Romance novelist Hope Parker came to us in 2020 at the beginning of her writing career. Her family (two of whom are BIPi clients – Write. By K Turner and John Navin & Associates) gifted her our branding and Squarespace development services when her first book, Atlas Calling, was published.
Building an author’s brand from scratch
When Hope came to us, all she had figured out about her brand – aside from her talent for storytelling – was her nom de plume. Luckily, we were prepared for just such a situation. Thanks to our brand discovery questionnaire, we were able to get to know her personality and her vision for her brand without the back and forth of vague language and endless revisions.
Settling on all the formative aspects of her brand – a color palette, a guiding theme, typefaces, and symbols – we created a logotype using her name and a dandelion. Combining her mark with stock photography featuring bokeh-style lights, her overall brand evokes many aspects of romance: freedom, escape, empowerment, self-possession, sensuality, and an “inner glow”.
Click on the thumbnails to see images of hopeparkerbooks.com and select pages from her brand guide
Squarespace website development – the perfect combination of affordable and professional
After setting ourselves up with all the tools needed for a successful website build, we set to work creating a Squarespace site to represent herself as an author, as well as promote her novels and other writing.
Working with a client who’s also a writer is a dream come true for our small BIPi team (and for budget-conscious clients!). After working together to create a sitemap, we handed over the copywriting work to Hope and began our build using the Bedford template.
Thanks to the brand guide we’d created, customizing the Squarespace site was a breeze. The Bedford template allowed us to feature her books and her short works in a simple, easy-to-navigate format. The tools provided by Squarespace allowed us to build a contact form that connects to a Google Sheet (a measure that will ensure no contact form entries are ever lost to spam or user error) as well as create a space for the client to add news and updates and a separate space to publish new works of fiction.
This site relied heavily on stock photography to achieve the overall look; it will serve the client well until she’s able to work with a photographer on a custom shoot (we can’t wait to see those photos – she lives on a small farm and the overall effect should be really cool!).
Squarespace websites make ongoing upkeep a breeze
The final phase before launch was training.
As a writer by trade, we know that Hope Parker’s site will be handling plenty of news and updates on a regular basis – and, since she’s relatively young in her career, ongoing maintenance costs need to stay low. Her ongoing cost will average a little less than $20/month, and she’s able to add new posts and content on her own.
It took less than an hour to train her on making basic edits to pages and adding new posts to the blog and short fiction sections. She’s now comfortable with managing the site herself, and can rely on the Squarespace infrastructure to keep the code of her site up-to-date and working across all devices.
The Hope Parker Books website was built using Squarespace. If you’re curious about how Berry Interesting Productions can help your team build an outstanding website, we’re always happy to help! Drop us a line or book a consultation directly with our fearless leader, D’nelle. You can also sign up to get emails from Berry Interesting, and we’ll keep you in the loop.