Still More Author promotional ideas

Richard Stamp, author of As the Sparks Fly Upwards has been very active and creative with the promotion of his book. He descibes some of his ideas below:

1. I attend a local church which arsonists burned down three years ago. I have been selling books at $25 each and letting folk in the parish know that $5 for each book will go back into the rebuilding fund for all copies sold by them and within the parish. That way I get $20 a book back and the community benefits ....and buys more.  The suggestion therefore is that authors find a local cause which they can support and which then recruits more sellers and acts as a vehicle for selling more books.
2. I have designed a simple poster. I have emailed it to a hundred folk or so around the world asking them to get them put up on community, club and church notice boards etc.  Eg There’s a town in Colorado in the USA which now has these flyers at the local gym, at the community hall and at the church. It all helps. I put the RRP on the ones for Australian use ... but left it off those sent to other countries where the cost would be differently expressed.
3. I have used some of the old galley copies in this way; I have asked local places where people have to wait for a while if I can put a copy in their waiting room.
4. I have  put a stick-on label on the front cover which says. This book has been lent by the author to ease your waiting time. Please do not remove it. Copies of this book may be purchased from Collins ABC shops also at Dymocks and also at Bookmark on High Street. [all local bookshops] or direct from the author on ph 54353576  
   Since each chapter of my book is a story in itself this is ideal for folk to read one story or two while they wait. Thus their appetite might be sharpened and a desire to buy the book and finish reading it be engendered. Books are now at the local Foot Clinic, at a large local medical practice and also at the new lounge and waiting area at a local garage complex where people wait while work is done on their vehicle.  More venues are planned.

These are additional measures to the usual personal give/away cards with the book’s details, interviews and reviews on radio and in local newspapers. Also I have visited various bookshops in the region [Bendigo and central Macedon ranges towns]  and 7 bookshops now have it in stock.

Neat Freaks United

File under: people with way too much time on their hands, or: how to make your fetish into a business. Austin Radcliffe spends his days shooting and curating images of objects arranged in aesthetically pleasing ways. In some ways his obsession is quite old school — collectors have long organised their finds by all sorts of esoteric criteria. While the neat aspect will probably irk messy people, the various collations, coteries and concatenations are often quite pretty, fun, and interesting for the sheer variety of things revealed in the world.

Taking the cake

Books are sometimes destined to become food for silverfish, but a recent family history we designed ended up as party fare. Launched at her 92nd birthday party, Sheilah Hamilton's book dealt with her life and extended family. Her children arranged for the book cover to be printed in edible ink onto her cake, even down to the spine and simulated pages. 

New Cloud Better than the Old Cloud?

Apple has finally moved into the Cloud in a big way, erasing memories of the half-baked MobileMe implementation (so bad that even Jobs was ashamed of it). If you are a natural born Mac user and only put up with Google apps because there weren't any viable cloud alternatives, here's your chance to switch back. Learn how to move your data from Google Apps to iCloud in this useful Lifehacker article.

So Social

If you are a heavy user of social media and want to analyse your impact and efficiency in that sphere, Lifehacker co-founder and coder extraordinaire Gina Trapani has a tool for you. Thinkup "archives and analyzes your interactions across social networks", and ensures that information that Twitter, Facebook and Google+ might treat as ephemeral is preserved for future use and examination. Read this article and marvel at the amazing power of intelligently interpreted data.

Type with soul

If precise typefaces with mathematically determined curves put together on a computer leave you a little cold, there is a tiny corner of the typosphere that is embracing a hand made alternative. The Organic Type features hand-drawn, painted, sketched, rubbed and eroded typefaces, achieving warm and charming effects impossible with standard type. Their typefaces cannot be installed via a font manager. Instead, each letter is supplied as a separate layered image file, and needs to be manually placed and kerned. Perfect for arresting and highly individual headers, and capable of heavy lifting in almost any design context. 

The Past is a Foreign Country

Looking backwards in time is to be constantly surprised. There's always so much that has been forgotten, and is genuinely strange and unfamiliar Seen in detail, eras often belie their stereotypes. How to be a Retronaut posts themed photo galleries chiefly from any decade of the last ten. Topics include Colour tourist photographs from the Soviet Union (1960s), Harlem Street Scenes (1930s), Pepsi advertisements (1950s), an Apple Gift Catalogue (1983), portraits taken in fake snow (Victorian England) and abandoned buildings of Detroit (2000s) and many, many more. The photographs and ephemera are often hard to contextualise and integrate, yet in an odd way, bring the past momentarily into the present. 

The Information

Our client provides an integrated service to people in the building trade. She wanted her documents to look attractive, but not overdesigned. Her clientele are mostly male and are looking for practical, no-nonsense assistance. Our solution involved generous amounts of white space, strong colours, clear imagery and bold, spare typography.

There Was Life Before Google?

This fascinating project maps the correspondence-based connections between the key thinkers in the enlightenment 'project', whereby 18th century intellectuals helped realign the church and state, gave science tremendous impetus and create the modern world. The graphics on this site effectively illustrate the flow of ideas and influence and gives us some perspective on our own massively linked world.

Cooliris

When installed in your browser, Cooliris converts a standard image search session into a rather more attractive (and possibly more useful) slide show. Google, Bing, Picasa and Flickr image searches are supported (among others). If nothing else, it can make a prosaic image search into a more interactive and almost three dimensional affair.

Corporate Predators

This thriller features a sociopathic CEO with a sideline in hands-on murder. We wanted to depict the milieu (Hong Kong), the scent of blood, and the rampaging spirit of unbridled, unprincipled ambition (enter the dragon).

Klout

If you'd like to see how much headway you are making with your social media and Internet strategy, try Klout. This service pries open your Facebook and Twitter accounts (among many other services), assesses your followers and their level of influence, then ranks your own level of influence. Hopefully you will prove to be a colossus astride the digital world. On the other hand, if you are at the more modest end of the influence spectrum, think of all the growth that lies ahead...

The Wonder of Very Tiny Things

Much potential aesthetic pleasure is lost because many objects of beauty are too small for our underpowered eyes to clearly see. But when we use lenses, stains and modern scanning devices, we can see ornate biological forms, pristine crystal structures and intriguing chemical reactions. Nikon celebrates the convergence of beauty and knowledge in a fascinating online gallery. 

Ludicrous Stock Photos

Anyone in the design or advertising trade has spent (way too much) time looking through stock photo libraries. While some of these images are works of creative brilliance, the majority are mind searingly dull and issue from the department of the extremely obvious and literal. Huffington Post celebrates the unintentionally surreal/idiotic nature of some stock photo memes, such as people holding tiny houses and people in bed listening to bluetooth devices. The sooner someone invents a software genie that can select the perfect picture via algorithm, the better.

More File Sharing Madness

File sharing/transfer services are thick on the vine at present. A recent contender (still in beta) is GE.TT. Just click one button, tell it where your files are and who you want to receive them, and it is off and running. Cleverly, the service allows the receiver to begin downloading the file even before it is done sending it from your machine -- potentially a big time saver when sending large files. Of course, DropBox does essentially the same thing, but GE.TT doesn't require you to set aside a designated folder on the sending and receiving ends.

Michelangelo in HD

Controversially restored a few years back, Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel masterpiece is now online in amazing interactive detail. Visitors to the site can pan, zoom, swoop and generally marvel at one of the West's triumphs. Best viewed on a very large screen for maximum 'wow' factor. 

Typography and Numbers

Follow this link at FontFont for a very detailed and accessible post dealing with the correct way to set numbers in tables, text, as super and subscript, and as fractions. The differences between poorly and elegantly set numbers is quite stark, and has implications for readability and sheer aesthetic enjoyment of the text.

Table for Eight

An elderly man takes a cruise to re-start his life after the death of his wife. He discovers that he cannot escape from the reality of his situation, but gains some solace in the company of often fractious strangers. We wanted to convey the basic concept of 'sailing into the sunset' with a simple geometric composition, torn edges, informal type and bright contrasting colours.

Infinite Storage

Internet startups come and go with dreamlike rapidity. A recent instance that seems to be gaining a bit of traction is bitcasa.com. It offers the startling promise of infinite storage space, somehow seamlessly melding your hard disk with the cloud. One suspects that this seamlessness might stumble against the roadblock of slow adsl connections, but perhaps it will have wings in lands with better broadband. If you sign up for the beta, you will be advised that tweeting or posting about your discovery will hasten your journey towards actually receiving an invite.

Beautiful Type Samples from Emigre

Digital type design pioneers Emigre have released some of their old printed type sample sheets in PDF form. The sheets are beautiful examples of graphic design in their own right and many of the spreads would make excellent posters. Several of the typefaces designed by the Emigre founders are still used, such as Mrs Eaves, Triplex, Filosofia, Template Gothic and Vista Sans. Some of the experimental typefaces have had their run, but they did help create the wide open field that is modern typography. Emigre was one of the first independent digital foundries and was responsible for the hugely influential Emigre magazine, which ran from 1984 to 2005.