Portfolio Project Progress Week One

It has been one week since I officially began working on my portfolio project, so it’s time for an update!

This month, I am creating a writing swipe file of approximately 20 slides, which will be available on this site. It will include examples of great writing from books, direct response emails, blog posts, movies and TV shows, as well as outstanding titles and book covers. All of this is in an effort to ignite creativity in other authors and to give them a better understanding of the power of words and the marketing of them.

So, what makes a quote great?

• Could be a difficult truth in easy-to-understand words
• Could apply to all readers
• Could make a hard theme easier to swallow
• Could sound pretty
• Could be hilarious
• Could be miserable but show deep empathy
• Could be catchy/become a motto

What makes a title great?

• Could be catchy
• Could be pointed/directed at a certain, cool audience
• Could be mysterious/force readers to read the synopsis
• Could sound pretty
• Could sound funny
• Could have a deeper meaning later in the book/post

What makes a book cover great?

As James Patterson says, “Nobody buys a book that they don’t pick up.”

• Shows genre
• Shows uniqueness of book
• Could include blurbs from big names
• Could include a tagline
• Gets readers’ attention

With these loose criteria in mind, I spent days searching Pinterest for examples to use in my swipe file. I ended up with nearly 100 pins that I loved but swiftly cut them down to just under 75 because some quotes just need context clues. *shrug*

Today, with my way-too-many examples, I started working on my presentation. Thus far, I have created a title slide, an about me/project slide and have started laying out the slides containing my pins. I estimate that I will have space for about half of them. That means picking favorites. They’re all my favorites. Now accepting help in the form of chocolate.

This project is teaching me a lot about writing and marketing, but it’s also teaching me random things like how to install custom fonts and colors that I can use in other projects. I feel so techie.

My current mission is to finish the layout of my presentation and add captions to go along with my examples as necessary. I definitely want to have a couple of slides that show the correlation between MG and YA branding techniques. That probably sounds lackluster, but I’m determined to make this the easiest and most colorful lesson in marketing that you’ve ever seen.

Until next week, friends! Happy Thursday!