The discomfort of carrying lack of forgiveness became a burden.

So, I decided to forgive.

But forgiving felt hard. It felt like I was pushing a mountain up a mountain.

Fortunately, I read an article filled with tips on how to open up to miracles. The writer of the article shared, to open up to miracles, spend at least an hour, no more than two hours, at one time saying, “I love you,” followed by the name of the person who I was struggling to forgive.

I tried it. And to my surprise it worked! A woman who’d mistreated me for more than a year, suddenly came up to me and gave me a hug. I was floored! She did it totally out of the blue! After that, our relationship was much better, and I actually felt love when I was in the woman’s presence. Before, I’d felt fear, anger, frustration and disappointment. Better yet, our relationship never went back to the strained way that it had been before.

When It Doesn’t Feel That Love Pours and Flows

Consider your relationships. Honestly, are there relationships with colleagues, partners, adult children, relatives or friends that find you feeling angry, defensive, afraid, depressed or small? Do you feel anything except love when you’re with these people?

What do you think might be blocking love’s flow in those situations? Could forgiveness play a role, even if it’s a matter of forgiving yourself?

For me, the experience with the woman who embraced me seemingly out-of-the-blue, was all the proof I needed that lack of forgiveness blocks the realization of love’s presence. And blocking love, leaves out goodness. You have to ask yourself if you’re up for that type of sacrifice.

Love Pours Over You

It’s a question Raymond Clarke has to ask himself in the book Love Pour Over Me. For Raymond, the struggle to forgive is rooted in childhood. The final choice he makes will do more than allow him to see (or remain blind) to love’s eternal presence. The final choice he makes will change his life and the lives of several people.

And isn’t this what is happening with your decisions about love and forgiveness? So, what do you think love is? Why do you define love this way? Are you open to seeing love as much more than you imagined? Are you ready to forgive? Are you ready to open to real love?

Here are a few tips that could help you open up to receive love:

  • Write down 5 things about the person you are struggling to forgive that you appreciate
  • Pen a letter to the person, sharing specific ways you feel she/he has wronged you. End the letter by sharing two things about the person you are thankful for.
  • Journal how you feel, penning thoughts that surface as you work to forgive the person. In my case, I’d journal about the woman giving me a hug out of the blue after I spent one to two hours saying “I love you” to her out loud.

Truth is, we cannot exist without love. Therefore, love is always with us. If you don’t feel love’s presence, what do you think it blocking the feeling / thoughts / experience of love? Hopefully, Raymond’s story will help you to spot love blocks as well as motivate you to choose love.

What Are You Afraid of? Regain Your Life

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By Books Author Denise Turney

To regain your life, face what scares you. Fear or love, that is all there is to choose from. What if the only choices that you ever had, that we all have, are between fear and love? Nothing else.

Life seems much more complicated. But is it?

Think back to your childhood. How old were you when you first felt fear, when you first felt afraid?

Light from candle to regain your life
Lit Candle Wix – Wikimedia Commons – Picture by Edukeralam, Navaneeth Krishnan S

I remember this golden, brown German Shepherd across the street from where my family lived in Ohio. Back then, I was eight years old. As usual, when I was outside playing – riding a bike, enjoying a game of hopscotch or jumping rope – I was with my siblings and friends.

Fear Offers No Comfort

There certainly was comfort in numbers. Yet, regardless of how many people were outside, when that German Shepherd (his name was “King”) showed up, people darted. I’m talking teenagers and kids. Folks broke out and headed for cover.

All of this fear over a German Shepherd who had broken his backyard chain again. The more intense the fear I was experiencing became, the more angry and helpless I felt. I also wanted the dog to just disappear, making it easy for the entire scene to be over.

Oh, but, when dogs break loose, they don’t go right back from whence they came. Instead, they explore, peeing on bushes and tree trunks. They also like to kick up dirt with their hind feet, as if to let every other dog in the neighborhood know how big and bad they are. And even if they don’t intend to, they scare a lot of kids. (See these tips on how you could face fear and regain your life.)

Ever Changing Fear

My fear of “King” disappeared after my family moved to a different neighborhood. But that wasn’t the end of fear for me. After “King”, there were bullies, spooky movies, the nightly news, and a few bad grades that I was very concerned about showing my dad.

Fast forward to my adult years, and “King” was far at the back of my memory, certainly no longer something that pulled up fear in me. The 12 year old girl I’d been afraid of, the girl I let bully me in elementary school, didn’t even pop into my mind. She was long gone as it relates to fear, totally in the past.

But don’t go thinking that I stopped choosing fear over love. In fact, in place of big neighborhood dogs, school bullies and a bad report card, there were bills, fear of the unknown, fear of love, challenging work assignments and growing numbers of people I knew who were exiting their bodies or transitioning.

Yeah. The things that I chose to allow fear to use to bind me have changed. But that type of change doesn’t mean anything unless I’m choosing love instead of fear.

Regain Your Life – Choose Love Instead of Fear

The good news. It’s a choice that I’m paying attention to, practicing awareness so I can choose love. Thing is, fear, as you can see, takes on a myriad of forms. Its content remains unchanged. But the forms that fear uses seem always in motion.

Oddly, with love, it’s the content that I have long, perhaps always, focused on. Safe, warm feelings, a sense of belonging and conviction that I’m cared for are part of love’s content for me. Doesn’t matter if that content comes through my pet turtle, a friend, relative, engaging in my passion (writing) or listening to the smoothest song. If the content is there, I feel it. I appreciate it.

And the content never changes. It’s one of the things that I absolutely love about love. Perhaps it’s time that we all focused more on love’s content and less on fear and its myriad forms.

Toward this effort, I wrote a book about what fear did to a town in Memphis, Tennessee. The title of that book is Spiral. Read the book and you may be amazed at how far reaching, twisting, blinding and binding fear can get to be. It’s worse than any virus. Once fear takes root, look out. Or better yet, choose love.

Can You Join in Love Again?

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By Books Author Denise Turney

African American couple in love smiling next to bikes wearing helmets
Couple in Love with Bikes – Wikimedia Commons – Picture by Bill Branson

Feel that nudge in your heart? Maybe your core is telling you that it’s time to join in love again. But are you ready?

It’s easy to fall in love when you’re young. It’s easy to fall in love when you haven’t had your heart broken. But go through the heartache of divorce or even a non-marital breakup and you could become reluctant to enter a new romantic relationship.

And who could blame you? After all, you’re merely trying to protect yourself.

Give yourself chance to join in love again

Yet, self-protection has a cost. The highest cost is living with an invisible wall around your heart and your mind, a wall that no one can penetrate. If you’ve experienced this, you might feel alone, isolated or like no one understands you. In addition, you might start to believe that you’re simply not someone who will ever enjoy a loving, romantic relationship.

But what if you’re wrong? What if you can join in love again. What if your next relationship could actually be rewarding, enriching, empowering and inspiring?

Prepping your inner being for love

To enjoy a healthy relationship, make sure your inner being is healthy. Signs that you are inwardly healthy include:

  • Freedom from suspecting other people of doing wrong when there has been absolutely nothing done or said that would indicate that another person has intended to harm you
  • No interest in searching through your partner’s cell phone simply because you want to be certain that you’re not being cheated on (again when there has been no indication of infidelity)
  • Engaging in a variety of interest (e.g., sports, crafts, traveling)
  • Appreciation for the chance to experience new events, conversations, etc. with your partner and others
  • Lack of obsession
  • Strong family and friends support system
  • Connections with people who are positive and improving their lives
  • Taking full responsibility for yourself
  • Daily routines that encourage physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health. Examples include exercising, meditating, nature walks, keeping an appreciation journal, worship of the Creator and resting.

Acknowledge your self-worth

You’re right. It takes work to maintain good inner health, especially in this world where there are long work hours, financial challenges, family demands and harsh environmental shifts. Yet, it’s doable and so worth it.

In fact, just as you brush your teeth and shower or bathe every day, it takes daily actions to maintain inner health. You need good inner health to attract other people who are committed to being inwardly healthy. Simply reading self-help books isn’t enough. You and your partner need to take the right actions to enjoy inner health.

If this is new to you, start by acknowledging your self-worth. Below are a few shortcuts that could help you acknowledge your self-worth:

  • Engage in hobbies or work that you love. For me, that’s writing page turning novels! Oh, and I also love to interview artists on Off The Shelf Books Talk Radio
  • Remind yourself that other people’s opinions do not give you real worth
  • Try something new once a month. For example, you could drive a new way to or from work, go swimming if you haven’t been to a pool in years, ride a bike, travel someplace new or try a different food.
  • Be patient with yourself. You’re learning.
  • Recall past successes.
  • Remember that your worth is not tied to what you do, how much money you have, who you know, what you weigh or where you live.
  • Say “I love you” to that gorgeous person in the mirror!

You just might be ready to join in love again

Can you join in love again? Of course, you can. In fact, joining in love with someone who is ready to love you may get easier after you acknowledge your self-worth and get your inner self healthy.

To join in love again, you also need to open up to the idea of being in a romantic relationship. Turning away from loving people, doesn’t signal that you’re welcome to romantic love. After all, just as you don’t want to be rejected, the person who’d like to approach you, doesn’t want to be rejected either.

A final thought, you’re never going to know everything that’s going to happen to you in this world. And why would you want to? In fact, opening up to surprises is part of being in love. As you start to acknowledge your self-worth more, work on your inner health and take full responsibility for yourself, surprises may stop being viewed as risks to you.

They might become opportunities to grow, have fun, avoid boredom and stay engaged in the details of your life. Surprises also might serve as a pathway into deeper, richer, fuller love experiences that you treasure with your partner. So, like Raymond Clarke in Love Pour Over Me, you just might be ready to try romantic love again.

Signs You’re in a Healthy Love Relationship

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By Books Author Denise Turney

Love Pour Over Me book cover of African American couple in healthy love relationship
Love Pour Over Me Book Cover – Denise Turney

Chance to flourish in a healthy love relationship may be the top desire of every adult. Time, disappointment, aging communities and diverse solo social events don’t seem to be putting the brakes on this desire. In fact, the numbers of people searching for a romantic partner to enter a healthy relationship with may be growing, thanks for the Internet. For starters, Pew research reports that 15% of American adults have used a dating app.

Everyone’s Looking for Love – Who’s Finding Love

Percentages are higher for Americans who have never tied the knot. About 30% of American adults who have never been married have used a dating app. Gone are the days when an adult posting a dating ad in a newspaper or magazine is considered a “lonely heart” or as being “socially inept”. But finding someone to get involved with and enjoying a healthy relationship are not always the same.

So, how do you know if you’re in a healthy relationship? A good starting point may be to pay attention to how you feel when you speak to yourself. Pay attention to how you feel based on how you treat yourself. For example, do you feel anxious or peaceful when you highlight mistakes that you made?

Do you feel confident or cowardly when you encourage yourself or speak positive affirmations to yourself? If we’re created to experience joy, love and peace, then, that may well be the hallmark of a healthy relationship. Forget trying to dupe yourself. Go after what you were created to have. Consider flourishing with joy, love and peace to be key signs that you’re in a healthy relationship.

Honesty Is Pathway to Healthy Love Relationship

This means that your partner and you actively help each other to experience joy, love and peace. You make it a goal. It may take honesty to accept this, to allow yourself to receive this trio of blessings. These three cannot be swapped out for excitement, romance or sleeping all day. Your relationship either enriches you with joy, love and peace or it doesn’t. No substituting.

More signs that you’re in a healthy relationship include:

  • Accountability is clear and accepted – Both you and your partner take full responsibility for your thoughts, emotions and behavior. You don’t blame each other for how you feel, think or behave. If you want to end or start a new way of thinking or behaving, you hold yourself responsible for doing what it takes to achieve that. This includes lovingly dealing with sabotaging mental forecasting.
  • Change celebrations – You and your partner don’t run from change. You don’t curse the world when your routines change. Instead, you celebrate change, seeing it as another chance to awaken and grow.
  • Admit when you’re not happy – Even if you grew up in a home where you rarely saw your parents laughing or expressing peace and happiness, you and your partner are not afraid to admit when you’re not happy.

More Signs of a Healthy Love Relationship

  • Clear, honest communication – Communicating is not enough. If you’re in a healthy relationship, you and your partner are honest, open and clear while communicating. You don’t belittle each other. You don’t diminish each other to relatives or friends.
  • Ongoing work – Healthy relationships see couples continuing to learn. Both you and your partner refuse to believe that you “know it all”. You listen to one another. You keep paying attention and learning.
  • Common goals – Rather than strive to convince or sell your partner on a goal, you and your lover pursue common goals. Neither of you feels as if you’re constantly “giving in” or being forced to do what you don’t really want to do just to keep the other partner happy.

All shared, no healthy relationship sign tops love. This is also where things can get tricky, as each person may have a different perception of love. Start discovering what your would-be lover’s perception about love is early in the dating process. Hook up with someone who has a vastly different perception of love than you do and, despite how much energy or time you invest in the relationship, the road could long be rocky.

Healthy relationships, like the one shared in Love Pour Over Me may take time. The best intentions can see relationships experience highs and lows. The good news is that some couples, like the couple in Love Pour Over Me, are truly meant to be. Here’s to wishing that’s what you experience!