Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Josephine Blake. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Josephine, appreciate you joining us today. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.

Covers and Cupcakes LLC specializes in marketability and branding for our authors. This means we continuously analyze market trends and take into account everything from top genre indicators to color theory in order to produce a cover in the target genre that is designed to sell our author’s books.

Our primary goal is to use cover artwork to draw in the ideal reader at the very first glance.

Often, our clients will send along updates to let us know how their new covers are performing. One of our clients recently reported that she had experienced her first five figure month and attributed this success to her new cover artwork. :) C&C works hard to create results like this again and again for our clients.

Josephine, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Our head designer, Josephine Blake, is a USA Today Bestselling Author and an award-winning cover designer who strives to emulate everything that makes the Independent Publishing Industry amazing. She is a self-taught cover artist, working every day to hone her skills so that she can provide you with a beautiful cover that will bring your story to life.

She began her journey as an author on a limited budget, using rudimentary design skills, to create a cover for her debut novel. (An Inspirational Western Romance titled Dianna, that was published in 2016.) When the cover artwork itself began gaining attention, going on to win a reader’s choice award, a handful of other authors began to request cover artwork and slowly, Covers and Cupcakes was formed.

Along with specializing in Marketability and Branding, C&C aims to create artwork that takes into account current genre trends while also standing apart from the crowd. We take pride in producing beautiful, unique cover pieces that grab reader attention.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

Honestly, just showcasing what we can do on social media has been enough to bring in a steady flow of clients. We strongly feel that our artwork and results speak for themselves.

Does your business have multiple or supplementary revenue streams (like a ATM machine at a barbershop, etc)?

Actually, yes. Since Covers and Cupcakes LLC began, it has specialized primarily in photo-manipulation (composite work.) While we do now offer cover illustration in both the fantasy and romance genres, In 2023, our Head Designer branched into photography as a means to provide unique model images to our clients, and Bookish Photography, our stock image website, was born. We schedule speciality, costume shoots quarterly and release new images to our clients (a mixture of authors and book cover designers) every month.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://coversandcupcakes.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/covers.and.cupcakes/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/coversandcupcakes
• Other: Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/CoversandCupcakes/

  Bookish Photography: https://www.bookishphotography.com/