Be A Tease!

Everyone loves a tease. That tiny morsel of goodness to whet your appetite and leave you begging for more. The build up of anticipation for something, whether it's food, books, movies, a hot date...it's what keeps your attention and focus, leaving you aching for more.

Teasers are an important part of book marketing. Done right, you can grab a brand new reader's attention in less than a minute. Done wrong, you can turn a potential reader away for life.

Here's a teaser for my new book out today, ELUDING ILLUSIONS

Sometimes teasers can be done using a tagline or a "hook" for your book. Here's another using a tagline for my book, VEXED.

Sometimes teasers can be lines or quotes from your book.

You'll notice in the teaser above I put my copyright info and gave credit for the picture to the owner of it. NEVER use pics of celebrities or steal pics from the interwebs to use in teasers. You can get in serious legal trouble without express written permission from the rights holder of the image. There are many stock photo sites you can buy images from to use in your teasers. 

And if you don't want to buy images, some photographers will allow you to use an image if you credit them in the photo, as I did above. But you must have their permission to do so. Or you can use plain backgrounds and make your own using images from your book cover art files as I did in the first two teasers. Ask your cover artist for help if you want banners made up or blank teasers you can manipulate using your cover art files.

A teaser can even be as simple as just an image and your release date to start getting your cover in front of your potential reader audience, like the one I did above.

Also, please remember when making teasers to keep the fonts legible.

While those are cool fonts and it makes it eye catching, it's somewhat hard to read. Teasers should entice a future reader, not make them work for it or get frustrated because they can read only every other word because of font, or colors blending in over background images. 

Try can keep them as crisp and eye catching as possible.

Remember to change up the teasers. 

• Have a sexy one if it's a romance novel. 
• Have a more serious and dramatic one that shows the depth of the book as well. 
• Have a tagline hook as we mentioned earlier. 
• A PG level one for general audiences is also a good idea. 
• Have one as well that gives perspective and insight into the personalities of your characters. 

Like the one below for my novel, VEXED, it gives you a sense of the banter between the main characters.

Teasers can also can turn a potential reader into a lost sale. Remember that a variety of people will be seeing your teaser. So, unless you're posting in a specific group of people, please make your teasers for a general audience. If you write BDSM or Erotica, make sure you have a teaser specific to those audiences, but don't post those in a general FB group using graphic sexual references. Have a cleaner version for the masses and put a warning that the book itself will contain language, violence, or graphic sex. 

Also, please, for the love of all humanity, make sure your teasers don't have misspellings or typos. It's a reflection on you as the author. Put your best work forward.

Go forth and tease the world!!