Anatomy of a Book Cover: The Vigilant Investor

The following is a guest post by Creative Director Cathleen Ouderkirk on the long process of creating the perfect book cover.

Sometimes jacket designs arrive fully-formed, like what’s-her-name popping out of of Zeus’ head. Our recent book, Harvesting Intangible Assets was exactly this kind of easy job. We asked Faceout Studio for something “dignified and serious, but with an intriguing element that combines farming and intellectual property.” Exactly the kind of assignment that thinking designers love, and voila, check out the response: plenty dignified, but with a touch of intrigue.

Other times (most other times), jacket design creation is more like childbirth—long and on the painful side. We love the jacket design for our new book, The Vigilant Investor because it exactly presents what we wanted… well, what we eventually realized we wanted. For this one we put our talented, long-time designer, Cynthia Wessendorf, through the wringer — but she survived.

First we told her: “Cynthia, we want something that looks serious (because we’re talking about people’s savings, after all) but still conveys a sense of security. So she came with a series of designs, including this one, which says “your money” and “protection.”

Maybe too much protection, we decided. We instructed Cynthia, “this one is beautiful, but we realize we need something a bit more threatening, to scare potential readers into needing the book.” Cynthia gamely jumped in and came with a second round, which certainly achieved threatening (note swooping eagle design).

Hmm, maybe too threatening. So we went back to poor Cynthia and said: “We love the idea of the golden nest egg being under threat or in distress, but the eagle seems too extreme. Is there something else you can do with the egg?”

And that’s when long-suffering Cynthia came up with what became the final design: a big gorgeous golden nest egg — but the egg is developing cracks… whoa… get it? Is your nest egg as secure as you think it is?

So thank you, Pat Huddleston, for writing such an eye-opening book, and thank you, Ms. Wessendorf for not giving up on us and creating an equally eye-opening book cover.

Creativity. Don’t you love it?

Cathleen Ouderkirk is Creative Director here at AMACOM. With us for over 20 years, she started as a copywriter and then moved to producing catalogs, sales sheets, and direct mail pieces, before moving on to design. After secretly designing on her own book jackets and showing them to the acquisition editors, her work evolved into overseeing all of our jackets today. Visit our website for freelance design inquiries.

Steve Jobs’ Favorite Poem: Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas

Our President and Publisher Hank Kennedy shared this poem with everyone at AMACOM and we’d like to share it with you. Even in the book industry, we sometimes underestimate the value and impact of words in capturing the ideas and spirits of others. We think this fits Steve Jobs of Apple, innovator and inspiration, who died of pancreatic cancer yesterday, perfectly.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Thank you for sharing this poem with us Hank!

Random Quotes from New Books This October

With that fall chill in the air, we know we’ll be standing at the soup counter at our local lunch spot soon. Of course we know our old favorites but it’s fun to order samples of the new soups. Why not get a sip of a new book to figure out what will feed your mind this October? Our Random Quotes from New Books series continues with titles to help improve your business, your finances, and stimulate the grey matter.

It’s Your Biz: The Complete Guide to Becoming Your Own Boss by Susan Wilson Solovic with Ellen R. Kadin

“Background noise is another potential problem for a home-based business. The sound of barking dogs and crying children won’t make you appear professional. If you have young childnren, you may need to consider day care. As for pets, make sure they are someplace where their activity won’t interfere with busiess. I’m fortunate. I have a shih tzu who never barks. When I work at home, he lays by my feet and never makes a sound. He is an excellent co-worker. (So much so I’ve given him a title. He is ‘chairman of the bone.’)” (page 158)

The Vigilant Investor: A Former SEC Enforcer Reveals How to Fraud-Proof Your Investments by Pat Huddleston

“Although the vigilant investor asks questions and writes down answers that an adviser provides, she does not rely on them. Instead, the vigilant investor seeks independent confirmation. At Investors’ Watchdog, we get education information from the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC). If you give the NSC an accurate birth date, student name, school name, and $6.50, it will either confirm what your adviser told you about his education or expose the Fibber.” (page 52)

Delivering Knock Your Socks Off Service, 5th Edition by Performance Research Associates

“Each interaction between a customer and a service professional is one moment in the chain of the customer’s experience. If you’re a service person, and you get it wrong at your link in the chain, you are very likely erasing from the customer’s mind all the memories of good treatment he or she may have had up to that moment, But if you get it right, you have a chance to undo all the wrongs that may have happened before the customer got to you. And, in today’s world, the faster you do it, the happier they are.” (page 4)

Harvesting Intangible Assets: Uncover Hidden Revenue in Your Company’s Intellectual Property by Andrew J. Sherman

“Kudoes to those companies around the globe that aggressively enforce their intellectual capital rights and do not allow illegal trespass on their property. But can this strategy go too far? Will high fences and concrete walls be helpful in the short term in their effectiveness and yet do long-term harm in driving shareholder value? Texas Instruments in recent years devoted significant resources to patent litigation and patent licensing, and the results have been impressive, netting the company more than $1 billion a year from litigation settlements and patent licenses as a result of vigilant enforcement policies. In some years, revenues from these sources have exceeded net income from product sales. Impressive, but dangerous. When revenues from litigation exceed revenues from innovation, this can be the beginning of the end of the future of the company. Yes, we must be diligent in building fences, but walls cannot be strategic substitute for the output of the new products and services that are intended to come from within the company.” (pages 112-113)

The Enemy of Engagement: Put an End to Workplace Frustration–and Get the Most from Your Employees by Mark Royal, Tom Agnew

“The Bernette Financial call center culture is the envy of the industry. Turnover is low. Nearly every employee believes in the mission: They’re helping people buy homes, helping businesses serve their communities, and helping families achieve their dreams. Customer surveys invariably show that Bernette customers are overall ‘very satisfied’ with the help they get when they call or e-mail. Questions get answered. Problems get resolved. Customer service representatives are viewed as helpful, knowledgeable, and friendly.” (page 25)

Now you’ve knocked back a tiny cup, are you ready to order a full bowl?

Paul Kurnit and Steve Lance on Developing Powerful Ideas

The following is a guest post from Paul Kurnit and Steve Lance, authors of Breakthrough: A 7-Step System for Developing Unexpected and Profitable Ideas on the methodology behind arriving at a great idea.

Companies need new ideas the way people need food. It’s the energy that grows and sustains them. But where do they come from? And when was the last time you or your company came up with a breakthrough idea, product or service that not only made it to the marketplace, but transformed traditional expectations and captured the public’s imagination?

Put a methodology in place. There is no shortage of good ideas, but there’s a shortage of good environments where ideas can come to life. So what is the methodology?

STEP ONE: Put an end to business as usual—start by acknowledging that you’ve got to create a new way of thinking about your business. The classic question is, “How’s business?” And the ideal answer is “Great—but it could be better.” Don’t settle for “same old, same old” when it comes to your company’s approach to business. Everyone should demand a new way of thinking about what you do and how you do it.

STEP TWO: Get business buy-in. New ideas are the lifeblood of every business. But you’ve got to inspire a culture that requires ideas as a steady diet. No new idea has a chance to live if senior management isn’t behind it. So start selling the idea of Breakthrough! up the line and throughout the organization.

STEP THREE: Organize the team and process. Great ideas don’t happen in a vacuum; you should assemble the right team to brainstorm on new ideas, products and services. A new idea team should be cross-discipline. They should be business stakeholders. They should be true believers. They should be people from marketing, from sales, from research, from development… maybe even your legal department. And if you’re a small- to mid-sized business it should probably include a number of your senior-most executives like your Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer.

STEP FOUR: Land on the big idea. Once you’ve got the right structure and methodology in place, you have a healthy environment to start nurturing big ideas. Now it’s a question of generating the ideas. Any good brainstorming technique will work: try one, try them all. Build excitement for the process by spreading the wealth, offering rewards for company employees who come up with new idea suggestions. Remember: the people who work in the company have the best idea(s) of what you need to be doing different and better.

STEP FIVE: Build momentum for the idea. Don’t just spring the idea on management. You’ve got to do research, due diligence and determine the dimensions of the idea before making the sale internally. Is it competitively insulated? Can it be done legally? What does your target market think of the idea? You’ll look foolish proposing an idea to management that can’t be done—so do your homework, first. Then go make the sale!

STEP SIX: Develop the plan. Once you’ve got company buy-in, start building out the specific plan to bring your idea to market. What’s your budget? What’s your deliverable? What’s the process to make it happen? What’s the timeline? Who’s going to make it happen? There are dozens—maybe even hundreds—of questions that need to be answered to bring an idea from initial stages all the way to the marketplace.

STEP SEVEN: Let’s do launch! You’ve got to prepare and implement a valid test. Will the idea fly? Is it a service or product your customers really want? What tweaking do you need to do? There are all kinds of ideas that seem like winners—all the way up to test. But you’ve got to be prepared in your launch to revise and strengthen the idea as you go.

It’s that easy…and that hard! There are no shortcuts to developing breakthrough ideas, products and services; but if you put the right process in place you increase your odds of coming up with a big idea that can transform your business and put you on the cutting edge of the marketplace.

Paul Kurnit is a well-known marketing expert and marketing professor at Pace University whose achievements at agencies such as Benton and Bowles, Ogilvy and DDB’s Griffin Bacal include campaigns for Crest, American Express, and Transformers. He is co-author of The Little Blue Book of Marketing

Steve Lance is a thirty-year veteran of advertising and marketing and an award-winning copywriter and creative director. He is coauthor of The Little Blue Book of Advertising and co-author of The Little Blue Book of Marketing.

Coolhunting and Coolfarming the Next Big Thing on Twitter and Facebook

The following is a guest post from Peter Gloor, author of Coolfarming: Turn Your Great Idea into the Next Big Thing. He shares some ways to leverage coolhunting and coolfarming for Twitter and Facebook.

In the last two years, usage of Twitter and Facebook exploded. According to Techcrunch Twitter has now over 190 million active users tweeting 65 million times a day. Analyzing this huge information stream open up a new treasure trove to discover the next big thing. Facebook on the other hand recently took the 500 million user mark, thus providing a huge testbed to foster diffusion of innovative new ideas through viral marketing on friendship networks of global reach.

In my Coolhunting and Coolfarming books I described how to coolhunt – look for new trends, and coolfarm – develop new trends, by finding the most innovative people and what they are talking about on the Web. Coolhunting means looking for Collaborative Innovation Networks or COINs, small groups of intrinsically motivated people who get together to create the next big thing, coolfarming means developing and growing the COINs. People in COINs communicate in a close-knit group, leaving behind digital traces in e-mail archives, online forums, Web sites, and Blogs. With our software tools we look for those clusters of close collaborators, and try to predict what they are up to. In this post I describe how to apply Coolhunting and Coolfarming to Twitter and Facebook.

For example, in our own work Coolhunting on Twitter we are able to predict stock market indicators such as Dow Jones, NASDAQ and S&P 500 one to three days ahead by analyzing Twitter posts. How we did it? We collected the twitter feeds for six months and got a randomized subsample of about one hundredth of the full volume of all tweets. We measured collective hope and fear on each day and analyzed the correlation between these indices and the stock market indicators by counting the number of times words like “hope”, “fear” and “worry” occurred in the tweets. We found that the number of positive tweets is much higher than that of negative ones, more than double on average, which might suggest that people prefer optimistic to pessimistic words.

We initially expected that the correlation between optimistic mood and stock market indicators would be positive, while the pessimistic mood would negatively correlate with stock indices. Surprisingly, we found negative correlation with Dow, NASDAQ and S&P500 for both positive mood words like “hope” and negative mood words like “fear” and “worry”. This implies that people start using more emotional words such as hope, fear and worry in times of economic uncertainty, independent of whether they have a positive or negative context.

To put it in simple words, when the emotions on Twitter fly high, that is when people express a lot of hope, fear, and worry, the Dow goes down the next day. When people have less hope, fear, and worry, the Dow goes up. It therefore seems that just checking on Twitter for emotional outbursts of any kind gives a predictor of how the stock market will be doing the next day.

We also studied the friendship networks of Facebook fan pages. We collected – as far a publicly accessible – the friendship network of the people who clicked on the “like” button on a fan page of 15 Facebook fan pages.
We ranked groups by emotionality from 1 (product brands) to 5 (medical causes). We found positive correlation between the network density and emotionality. This means that the more connected the friends of a cause or brand are, the more emotional they are about their cause. Even more interestingly, we found negative correlation between the clustering coefficient and emotionality. This means that the more the friends of fans are split up in subgroups, the less emotional they are. The conclusions would be that the causes with the most emotional supporters have a dense, but evenly spread out network, with no recognizable subgroups.

This leads to two recommendations for coolfarmers who want to spread their idea: First – broker connections between thy supporters, and two – fight fragmentation of thy supporters by connecting subgroups. In short – it pays to help build one large happy family!

Peter Gloor, has enjoyed a 20-year career as an executive for UBS, PwC, and Deloitte. He divides his time between the MIT Sloan School of Management, Helsinki University of Technology, and the University of Cologne, and has been growing his startup company, Galaxy Advisors. He is the author of Coolfarming: Turn Your Great Idea into the Next Big Thing and the co-author of Coolhunting: Chasing Down the Next Big Thing.