Australian marketing executives Agius and Clancey advise would-be entrepreneurs on how to build a powerful brand in this debut guide.
The authors went into business together in 2008, hoping to make enough money online that they could continue living leisurely lives in Thailand. It didn’t quite work out that way; the pair were soon forced to move back to Australia, but they soon started a successful search-engine-optimization–based marketing firm called Louder.Online. Within a year, they write, they had clients around the globe, and in this book, they seek to share their subsequent experience with those who might follow in their footsteps. “A powerful brand is one part technical savvy and one part social smarts,” explain the authors in their introduction. “We teamed up on this book to bring you both sides of the equation—Aaron with his technical and practical know-how and Gián with her marketing experience and passion for the behavioral and social sciences.” They explain how to build a reputation for credibility, increase online traffic, engage with specific audiences, and get those audiences to purchase products—and keep purchasing them. Each chapter focuses on one topic; for example, in a chapter on audience engagement, the authors explain how it operates on both a psychological level and a practical one, using hypothetical examples as well as anecdotes from their own experience. Overall, the authors’ prose is succinct and patiently instructive: “Marketers often think they need to become master instructors for their video content to work. The truth is, all you have to do is be authentic. Document your life. Share what you’re up to in short, simple segments.” The well-organized book reads quickly, making for a useful primer on building a customer base in the modern marketplace.
A comprehensive, pleasantly composed marketing resource.Pub Date: July 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5445-1185-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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With this detailed, versatile cookbook, readers can finally make Momofuku Milk Bar’s inventive, decadent desserts at home, or see what they’ve been missing.
In this successor to the Momofuku cookbook, Momofuku Milk Bar’s pastry chef hands over the keys to the restaurant group’s snack-food–based treats, which have had people lining up outside the door of the Manhattan bakery since it opened. The James Beard Award–nominated Tosi spares no detail, providing origin stories for her popular cookies, pies and ice-cream flavors. The recipes are meticulously outlined, with added tips on how to experiment with their format. After “understanding how we laid out this cookbook…you will be one of us,” writes the author. Still, it’s a bit more sophisticated than the typical Betty Crocker fare. In addition to a healthy stock of pretzels, cornflakes and, of course, milk powder, some recipes require readers to have feuilletine and citric acid handy, to perfect the art of quenelling. Acolytes should invest in a scale, thanks to Tosi’s preference of grams (“freedom measurements,” as the friendlier cups and spoons are called, are provided, but heavily frowned upon)—though it’s hard to be too pretentious when one of your main ingredients is Fruity Pebbles. A refreshing, youthful cookbook that will have readers happily indulging in a rising pastry-chef star’s widely appealing treats.
Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-72049-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Clarkson Potter
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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A New York Times columnist and editorial board member delivers a slim book for aspiring writers, offering saws and sense, wisdom and waggery, biases and biting sarcasm.
Klinkenborg (Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile, 2006), who’s taught for decades, endeavors to keep things simple in his prose, and he urges other writers to do the same. (Note: He despises abuses of the word as, as he continually reminds readers.) In the early sections, the author ignores traditional paragraphing so that the text resembles a long free-verse poem. He urges readers to use short, clear sentences and to make sure each one is healthy before moving on; notes that it’s acceptable to start sentences with and and but; sees benefits in diagramming sentences; stresses that all writing is revision; periodically blasts the formulaic writing that many (most?) students learn in school; argues that knowing where you’re headed before you begin might be good for a vacation, but not for a piece of writing; and believes that writers must trust readers more, and trust themselves. Most of Klinkenborg’s advice is neither radical nor especially profound (“Turn to the poets. / Learn from them”), and the text suffers from a corrosive fallacy: that if his strategies work for him they will work for all. The final fifth of the text includes some passages from writers he admires (McPhee, Oates, Cheever) and some of his students’ awkward sentences, which he treats analytically but sometimes with a surprising sarcasm that veers near meanness. He includes examples of students’ dangling modifiers, malapropisms, errors of pronoun agreement, wordiness and other mistakes.
Analyzing his craft, a careful craftsman urges with Thoreauvian conviction that writers should simplify, simplify, simplify.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-26634-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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