A couple of years ago I got a call from Sarah Jio about doing some branding photos for her new podcast with her husband. Sarah is an international best-selling author who is loved here in the states and is extremely popular in Turkey. Her husband is a record producer and so they were putting together a new podcast called Mod About You.

We worked together for that podcast cover shoot which was so much fun! And then, when she was in need of an image from her upcoming book cover, she reached back out to collaborate again.

Sarah is known for her fiction books and is a New York Times Bestseller. While she is known and loved worldwide, she has a huge fan base in Turkey. Her book that we were collaborating on for the cover is called Bittersweet or “Aci Tatli” in Turkish and is more of a memoir to be released overseas.

Knowing that the goal of this photoshoot was for a book cover and a memoir, we knew we needed to create photos that:

• Focused on Sarah
• Were portrait length (vertical) as that’s how books are printed
• Needed to have open space or “negative space” for text seeing that the book cover and her name would need to be placed on the cover within the final design
• We shot in my Capitol Hill studio because of it’s clean white backdrop, which bodes very well for the simplicity in commercial images
• She brought some props to help tell the story. A birthday cake, a wicker chair, some books, and a bouquet of flowers.

We knew we wanted to give the publisher options to test out as I don’t believe Sarah had the final say on the image chosen.

In the end, they picked the photo of Sarah holding out her birthday cake for the image, which works great for the cover as it was one of the closer-up photos of her face as well.

I love collaborations like this because the story that Sarah wrote was so close to her heart, and it was my job to help visually capture the essence of the book through the image we created.

They say not to judge a book by its cover, but in reality, we all do.

I think we did a great job in creating these on-brand photos for her book cover.

There is a lot of strategy that goes into creating a successful brand photoshoot, and book cover photoshoot as well. It’s one of my power skills to be able to work with my clients and really dive into exactly how to create the visual representation of their work.

If you are looking for a Seattle brand photographer and want to collaborate on a brand photoshoot, please reach out for a discovery call here. Discovery calls are 20-minute zoom appointments where I learn more about your needs, and you learn about the process to bringing your brand to life through brand images!