Brand Spotlight: Featuring TK Lawyer

Welcome back to Finding Your Indie. I'm Bonnie Paulson, and I'm Mandie Stevens. We are here today with another awesome Brand Spotlight.

Now we mentioned this in our last Monday Marketing Tips and Tricks, but we just wanted to make sure that everybody's aware of what's going on moving forward.

We've had a lot of people requesting brand spotlights and so we are going to hold off on doing ad account audits. Not that anybody signed up for them. And we're going to also hold off on doing Random Fact Thursdays. So, we will be doing brand spotlights until we run out and then we'll go back to our normal schedule.

And if you want to be in a brand spotlight, we would love to do it. Also for scheduling purposes, and legality purposes, we're probably just going to hold off on having anybody actually on the video with us. It's a lot easier for us to do it at our own schedule rather than trying to get three people to schedule.

So, we're just going to go forward this way. Hopefully it's helpful. If you guys have any questions, hopefully you feel comfortable reaching out to us. Again, we really, really, really would love to have more authors to do. So just let us know what we need to do. Today I'm going to let Mandie introduce our author, and we're going to go from there.

We are featuring TK Lawyer. I absolutely adore her. She comes to Orlando Reads Books every single year. She is probably the very best person that I have on a panel because she's so lively. I've bought her books because of it. And you know, I usually don't read a lot of sexy stuff. It's just not my thing. But the way she talked about her books was like, oh, I have to read it because there's so much more to the books than just sexiness.

She's such a sweetheart. She's so sweet. And she always had these cute little cat ears on. I love that she does that for her branding because every time she goes, people can easily recognize her because she has her little cat ears.

Yeah, that's awesome. Does she have cats in her brand?

I don't think so. I know she might have shifters.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, she's just cute.

Well, let's dive into this. I'm going to have you take point on this and I'll just make conversation since you know her. This is our normal brand spotlight. We have not looked at her stuff previously. Mandie might have at some point because they're friends. I have not seen her stuff. I have not looked at it. So, I might make some summations based on what I see.

So, if you want me to do that first, like this is what I think it is. I mean, you just told me she writes shifters, but that way we can kind of get like a rough one time. I do want to say that I do not offer advice to anyone unless they come to me.

She's coming to us.

I just want to preface that I haven't said anything to her or anybody else. I think that's important.

Oh, no, of course.

We don't walk up to someone and say, oh, I noticed your brand.

Yeah, that's not what we do. It's a, hey, can you get some help? We'd love to give you our opinion and what we think would sell and how to fix something, but we would never, ever. And even if you don't take our advice, we're not saying it's like the end all be all advice either. I think that's important to caveat sometimes because just because we say something doesn't mean its gold.

It works. It does work. And we've helped a lot of people fix their brands and fix their business. But that doesn't mean it's the only way to do something.

I do like that you caveated to that.

This is her Amazon page. I went here first, didn't look at her books or anything. We're just going to scroll down to her books here. This one is set up in popularity. So, it's the first book left to right, top to bottom on what's the most popular of her books.

I am surprised that Christmas one is most popular until I saw the picture. That's a really good picture of the copy. I think she just had a freebie on that. Oh, good. I don't love the cover. It's very difficult for me to see what's going on. It's hard to read the title.

Yeah. I can't read the title. It's embossing. My co-writer will tell you, I absolutely hate embossing with a passion. It reminds me of 1990 Photoshop. So, if I see that, I automatically think it's a self-published book.

It's funny because I love embossing. I can't see it on here. It's just, there's a lot going on here.

You can tell it's Christmas though because of the red. I see the red. I'm like, oh, Jingle Bears. So, I know it's a bear shifter, which I love, but overall I hate the font. And the author font is not her. Is that her brand? I can't tell if that's her brand font or not.

Yeah, it is.

Oh, well, it's not on all the books. I think the other one's an anthology, but I can't see the background in that. It looks like there might be a bear in there.

Yeah, I don't know. I can't tell what it is. This one looks more to market where you have a guy and then there's the wolf. So that one, I can tell that one's a shifter. That's good. I like that cover. You look at it, and you know it's a shifter.

Yeah. It's very clean looking. Easy to see.

Now are these set up in series? Does she have series?

I don't know. I've only read a couple. I read nightfall before, that's the book I had bought at the conference.

Which I like the cover. Well, it's on pre-order. Let's see what's going on. Maybe she's redoing it? I thought that was the one I had bought. It was a different cover though.

Let's see more. Okay. You can see these, the Centurion and Jasper, you can tell that's in a series.

Yes. It is in a series.

Okay. But there's no series, and there's no eBook for him either.

Wow, maybe she took him down. I mean, those covers are great and they're very to market.

Yes, these are.

I was going to say out of all of them, I think these are the ones that are to market and it's branded very clearly for the series.

I don't know where they're at. There's no eBook for them. Maybe she, I don't know, maybe she pulled them. I feel a little like I'm wading into something that I'm not quite sure what this is. So, without sounding rude, I think first of all, right out of the gate, the covers are not going to be doing her any favors right now.

I’m just thinking that a lot of these covers are not doing her any favors. Some of these where like, this is a great. image, I think, you know, I think the image is great. If that's what it is, it looks like a military romance. It does not look like a shifter one at all. No, but if you look at Picture and Pserfect, that's not shifter either.

No. So writing multiple genres here.

Yeah. And the Angels Ex Wives Club, that premise just right there, the title, I love the premise of that. I think that's great. But again, the covers are, you can't read it. These aren't even thumbnail. These are pretty big on my laptop and I'm having a really hard time reading.

I think it's the fonts. Well, it's the font set on the background. I can't even read what's above her name there. International Bestselling Author? I read it on daybreak, but barely.

Okay, yeah, I think, okay, let's go back to her home and let's look at her bio.

Okay. So, her bio says passionate, playful, paranormal. Okay. So paranormal, if that is in your brand tagline, then every single book needs to be paranormal on some level. And for instance, when we saw the military one, unless I mean that one, and then that went with the playful one that you saw, those were definitely not. At least they didn't look it.

They're not, it says in here, she writes contemporary romance as well.

So she needs to separate those.

Yeah. So, her audience doesn't know what they're getting and they can't read the titles either, or at least I can't cause I'm blind. So, she's been writing since high school. That's cute. Okay. So, so right out of the gate though, what I'm saying is if she's going to have passionate, playful and paranormal, then the books need to be paranormal.

I don't care what it says down here. If this is your tagline, which is what she has in her logo, passionate, playful, paranormal, then that means all of your books need to be paranormal in that pen name, because that's what you have literally said your brand is. So, if I'm expecting passionate, playful, paranormal, and I go into the books and I see something like this one, which is obviously not shifters. It's not paranormal. This one's not paranormal.

It looks like there might be angel wings in there. But yeah, I can't tell. I can't tell what they shift or shorts. I'm just going to go into picture imperfect and let's see what it is.

Okay. So it's a short book. It's only 137 pages. Okay. Contemporary romance. Yeah, this is contemporary romance. This blurb looks kind of like it was written in like poetry style, like prose. I'm not sure. Okay.

I hate the font on that. I can't even read it.

Right. Okay, so here's what we're going to do. So, TK, if this was me I would split out my pen names. I would split out my work. I would go strictly paranormal. Contemporary, right? Like I would literally split those two out and we have a video on how exactly to split out pen names when and how and what you need to do in order to do that coming up.

Several people are asking us how to do that now that we're doing these brand spotlights and suggesting that. They're wondering how to do it. So, we're not throwing you to the wolves, pun intended. So, with your shifters you would go over here and do a new pen name.

And here's the thing. It should not cost you thousands and thousands of dollars to re-cover these books. We're not asking you to go out and get the best cover designer. All we're recommending is that you get better covers, more to market, more to brand. So, you can go things like Mibley art is actually pretty affordable.

Fiverr, I know people who get covers off of Fiverr and they look really nice. Get Covers. I think theirs were 35 each. They may have gone up now, but I had some covers done through there and you can also join the cover marketplace. They have tons of covers in their group on Facebook, which is great.

Yeah, and that's awesome. Find premades.

Then you would go to your contemporaries. Same thing. I would treat them the same way. I would do paranormals, recover them to market. I would do your contemporaries, recover them to market. You don't have to spend a ton of money to get nice covers.

If you are like, I like the images or whatever, just fix your font. At least fix your fonts. That's not readable. These aren't even thumbnails and it's difficult to read. Then that's a big deal. It really is. Like Mandie said, it's like, oh, that's self-published, not just indie published.

Indie published is fine. But when something looks self-published, meaning the author did everything themselves and didn't get help from anybody that immediately gives you this really bad stigma, like right out of the gate. It's like, oh, the cover's not very good. I bet the writing's not very good.

That's not true because I've read her books and the writing is good.

Oh, I know, but what I'm saying is it gives you this predisposition of this isn't going to be very good. So, when the reader goes into it thinking it's not going to be very good, they're looking for reasons why it's not good.

I'm sure her ratings will come up too if she changes the covers.

Yes. Because it's a psychological thing.

Yeah, it is definitely psychological.

I also want to say she has several angel books. Are these a series? Because if not for marketing reasons, they should be set up as a series. So, my next thing I was going to recommend is that you figure out, and put them into series, which you do inside your Amazon page.

If you're wide, or if some of these are wide, I mean, some of these are in Kindle Unlimited. If they're not part of a series, consider putting them into a series and very easily linking them somehow in the back of the books, right?

Make them the same world. Yeah. If they are, make sure your covers look branded like your Centurion. I don't know what's going on with the Centurion, but that one was the series clear down here at these ones. Those are gorgeous. These are just awesome. I'm not sure why these aren't available.

Yeah. I mean, you can't get them. You can't find them anywhere. This cover is an anthology, but that one just screams contemporary romance. That needs to be a different pen name. Like Mandie and I are saying, these covers are gorgeous. They just look awesome.

So, I don't know exactly what you're getting into there. I don't know if they were with a publisher, if she's doing something different with them, but they're gorgeous.

Yeah, those are very, very awesome. Very easy to read. It's just clean. It just looks cool. And they're good books.

I have Jasper and Nightfall. I think I had that one. I don't know if she's re releasing it with a new cover, but the old cover was great too.

Well, I mean, this is a great idea too. Coloring book and stuff like that's great. I think all that's smart. I think that's what you should be doing. But yeah, I would definitely be splitting that up.

Now, if you're like, but I don't know what my cover should look like. Let's go and look. Let's go and look at a Bear Shifter Christmas book. So, you just look it up and you say, okay, this one looks amazing. And I'm not saying copy the cover at all. I'm saying this is what it should look like.

See how clean the font is. The name is easy to read. The coloring's great. I mean, this is exactly what it should look like. It's something just like this. I mean, that's just gorgeous. These are great. So, when you're looking for them, it's very easy, exactly what you are. If you're bear, romance, paranormal, shifter.

Go and research it. You can see exactly what some of the covers are and you can even say, oh, I can tell I don't like that one. That one looks really cool. So you can say, oh yeah, I don't like this. Look at it yourself and say, is this something that I like?

Is this something that I wouldn't like? Is it clean looking. This is a wolf shifter. I could have told you that without even reading the thing. It's a wolf. You can see the wolf in it and you have the bear in it. I know you can't see it, Mandie, but there is a bear in it, but it's really hard to tell.

I would go after something very similar to these styles.

So yeah, nothing looks like it's in a series. Nothing looks like the metadata is holding correctly. I'm just going to, and I don't know who Ariana Hawks is, but obviously she's doing something right. I'm going to go in there and I'm just going to say, this is what you do. You go in, you find the good ones, the ones that look good, the ones that are ranking the ones that have great…

I mean, this is great. So then you come in and you look at the covers and landing pages. This is great. This is the bolding it's formatted nicely. You want to be making sure that you are delivering the same expectations that you need for these specific books. Like that's what you have to do.

So, she's including a free book. She has so exactly all the books she has in series. Yes. That's fantastic. Yeah. This is great. This is all excellent. It's very easy to read. Very easy to read logo. Like everything is just clean. It's just, that's what you want. That's what you want to be looking for. So, I would do that for your contemporary.

I would do that for your stuff. Can I look at her blurbs for her shifters? Because I didn't even see, oh yeah. I didn't care for the blurb for the the contemporary we saw. So like for the jingle bear shifter. Yeah. Let's check. So this is good. There's bolding. That's really good. It actually draws your eye down.

Yeah, but I don't love the style.

What do you mean the style? Like how it's written?

Yeah, how it's written. I just feel like there should be more like the last one we saw. Like this is, they became best friends, but that was a long time ago.

Oh, you mean the hook needs to be stronger.

Yeah, it definitely needs a stronger hook. Because a woman's jingle gives interest to her best friend. Yeah. Because if not, if it's just I'm thinking of this as, okay, this is just a little sweet romance because there's really no stakes. And it's a, it's a short book, but that's okay. We can still have stakes mentioned.

So you need to focus on goal, motivation and conflict for your blurb. Even if it's just a sweet romance where they're fighting over cookies, like you still need to have your goals, motivations and conflicts. It needs to be very clear. Okay. This is what she wants, he's in the way of her getting it or whatever's in the way of her getting it.

And why does she want that? So that's what you need to make sure your blurbs are. I do like the formatting. That's exactly what I always recommend. Put the bolding throughout. I mean, it's great use of white space. The sizing, everything is great.

Let's go look at another one. Let's look at Serenade since we like that cover. Okay. So she is using, using the formatting. Which is good. Okay. And she does have some metadata in here, which is awesome.

I'm not sure I would put the word count in there. People don't usually know what that means. It's a standalone. I would put that. I would make that up here, standalone paranormal shifter romance right up at the top. Okay. A wolf that a mate, which doesn't date. There needs to be some bolding. And that's cute.

Yeah. I like that. I like that tagline a lot.

And the cover looks good.

Yeah, it does. I think she won an award for it.

Yeah. There's a little award, sticker badge thingy on it. I think that looks great. And it also makes me wonder, well, why didn't you do a series with it? But yeah, let me see. I'm just going to go down here. Okay.

So she's got the majority are five and four star. If you wanted to know what was wrong with it, come in and just look at the more constructive or the more critical, reviews to kind of see what it is that they thought it fell short on. Yeah, but I mean, it's got good reviews.

If you were looking and you wanted to get higher reviews, go in and read your more critical ones. Ignore the, the mean things that people say and just read it for what you could do better. And then also read in your good reviews; they usually do like a word thing.

Where is it? Oh, they don't have it on yours, but they usually have like a thing that has like, it's like a word cloud. And it says things that are mentioned like paranormal shifter, dah, dah, dah. So when they do that, then you can kind of see, okay, they, the majority of people think that it's a great shifter or a strong romance or whatever.

So you just go through and you're, you're going to pick out the things that people are saying. I cared about both of them, whatever. So you want to get the similarity so you know what you're doing right. And it's always good to know what you're doing, quote unquote, wrong so that you learn how to do it better.

So this one looks really good though. I mean, it's 4. 3 on Goodreads. That's next to impossible to get. So that's good. Pricing's okay. You could probably go up to $3.99. Yeah. Especially at the 200 pages, you could do $3.99. You could do some more fun stuff with this.

I think it's with a publisher because there's Luminosity. Is that her?

I don't know.

Hmm. That's something to me. Wait, that might be a good thing to note. Okay. Well, that's cool. I mean, this is awesome. I'm just going to do a look inside.

It's all cleanly formatted. Want to be kitten. That's why she wears the ears. That's cute. I love that. Yeah. This is awesome. I think it's great.

I think that is her.

Well, I mean, it looks good. The inside looks good.

So, I think that would be the first thing that you'd want to do is focus on separating out paranormals and contemporaries, and I know it sounds like a lot. Oh my gosh. Trust me. I know it sounds like a lot. You want to figure out what's tied in together as series, what's not, make it very clear. Part of a series. And like Mandie said, BBW. Focus on that, you know, put that up here.

I would do standalone Paranormal Shift or Romance. Standalones do really well, because there's just not enough of them. And there's people who want to read standalones. I like series, but I also am like, I really could use just a standalone right now.

I don't need the commitment for a series, but I'm a serious person. I love knowing that it's in the same world, you know? Yeah, exactly. Tie it in somehow. But sometimes it's nice to know what I'm getting into. I thought, because I was looking for a standalone. That's all I wanted. And this author didn't have it connected to anything.

I thought, Oh, okay. It's a standalone. That's cool. And so I downloaded it, read it through the very end was one of the biggest cliffhangers I've ever read. And I was livid and I was like, where's the next book I'll read it. And I love series, but when I'm thinking I'm getting one, and I'm getting something completely different, I get really upset. Because it's like, this is not what I was expecting.

So here, if you're like Serenade, this is a standalone, I would do Serenade standalone paranormal shift or romance. Awesome. Then you can also in the same world as your other books, let people know that it's in here, put it in here, down in the review section, editorial reviews, or from the author or whatever, like on that other page.

But ultimately what you want to do is study, look and see what do these covers look like? And if you're just like, I'm not sure, grab some comp authors, which we talk about a lot, grab some comp authors and send them to your cover designer. Send them and say, this is the style that I like.

Can you come up with something that's similar or something that feeds the market? Like this does, it doesn't need to be similar, but same tone, same feeling, same, whatever, because change the fonts. Yes, definitely change the fonts from what you're using. I would avoid the embossing if that's. Cause that might be lending, especially with cursive.

I never use embossing with cursive. When I use embossing, I use it on things that are like, they look almost like metal. So I'm trying to give it a metal look, but I only use embossing if I'm like actually trying to make it look like a 3d thing. Usually I use stroke and like the dark, like the drop shadow and stuff to give it more of that look that I think most people think they're getting with the embossing.

So If you have to use it, don't use it on script. Embossing is not good on script. Ever. It's not a difficult to read. Yeah, it does. It makes it really difficult to read. And it's, it's all the script is already got a lot going on. So when you add the embossing, it's like, ah, this is a lot.

She's nailing the hard part already because her books are good.

Yeah. That is the hard part. You can't fix, I mean, it's really hard to say, I hate to say this, but you can't fix that. Like, you really can't. People are like, Oh, I, I think, I think I write a good book. And it's like, yeah, but you have like two star reviews.

Like that's all you have. You know, that says that maybe you're in the wrong genre or maybe there's a lot of things going on… but yeah, your books are good. So, if you can fix the packaging and fix the expectation, which is what the brand is. It’s what the expectation is from the reader, I think you'll see a big difference and your reader experience will be heightened, which is always a good thing.

I think those two things separate out for pen names and it can be as simple as TK lawyer and Tamra lawyer, or K lawyer, whatever. You can still have the same last name. But when I did that, I had Bonnie and then I separated as to Bonnie R. Paulson and B. R. Paulson.

When I separated them, it was very, like, this is the mentality I had for B. R. and this is the mentality I had for Bonnie. Mandie has the same thing. Mia and Ellie. These are two different people, and you have to treat them like two different people. Because you have different readers.

Yeah, I have different readers and it's okay for crossover, but you know, you can tell them, hey, this is me over here. And you can keep the same newsletter and just be like, if you like contemporaries, this is who's going to be writing my contemporary. You know, this is the name for my contemporary romances.

If you are strictly into paranormal and then you start taking them and filtering them according to who they are interested in, what they're clicking on. And it takes some time. And after about three months your metadata and everything looks good. Like all the also bots have time to actually separate out.

Here's a little tip. If you're going to have your book covers redone, which I would recommend, see if there's any way that they can give you the cover with the font and a cover without the font, then you have marketing opportunities specific to your book cover.

You'll actually be creating a really great marketing experience that's synced across your marketing and your book page, your landing pages. Anyways, it's a lot of information.

I just want to say that you made more money once you separated.

Oh yeah. It was, it was like night and day. I mean, it was crazy.

It was like, whoa. Yeah. I was making like maybe 50 a month. And then suddenly I switched them out, and this was against what everybody was saying. Everyone was like, you don't need to switch them out. And these were big, huge authors saying this. They were like, you don't need to switch them out.

Why? I have all of mine in there. And it was like, Well, good for you. You're XXX, you know, I'm not. And so when I finally did it and I went back and forth for a long time, when I finally did it, I went from like 50 a month to like, it was 1500 on one pen name and it was like 2, 500 on the other. And it was like, like immediately, bam, all of my marketing efforts were actually clear.

Then I got a book bub, and it went for that, for that one pen name, it was like 20,000 in one month. It was very easy for them to find out what's Bonnie. Right. But if I'd had them together, that would have been just all kinds of awkward nightmare because they wouldn't, it would have sucked.

It would have sucked trying to keep them all straight. Now it's 14 and I don't know what I'm doing.

Well, there's so many authors out there, too, and reader attention span finding books is next to nil, so you have to be like this is what the cover is, a hundred percent.

Yep, this is what it is, and they should be able to look at the cover and know what they're getting. I'm not going to lie. People, a lot of people are like, oh, well I paid for these covers and they were like a thousand dollars and dah, dah, dah, dah. And I'm like, there's no way I would pay that much money for a cover. And here's why.

Not that the work isn't good. Not that I don’t love book cover designers. I'm a book cover designer. I think that they should be paid well for what they make. However, with how fast our market shifts and adjusts… I think I have been through nine cover iterations for just one of my really successful series.

I change about once every two years, maybe even more because of the market shifts. So clean and wholesome romance. Which I'm in as a sweet author. It was couples, and then it was couples with Desire Pro, which is a font, and then it was landscapes, and then it was a women's fiction style of landscape, and then that same thing, but you had to have covers, but they're like this big instead of the size of the whole, you know, instead of the size of the series.

So, you have to stay on top of it, and you can't do that if you're paying a thousand dollars to cover. I mean, I think I was max paying like a hundred and hundred and fifty and then I started learning my own. I was like, no, I'm just going to do my own because I can't afford this.

I learned to research it, and now I shift out covers all the time. I'm like, oh, okay, I'm gonna do this cover. I'm going to do this style of cover. I mean, Mandie's usually getting my covers sent to her and I'm like, Hey, what do you think of this? And she's like, no, or she'll be like, yeah, actually I like that one or whatever, but here's a suggestion.

Yeah. Here's a suggestion, but ultimately you don't want to look self pubbed. If you are doing your own, which is great, like I said, whatever, I highly recommend. There is a couple of free font courses that Canva does, how to pair your fonts and you don't have to use Canva.

I don't use Canva for eBook or for my covers. I use Photoshop, but to use the courses that they offer that are free. Amazing because they really do teach you font pairing and how to use your colors and how to use the effects to make it. And they're really clear and they're short. They're really short.

Yeah. And so book brush, you can go in there. They have where you can make covers in there, but they have font pairings too. So you can go through and learn the different fonts. And I think that's amazing.

That's our recommendations. Oh, and another thing, while you're researching the covers, research what the blurb should look like and work on figuring out from those really good blurbs that are done.

Figure out, okay, what's their goal? What's their motivation? What's the conflict? And then go and rewrite your own blurbs, like rewrite them and work through them and have people look at them. And cause blurbs are a huge deal. If you can get people to look at the cover and go from the cover to the blurb, you just sucked in a bunch of people.

If you lose them at the blurb though, all that work you've done is for nothing. Yeah. I hope that makes sense. It was a lot of information. That's a lot. If you have any questions, is there anything you want to add to that, Mandie?

No, I mean, you know. TK, you can always shoot me a message and I'll look at something for you, you know, if you have further questions.

Yeah, and we'd love to do a follow-up if you are able to. We would love to say, hey, yeah, these are the changes that you've made and let's see what you've done. We would love to do that. And I'm also curious why some things are up and some things are down. That would be really interesting to see as well.

I might even talk to you at ORB when we are there so I can ask you some questions because I'm really curious. Anyways, I hope this was helpful. Thank you for joining us on our Brand Spotlight for TK Lawyer. And if you yourself want to be spotlighted, please click the link below in the description and there's a form and you can fill it out and we will fit it in.

I don't think that we have anything else. Okay, so hit like and subscribe and we would love to see you in our free Facebook group. And remember Boss Mode is coming up at the end of August and we would love to see you there.