Isaac Stewart pointed this out to me. Wow. And what a change. Farland’s got a whole new look and feel. I don’t know much about cover art/marketing and how well various colors and styles do in the book store (will buyers gloss over this because of its dark color?–I hope not). But however this performs on the shelf, it’s a great illustration.
See more images on Irene Gallo’s blog about it. Compare with the old style.
Folks running for office, especially our wonderful citizens running for local county offices, business owners, and any of the rest of us who what to persuade people to listen, I’ve got something for you.
I will bet that most of you aren’t aware that you’re muddling your message and losing votes, sales, and converts to your causes.
Of course, maybe you’re way ahead of me. I thought I knew what I was doing. I have a master’s degree in business, spent a few years in business consulting, have created a few small startups, and currently am a product manager for large software company. Despite all of that, I had somehow missed something vital. Something simple and powerful. Something that has a dramatic effect on sales, votes, and converts. On getting people to even listen to what I had to say.
And I’m not alone. I saw another company struggling with it this weekend.
On Saturday I went and watched the latest Marvel movie at a theater in Logan. One of the pre-movie video ads was for a local company called Conservice. I don’t know how many thousands of dollars they spent on the ad they played. Or how much they spent on the many other ads we’ve seen over the years. But when it finished, I turned to Nellie and said, “I still don’t know what that company does or why I should care.”
“I know,” she said. “I know.”
We were both baffled. After years of seeing their ads, we still have no idea what they do, how it would make our lives better, or what action we should take to use their service.
They have wasted thousands and thousands of dollars on their marketing.
There’s another local company that advertises during those pre-movie slots. It’s called ARS. I saw one of their ads this weekend as well. But it only reminded me of what I already know. I know exactly what they do, how it would make my life better, and what action to take.
If you have a flood, fire, or plumbing backup—whatever—they clean it up. “Got a mess? Call ARS.” That’s their one-liner.
If I ever have a mess, I will call ARS. I will never call Conservice. I have no idea what they do.
What’s the difference here?
Clarity.
And what generates that clarity?
A complete focus on the customer. The ARS ads are all about the customer and their problems and needs.
The Conservice ads, on the other hand, are all about Conservice. We’ve been in business for x years. Here’s what our building looks like. Here’s a worker planting a bush. Blah, blah, blah.
The ARS ads are all about me, the guy in the theater seat, the thing I want and the problem I have. ARS features me as the hero in my own story. They present themselves as the helper—the Yoda or Gandalf or Haymitch who helps the hero get what they want. You got a mess? We’ll help you.
The difference in the power of the two ads is night and day.
Of course this means it’s been verified that I’m a dolt. After all the years in business and education, I should have known this. But the surprising truth is that I’m not alone.
I look at the marketing we do at the billion-dollar company I work for and see this same issue everywhere. Millions of dollars spent on muddles. I look at company websites on the internet and see more muddles. I recently listened to pitches by many of our local citizens running for office and saw the same thing. It seems this communication muddle afflicts a lot of us.
About five years ago, when I began investigating an idea for a new company, I came across the Lean Startup method pioneered by a guy at Stanford and began to see the light. But a few months ago, the curtains were completely pulled aside to let in the sunshine. And wow! What a revelation.
If you want to get people to listen, you have got to hear what Donald Miller has to say. He’s consulted with thousands of companies on how to clarify their message so people will listen. His framework and method make clarifying your message so easy.
He calls it the StoryBrand framework, and it’s brilliant. What it does is help you clarify your message so that a customer or voter or whoever will know within three seconds:
But it goes beyond that. It helps you actually define what you should be offering in the first place. It’s a powerful product development tool. I’ve started using this in all my business efforts. And in my training and presentations.
For example, I just used it to develop a presentation I delivered at a huge writer’s conference last week. The results were that after the presentation, I had a line of people wanting to thank me. I had people telling me I made them cry. Others wanted to give me a hug. They were grateful. I had people tell me it was the best presentation of the conference.
This was not because I’m brilliant. I’m a dolt, remember. It’s because I used the StoryBrand framework to focus on those people. Their needs. Their problems. Their aspirations.
If you’re running for office, if you have a business, if you want to persuade anyone to do anything, then let me recommend you listen to this guy and learn about this framework.
Get the revelation. Get out of the muddle. And get people to listen.
And when you’ve finished the Miller stuff above, read How to Write Copy That Sells by Ray Edwards, the guy who has partnered with Miller. It’s all about clarifying your message as well.
Earth: The Biography is one of the most interesting documentary series I’ve seen in a long time. It’s produced by National Geographic and the BCC. Dr. Ian Stewart, a Scotsman, hosts the program and tells the life story of our planet, how it works, and what makes it so special.
There are five parts: “Volcano,” “Atmosphere,” “Ice,” “Oceans,” and “Rare Earth.” And while they were all good, the last two blew me away.
For example, I always thought the polar ice caps were a big waste of water. What do they do besides torment penguins and Eskimos?
But the program reveals that the ice caps are critical to all life everywhere on the planet because they power the great ocean conveyer. This conveyer is a slow current that carries surface water away from the equator up to the polar caps then down to the sea floor and back—transporting oxygen, nutrients, and warmth all around the globe.
We can see how critical the ocean conveyer is when it stops. There was a time when this happened. With no replenishment of oxygen, the water turned to poison. The poison was picked up in the clouds and rained down upon the land. And almost every living thing on the planet died a toxic death.
Sniff, sniff–we love you, Polar Ice Caps.
“Oceans” was fascinating, but “Rare Earth” was the kicker. How common is our cozy little situation here on earth?
Well, for life to exist as we know it, we needed to be a certain narrow distance from the center of the galaxy, orbit a certain, less common type of star, be within a certain range of that star, have a big old fat vacuum like Jupiter hanging out in the wings sucking up asteroids and comets so they don’t hit us instead, have an orbiting moon of a certain size, an earth core with just the right amount of iron, a tilt to the earth that would allow polar ice caps, water, an atmosphere to protect us from all sorts of celestial mayhem. Heck, we even had to have that nasty mass extinction caused by the broken ocean conveyer. And there’s more.
So many rare events had to line up just right, that it’s bound to make the atheists among us celebrate their good fortune with illegal-Wyoming-firework abandon and the believers to rise up from their chairs and shout, “Hallelujah and Amen!”
Nellie, the girls, and I all loved this show.
***
I’m a nut man. Love nuts. Hazelnuts, walnuts, Brazil nuts, pistachio nuts, cashews, pecans. But nuts are expensive. And while peanuts are lovely, I like some variety and grow weary of the mixes where you get about five thousand peanuts and one burnt almond. So when I saw the forty ounce jars of Planter’s Deluxe Nuts (sea salt, NO peanuts) at Sam’s Club in Logan, Utah selling for a mere $10.98, I just about fainted away and died.
Eleven bucks?!
For comparison, please note that a little ten ounce jar of the exact same nuts costs six dollars in the grocery store. Four times the nuts for less than double the price!
The nuts are good. More importantly, they’re a regular item at Sam’s. So with all the reports coming out about how good nuts are for you, reduce heart disease, reduce diabetes, blah, blah, blah, fight aliens, I can now afford to eat them and hopefully extend my stay as a carbon-based life form.
***
General David Petraeus has revolutionized the way America wages war. It was his strategy that turned the war in Iraq around. It’s his strategy that’s being used in Afghanistan. And it will be his methods that will inform how our soldiers face enemies in years to come.
The key to his thinking is realizing that there are two different terrains that must be won in the types of war we wage now—the geographic and the human. You know what geography is—take that hill, secure that town, remove the threats from that jungle. The human terrain, on the other hand, is made up of the hearts and minds of the people at the site of the struggle and has proven to be equally important.
It’s important because the wars we’re most likely to engage in now are not ones where two big armies square off and blast away. Anyone who tries to stand up to the United States using that method is going to very quickly learn what it means to get stomped, shredded, and served to the dogs. So most of the battles are likely to be engagements in unconventional war, where the enemy hides, and where the local populace will make or break the effort.
In May 2010, Vanity Fair magazine published a fascinating article called “The Professor of War” by Mark Bowden. It summarizes Petraeus’s history, the source of his thinking, and the kind of man he is. With so much at stake, I was grateful to get this well-written glimpse into the general and his approach to war.
While you’re at the site, you might want to also read another Vanity Fair article titled “General McChrystal’s Three Biggest Strategic Errors in Dealing With Rolling Stone” by Bill Bradley, published June, 2010. McChrystal was Petraeus’s right hand man. The contrast between the two men is enlightening.
Last year someone recommended Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo to me. I noted the recommendation and then promptly forgot it because my reading queue is two years long. But this last week my wife brought some books home from the library, and there, sitting on top, was Bardugo’s book.
I opened it. Page one listed the orders of magic. I was immediately drawn to the names. They were Grisha, “soldiers of the second army, masters of the small science.” They had divisions of corporalki, etheralki, and materialki, who are the order of fabrikators.
I don’t know what it is, but I love, not steampunk (well, I don’t know if I don’t love steampunk because I really haven’t read any, but I do think dirigibles are vastly overrated), but the mixture of machinists and engineers and magic set in the late 1800’s, the time period when Sherlock Holmes was running about. It’s something I can’t resist.
And “fabrikators”? Russian? Oh, baby.
Most epic fantasies are set in some kind of old German or English medieval setting. Nothing wrong with that. We luvs them, Precious. But something different is nice as well. Recently, Peter V. Brett and Saladin Ahmed have given us fantasies with a Middle Eastern flavor. But I haven’t read an epic fantasy with a Russian flair since C. J. Cherryh’s Rusalka series. And here on page one I’ve got magic and machinists and all these Russian sounding terms.
Awesome.
I turned the page. The opening paragraph of the prologue pulled me right in, and I was off and running, soaking up this little snippet about an orphaned boy and girl who, fast-forward in the next chapter, are now in the army. Not the second army that’s made up of Grisha, but the first army that’s made up of soldiers with rifles who have to slog through mud and march while a handful of Grisha of the second army roll by in a carriage.
Alina, the girl who is now working with the army’s cartographers, and Mal, who is a tracker, are heading with the troops toward the Unsea, the Shadow Fold, this darkness that cuts the country in two and is full of these horrors called volcra. They enter the Shadow Fold, are attacked, and Alina unconsciously calls forth a powerful magic.
Of course, she can’t reproduce it, but it’s a magic that might be used to banish the Fold forever. The rest of the book is about Alina avoiding assassination, trying to learn how to summon her magic, and being pulled into a surprising and terrible plot. It’s also about her and Mal. Yes, there’s a love story here, but this is NOT a romance where everything focuses on her feelings and his feelings and touches and sighs and unbounded quivering.
This is an epic fantasy, remember? Those books that delight readers with dark lords and magic? Well, there’s plenty of that here, plus secrets and a number of delicious plot twists. There are escapes and chases and battles. And, yes, that love story that isn’t overblown but feels very real indeed.
Epic fantasies come in lots of different sizes. This isn’t one of those huge doorstop epics with twenty sprawling plotlines. This focuses on one point of view and one storyline, which means you are able to enter the story very quickly, much like the epics by Hambly and McKinley and so many others.
It’s a terrific read. Give it a go. If you enjoyed Vin in Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn and Cinna and Katniss in Hunger Games, then I think you’re going to love Shadow and Bone. I’m certainly looking forward to the next volume.
There’s a joke that all horror movies would be over in two minutes if you just made the hero smart and gave him a gun.
Well, Correia gives his likeable hero a gun, but not just any old thing. If you’re going to kill a vampire, why not use a rocket propelled grenade or a flame thrower? In fact, if there were enough monster outbreaks, you might have a government agency. You might also find that agency was willing to outsource some of the monster hunting to private contractors (ala Blackwater). And you can bet they won’t be hunting with pea shooters. They’ll be doing it right, with brains and firepower. Correia, someone who loves guns (used to own a gun shop and shoot competitively in rifle, shotgun, and pistol) and monsters, wrote a story that does just that.
The idea of Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter International might remind you a bit of X-Files or Men in Black, but it’s neither. However, it is as good as or better than both. Correia tells the story of Owen Pitt, a big lug of an accountant, who, as he was working late one evening, gets called into the office of his boss. No big deal, right? Except the fat man is naked, transforming into a werewolf, and vows to eat Pitt’s heart. It’s not quite how you want to end your day tallying debits and credits. Pitt almost dies in the encounter, but manages to “live the American dream” and throw his incompetent jerk of a boss from the fourteenth-story window and splatter him on a double-parked Lincoln Navigator below.
Good work for a bean counter. When Pitt finally recovers, he gets an offer he can’t refuse (mostly because of the alluring agent that comes to recruit him), and he joins Monster Hunter International (MHI), the private contractor who sends out special force teams to use any means at their disposal to kill monsters. Unlucikly for Pitt, one of the baddest monsters around is just about to ruin the world forever, and Pitt finds himself in the middle of the fight.
Correia fills the book with enough action for any red-blooded male, a variety of bad mamba jamba monsters, and wonderful characters. There’s romance and heroism (I got a lump in my throat at one part toward the end), but his signature is his humor. I laughed again and again.
Part of that humor stems from the fact that Correia has an ear for good lines. Part stems from his delight in taking common tropes and stereotypes and twisting them. And this is another one of the things that I enjoyed immensely about the book. For example, the team of newbie hunters that Pitt joins is not made up of square-jawed males and females with Navy SEAL backgrounds, although some in the company do have that. Nope, Correia puts together an accountant, librarian, school teacher, and stripper (all people who faced some kind of monster and are ready for payback), and he makes them believable hunters.
This tongue-in-cheek tweaking is everywhere. There are elves in this book unlike any you have ever seen. But he also makes it personal. Owen is not your typical accountant. Even a number of the minor characters get this treatment. For example, one of the people on the team is a Black guy with Rasta hair. But Correia doesn’t choose from what Correia calls one of the four Hollywood stereotypes. Nope, this guy plays against those types. He isn’t the comic relief, the gangsta, the sports dude, or scary male. He’s his own man, a shy virgin with a good heart. Correia also gives his characters interesting backstories. And one of the delights is discovering them.
I encountered a few minor flaws in the presentation, but these are easily overlooked. Easily. There’s also quite a bit of profanity (and so those who wish to avoid it are forewarned). However, when I turned the last page Friday night, I looked up at Larry who was lying on his bed in our La Quinta hotel room in Denver, his concealed .45 and 9mm guns on the floor beside him, and said, “Wow. WOW.” And then I think I said, “Dude, what a marvelous read” or maybe it was “Oh, great lord of zombie destruction tales do not smite me,” but I’m not sure because I was still thinking about the perfect last line of the perfect last scene of the last chapter.
Now, those exclamations of satisfaction and delight had nothing to do with the guns on the floor, that Larry’s a deadly shot, or that he’s a big 6’3″ Portugese. It has nothing to do with the fact that he and I were on a book tour together. I don’t read books that don’t grab me. End of story. I stopped doing that long ago. I don’t care who wrote them. And I don’t give false praise. False praise irks me to no end and does nobody any good, especially not the receiver. The truth is that Larry’s book was simply too good to put down. It pulled me in with the opening quote and kept delivering the goods until the end. And if you don’t believe me, you read the quote that both inspiried and opens the book and tell me you don’t want to turn the next page.
“You know what the difference between me and you really is? You look out there and see a horde of evil, brain-eating zombines. I look out there and see a target-rich environment.” ~Dillis D. Freeman Jr.
Yeah, it got ya, didn’t it. The ride is waiting folks. Just go on over to Amazon. Correia is going to be a writer to watch.
Scott Card recently wrote “Marriage needs lots of humor.” It’s an awful title for one of the best articles of his that I’ve ever read.
I’m not going to spoil it for you. But I will say that I’ve found that it’s the small things that seem to make the biggest difference in relationships. And this is one of those small things that packs a HUGE punch. But not until this article did I realize it.
And for you writers who are wanting insights on what makes characters interesting and sympathetic–there’s a little treasure trove here for you as well.
Enjoy!
I’m excited to share the Lockwood & Co. series by Jonathan Stroud. It’s a delightful audiobook experience for the whole family.
Nellie introduced me to it on our road trip to Yosemite last October.
And, oh my gosh, how we’ve enjoyed listening.
They’re young adult paranormal thrillers with a good dose of humor and English charm.
Yes, Netflix, launched a show based on the books, but Nellie and I tried it, and the Netflix productions don’t hold a candle to the audiobooks.
It’s not even close.
If you’re going to do this series, listen to the audiobooks or read them.
The story is set in England in, I’d say, the 1980s, before cell phones and the internet became a thing. The problem is that ghosts, specters, tommy knockers, etc. are appearing all over the place and causing havoc. Because, in this world, when you’re touched by a visitor from the other side, you can easily become ghost locked, basically put in coma, or die.
And while the ghosts can touch anyone, children and teens are the only ones who can see them. And so it’s children and teens who must fight them. Of course, large ghost protection agencies are formed, but our story is about Lucy Carlisle, who joins a tiny agency run by a daring young man named Anthony Lockwood.
There are five books in the series, which translates to about fifty-nine hours of delightful listening. Perfect for the long road trips, cleaning, fixing dinner, walks, etc.
Miranda Raison is the reader for the first book, Katie Lyons the second, and Emily Bevan for the final three. And they’ve all been a joy to listen to.
I’m not normally a paranormal kind of guy, but this is making me reconsider. We loved Stroud’s Bartimaeus series. And he brings the same fast action, interesting characters, and wit to these.
If you enjoy delightful characters and derring-do leavened with some humor, give these a try. I think you’ll be glad you did.
Comments are closed.
I really prefer the new art. I actually resisted buying ‘RuneLords’ years ago because, I REALLY dont care for Darrell K Sweet. More than half the time I’m looking at Wheel of Time covers I ask myself what is he trying to say here? The most boring moment in the book? case in point ‘Knife of Dreams’. Yes he paints better than I can by a long shot, but I’m a writer not a painter. And if I can ever get TOR to take one of my books, I would rather have KK than Sweet.
Sorry just a little rant. I would prefer something like KK for
‘Servant of a Dark God’ too
It’s visceral. KK is like, holy crap, that dude is going to kill me!! Sweet is more tame. I don’t know if Disneyesque is the right term, but you don’t get the feeling of danger with Sweet.
Isaac, who brought this to my attention, suggested this feel matched my book. He’s the one who opened my eyes to the feel of my book, saying it reminded him of Braveheart, Patriot, or an early British Isles feel.
One thing is for sure–cover art marketing is an art. There are all sorts of factors to consider in addition to whether the illustration is cool. I’ll be interested to see what they come up with.
I’ve only read what you have posted thus far, but without tooting your horn too much, I really like it. I think the biggest moment of zing to me, the moment that has me wondering the most about was Sugars mother, how she got that strong and daring to stand by her husband. Is more going to be revealed there soon or did I read something into it that wasn’t there?
Not trying to be off topic, I just started wondering about the Braveheart and Patriot feel of things. I personally like the racist feel of things, the conflict between Koramites and the others, not because Im racist but because thats real. I cant recall which series it was,Im sure it was a bigger one; a friend of mine liked it because there were no race issues. To me in a world of many divergent nations for there to be no race issues is unrealistic. I just didn’t buy it. But Fir-Noy hating others, conquered peoples thats real, fantasy world or no.
So for an art cover comment, something dark and dangerous is better than Sweet and low.
Glad to hear it’s working for you. Yes, more will be revealed about her mother. Hopefully, many delicious moments ahead. 🙂