How a Book Lover Announces a Pregnancy
At Home with the Hastys - How We Announced Our Pregnancy
I’m on maternity leave! Baby Hasty is due Dec. 18. During this time, I’ll be sharing some blog posts I wrote throughout our pregnancy journey, but this site won’t be as active as it normally is. I may also be a bit slower to respond. Thanks for understanding and for being so supportive of me, my family, and my blog. Want to donate a few dollars to keep this blog running? You can do so on Venmo or Paypal.
The Mock Book Cover Reveal
I posted three teaser Reels on Instagram about a very exclusive, only on hastybooklist.com, book cover reveal. You can see them here, here, and here. Then the big reveal day finally arrived and we posted this video, which I just think is super fun:
I had so much fun putting these teasers together. I wanted to share our exciting news right away, but also wanted to wait until we were out of first trimester. The teaser videos were a great way of posting something, but not the big news. Although, several of our friends caught on to our secret (the character designed to look like Eric looks JUST like him.)
I hired Lila Selle who designed the cover for The Spice Master at Bistro Exotique by Samantha Verant, which I had the honor of revealing on this blog a few months prior. At the time, Lila was a junior designer at Berkley Publishing Group and doing freelance work on the side. I told her my idea, to create a book cover that was actually a pregnancy announcement, and give her these guidelines:
something similar to your Public Relations cover (I.e. rom com)
Chicago city skyline in the background
three characters that somewhat resemble me (with a baby bump), my husband (wears a suit, bald, maybe with a computer or suitcase) and my dog (black and white) - I can provide pics if that would be helpful
Title: Then Comes Baby
Authors: Eric and Ashley Hasty
Book blurb: "A highly anticipated debut!" - Bob and Terri Steffes, maternal grandparents
Maybe a second book blurb to come
A few weeks later, she came back with these two options:
I was THRILLED! But I asked for a few adjustments to be made:
I like the blue and yellow but could we make them a bit more earth tones like the colors attached? I'd like to print this out for the baby's room and the earth tones match our home a bit better.
Could you make Huxley's spots and ears black?
Could we take out the "maternal grandparents" in the first quote and add another quote? "The greatest adventure there is!" - Bob and Renee Hasty
Would you be able to design an ARC badge (is that what they are called? I attached one for reference) that says "Baby Due December 18, 2022"
Literally, the next day she came back with this. And I had all the heart eyes:
She also provided an Instagram mockup (first image), which I used to created a few more Instagram posts. I also put the book cover into DIY Book Covers to make the 3D versions. And voila:
Those images became this Instagram post, which announced our pregnancy via a mock book cover. I also wrote a blog post about our pregnancy journey, here.
