Mood Perfect: How to make a mood board for your novel

Including best practices

Published and unpublished authors are increasingly called upon to move into the world of graphic design for their novels. Whether you’re pitching to find an agent, making a publishing announcement or making a trope board to post on social media for your readers, we’ve got to diversify now more than ever and use other skills, besides writing techniques and plotting.

I’m looking specifically at mood boards today, but many of these ideas can extend into other areas for authors who need a ‘how to guide’ and if the post proves popular, I might do more posts like this one in the future.

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Mood boards for beginners

I’ve been pitching my querying novel on social media for a number of years. For those who pitch regularly, they will know that different pitching events have different requirements, but many of them allow mood boards.

Great if you already know how to create these, but what if words are your focus and you haven’t got a clue where to start? Hopefully, my guide will help point you in the right direction.

Step One: Brainstorm your main ideas

This might seem obvious but decide what over arching themes or ideas you want to show.

What’s the atmosphere of the novel? Is is a crime noir, or a comedy romance? Both of these genres have very specific visual identities with the covers that they choose for their marketing, so this might help guide you to choose images and colours that meet these genre expectations.

What types of characters do you have? Is your MC a surgeon? If so, what kinds of images might help visualise that? You might choose a stock photo of an operating room or just a scalpel – that entirely depends on whether this is the main focus for that character.

Key scenes? Writing a fantasy novel with a dragon tearing down a building? Sounds exciting, you might want to find an image to give a hint of that adventure.

Genre or word associations: we’ve already talked a bit about genre expectations, but associations throw up many more possibilities.

Locations or settings? If your novel is set in Paris, you could show something quintessentially Parisienne. Got a murder mystery on a yacht? Then you should show a suitable image of a ship.

Step Two: Collect your images

Most of the main pitching events request that people use copyright free images for their mood boards. There is absolutely no issue with using a paid licensed image, but there are a number of website offering free-to-use images.

The main ones are:

• Unsplash

• Pexels

• Canva (offers stock photos with their graphic design services)

• Adobe Express (same as Canva)

You could also use your own photographs or illustrations as long as you own them.

One small thing to be aware of, unfortunately, is that all of these sites are also supporting Generative AI images. It’s not against the law to do this, but it makes it harder for authors who are strongly against Generative AI image and the threat it poses to creatives not just in literary circles, but in the photography and art world. I would advise to choose carefully. If it looks too good to be real, then it could be generative AI. Proceed with caution.

Step Three: Choose your ‘weapon’ or software

There are a number of graphic design websites with a free subscription that can offer image grid templates and resources for authors who want to make mood boards, or indeed other marketing materials like agent guides, book giveaways, publishing announcements etc.

The main ones are Canva and Adobe Express. They are easy to use, are fully customisable, offer ready to use templates, have filters and controls to adjust images tonally, and last but not least – they have a wide range of fonts.

All my slides were made using Canva, for example. I used a template and changed the fonts, colours and text to make a house-style for the post.

Too new? Are you overwhelmed with having to learn a new skill?

Fear not because you might be able to use software you are already familiar with. Powerpoint, InDesign, Photoshop etc can all be used to make mood boards if you already know how to use them.

Warning! I personally would not recommend to use Word. Nope. It really doesn’t work with images, but Powerpoint is the next best option. I work in a design company and we often use Powerpoint for our professional mood boards. Why? Because it’s quick and easy to use.

Step Four: Use filters to blend the colours

This is the fun part! Once you’ve chosen your images and placed them on or in your chosen arrangement, Canva, Adobe or Powerpoint all have image adjustment settings or filters available, which you can use to alter the images to work more harmoniously together.

I usually try to choose pictures that are similar in colours and tones to begin with, but sometimes you find the right image and it just doesn’t look right with the others. It might just be as simple as making it black and white, or bringing out the red tones some more. Just have a play around and find what pleases your eye the most.

Extra Tips:

1. Make your boards Accessible

We are living in an age of awareness and social media endeavours to make it easy for accessibility with subtitles, but also by adding Alt Text to visual images for visually impaired people. Twitter was one of the first platforms to introduce Alt Text and make it compulsory, before it became X.

As a social media manager, I try to make sure my posts can be as accessible as possible and diligently add Alt Text to all image and GIF posts.

You can go even further than just adding Alt Text, by thinking about the readbility of the font you are using as well. Is it too small? And the style, is it too cursive and hard to read? What about the colours? If you are putting white text on a grey background, is it still too hard to read on a phone?

2. Be inventive

Sometimes less images are better than many.

Sometimes simple images are more impactful than complex ones.

Use contrast to create tension: a broken glass featured on a board with rumpled silk might work well for a spicy thriller, hinting at the romance aspect, but the broken glass signifies something darker.

Texture and colour all contribute to the mood and in turn the genre. If we see muted pastels and sunny beachs, we are more likely to think of a romance novel, dark aesthetics and swords with fantasy etc.

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I hope you’ve found this useful and it’s got the creative juices flowing. Please feel free to comment and let me know if you would be interested in more posts like these on marketing for authors.