BOOKS ON BILLBOARDS

Celtic Connexions is thrilled to have the creator of look4books.co.uk, Gary Walker, here with us today. Not only does Gary support indie authors on this site, but he also creates fabulous billboards with their covers. This is the one he did for my debut novel, A Shadow in the Past. I’m thrilled beyond words.

Books on Billboards

So settle in Gary and make yourself comfortable in our ‘hot seat’. You work in a completely different field. How did you get interested in photo manipulation? How long have you been doing it?

I have been seriously doing this work for around 18 months. The reason for me getting interested in this would be better suited to your second question

What made you decide to do “books on billboards” for Indie authors?

I had written two books which I had published independently. They did fairly well on Amazon Kindle for the first few weeks, but then I noticed a sharp fall off of sales. At this time I had no interest in Social Media, so knew nothing of the marketing possibilities of using images with links to my book selling pages on sites like Twitter and Facebook. By the time I had gained this knowledge I had already decided to remove my book from Amazon. I then made the decision to help other independently published authors by putting their books on my website www.look4books.co.uk and began to design posters for them.

When did you start your website look4books.co.uk?

The website has been going for a number of years, it began life as an antiquarian book selling, and information site. I had been a collector of old books for more years than I care to remember.

Of all the billboards you’ve done so for authors, do you have any particular favourites and will you share them with us? Was it the degree of difficulty, the type of billboard the author wanted, or the way the colours from the background worked with the book cover images?

A lot of questions there. To be perfectly honest the answer would probably be all of the above, and sometimes none of the above. What I’m trying to say is I just know when a poster really works. It also helps when I get feedback from the author themselves, be that positive or negative.

Many thanks Melanie for inviting me to do this interview.

Thanks for coming over today. It’s been great getting the ‘inside scoop’ on your work. Here are a few more examples of Gary’s brilliant book posters.

Books on Billboards

Books on Billboards

Books on Billboards

Books on BillboardsYou can see more of Gary’s photo manipulation genius on his Pinterest board book posters.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.