Introducing Bookhead on Canva

We are excited to launch our new Canva app that helps you design marketing materials. Search one or more ISBNs to instantly get author, title, book cover image, trade reviews, descriptions, staff picks, and more in your design. You can also connect your book lists from Google Sheets or Airtable, so you can include your staff reviews.

We are extra excited about this new tool because it solved a problem that I first encountered a decade ago. I was a bookseller who designed our quarterly catalog, which was a print catalog with new releases that we distributed to our customers.

When designing the catalog, part of my workflow was taking hundreds of ISBNs and getting the author/title/image/description etc for every single title so we could include the book in our catalog. I also had to do this with emails, social media posts, and print materials that I designed. As you can imagine, this took a lot of work. If you are a bookseller who does similar work, you most likely still have this problem and you know exactly what I'm talking about. It's super repetitive with a lot of clicking, and Bookhead believes that if you are a human that does manual repetitive tasks on a computer (like searching for each title by ISBN then pulling the image or other metadata into your designs), then there exists an opportunity for a computer program to help you with this work in a more automated way. We are starting with Canva, but we are considering building this tool into other applications that you use to design marketing materials, like Adobe and Mailchimp.

I left the bookselling trade and became a software developer within the civic tech and social justice world, but I never lost touch with the bookselling life, and I never forgot about this app idea. I was equally excited and disappointed to see my friend (and now Bookhead co-founder) Katelyn O'Brien going through the same pains that I first encountered a decade ago.

A year later, after seeing Katelyn make designs in Canva, we have a solution. Install it in Canva here.

You'll get 10 free lookups to try it out, and then you can sign up for more free lookups. These don't refresh each month. They are a lifetime trial. So please, go use it, let us know what you like and don't like, and then sign up for a subscription so we can make it better!