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September Publishing

Independant publishing house

The Challenge

Sophie is an internationally bestselling author with a large backlist across a number of genres. The challenge was to create a site that could showcase the breadth of her work in a visually unified way.

The site also needed to display both UK and US covers and this was further complicated by the American versions often having different titles.

Sophie wanted a clean, minimal site with everything organised into separate units  – no text ‘floating’ on the background.

“My old site was in desperate need of a refresh and I wanted something stylish & professional.”
SOPHIE HANNAH

The Solution

A UNIFYING THEME FOR A CROSS-GENRE BACKLIST

A gradient background designed on on a per-book basis creates a unifying feature across the genres and editions. The gradient colour scheme is designed to work with  both UK and US jackets and to allow home-page promotion of a fiction and non-fiction title at the same time.

Text and calls to action are organised into units with low opacity backgrounds, allowing the gradient colours to show through.

A strong cusom font creates further visual unity and gives character to a minimal design that uses no images apart from jackets.

CUSTOM ILLUSTRATIONS AND GIFS

I used the custom illustrations from Sophie’s book cover on the area of the homepage devoted to promoting the latest fiction title.

For the non-fiction title we created hand-drawn illustrations in house and an animated gif to work alongside those. This adds interest to a non-photographic book page.

“My latest Poirot novel is dedicated to Faith, who has gone above and beyond and taught me so much.”
SOPHIE HANNAH

PROMOTIONAL PAGES

The page showcasing Sophie’s new non-fiction title, How to Hold a Grudge,  is a portal to a selection of further promotional pages.  Readers can enjoy the Grudge of the Week, the Grudge Music title of the week, and the How to Hold a Grudge Podcast.

To balance information about all these pages we have cactus illustrations in various stages of bloom, a custom gif, a slideshow and selected quotes from the text. It all adds up to a rich reader experience around the topic of Sophie’s book.

“Faith has worked closely with me to deliver a top-notch website. Since our first contact she has listened patiently and worked hard, brimming with ideas and making them work. Faith knows instinctively what will have the right effect and I couldn’t be happier with the website she has made for me. It has a personal touch that I don’t think I could have got from anyone else. I can’t recommend Faith highly enough!”
SOPHIE HANNAH

Site Features

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Custom gradient background for each book to visually unify cross-genre backlist and solve UK/US title and cover variation issue

 
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Content organised into blocks with semi-transparent background to allow gradient to show through

 
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Extra custom built pages for marketing purposes including giveaways, competitions and list building

 

Events display by month with images and booking links

 

Extras section to display articles without author needing to commit to full blog functionality

 

QUESTIONS ABOUT A WEBSITE OR PROMOTING YOUR BOOKS?

LET’S TALK!

I’m Faith Tilleray. I’m here at my computer most days and welcome any contact from human beings – particularly the special kind who write books. 
Pick up the phone anytime during work hours.

You can call me on 01588 660221 or 07891 449 007

Alternatively, drop me a line on faith@aisforauthor.com