Getting the Most Out of Amazon as a Book Marketing Tool

April 3, 2013 by

If you’re an author, you know how important being on Amazon is. It’s like the Google of books. The site is basically a major search engine, and will help anyone searching for a book on a topic you’ve written about find your book.

All that being said, competition is still fierce on Amazon, just as it is on Google. You’ve got to use every available tool to ensure that readers find your book…and not some other author’s. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Blog, Writing a Book Tagged With:

Visual Marketing Contributor Tries His Hand at a Children’s Book

March 6, 2013 by

One of our book contributors, Robert Pizzo, whose unique email marketing designs were featured in the book, recently announced that his first children’s book, The Amazing Animal Alphabet of Twenty-Six Tongue Twisters will be published September of 2013.

The book features a silly tongue twister for each letter of the alphabet, accompanied by Pizzo’s iconic art:

 

When asked where his inspiration came from, Pizzo said it was close to home:

“As the father of three daughters, I had always enjoyed reading to my kids. We ended up acquiring quite a collection of books and I guess it’s in the genes that my girls always enjoyed the ones that had more of a graphically designed look to them. A few years ago I had this idea for an animal alphabet book loosely based on a little sentence game I would play with my kids while riding in the car. Though I had illustrated many book covers I had always wanted to see what it was like to illustrate an entire book.”
Pizzo says creating a book wasn’t that much different than his average illustration assignment, “only much, MUCH longer!”
He looked to authors like Dr. Seuss, who have mastered the simplicity of words in children’s books, and put more focus on the illustrations. “First, I took a jumble of seemingly random words beginning with the same letter and turned them into a complete sentence. The more unlikely and absurd the better! Once I had that I thought,  ‘OK, now, how can I illustrate that?’ You ought to see the gigantic stack of sketches and Post-It doodles this process generated.”
Pizzo says he would consider writing more children’s books in the future, depending on how well this one does.  “I have a couple of other book dummies and ideas in a folder on my computer, so who knows?”
Filed Under: Blog, Interviews Tagged With: ,

Visual Marketing Contributor Goes to Grammys

February 8, 2013 by

UPDATE: We just found out that Visual Dialogue won the Grammy! Here’s a video of the acceptance speech. Congrats to Visual Dialogue!

It’s not often that a graphic designer is invited to the Grammys. Consider Fritz Klaetke and Susan Battista the exception. Their aim? Not (just) to rub elbows with celebrities. The two, who run Visual Dialogue, featured in our book, were nominated for the best boxed or special limited edition package Grammy for their work on “Woody at 100,” a four-CD Woody Guthrie centennial collection released in July by Smithsonian Folkways.

Creating Visual Briefs

In an article on Boston.com, the pair of designers talked a bit about their process for decoding ” the often jargon-laden details of a business into a common language and then, like linguistic alchemists,” turning them into what they call a “visual brief.”

That’s a challenge many designers — and marketers — face: how do you take a ton of  information — sometimes not interesting — and make it exciting?

Clearly the two did so with this project.

The Finished Product

The Guthrie collector’s edition includes a book the size of a record sleeve (deliberate, I’m sure) that includes slits to hold the CDs in the back. Throughout the book are Guthrie’s sketches and drawings, which enhance the storytelling nature of the set. And that’s what the package is: a storybook, not just a set of CDs.

Congratulations to Visual Dialogue for getting the attention of Hollywood on this project.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With:
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