As you kick back during these last days of summer, check out one or more of our August Book Picks, offering a little something for everyone.
From guides on how to successfully create and leverage video—one of the hottest trends among publishers today—to insider looks at Silicon Valley “chaos monkeys” and the rise of Hollywood power players, our selections are sure to both educate and entertain.
Enjoy!
Book Picks: Video Marketing, Plus Some Steamy Media-Related Summer Reads
Written for business people dealing with complex offerings, this is a hands-on, in-the-trenches guide to leveraging this emerging medium to reach bottom-line business goals. Uniquely, this book addresses the full range of visual solutions, with an emphasis on using these products to create real business value. You’ll learn the ins and outs of infographics, interactive pictograms, video, animations, data-driven visualizations, and other conversion-generating graphical content. Get inspired by the groundbreaking examples showcased, and learn how to manage every aspect of visual content, from sourcing suppliers to leveraging content on the appropriate media platforms.
Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by
Imagine a chimpanzee rampaging through a data center powering everything from Google to Facebook. Infrastructure engineers use a software version of this “chaos monkey” to test online services’ robustness—their ability to survive random failure and correct mistakes before they actually occur. Tech entrepreneurs are society’s chaos monkeys, disruptors testing and transforming every aspect of our lives, from transportation (Uber) and lodging (Airbnb) to television (Netflix) and dating (Tinder). Weighing in on everything from startups and credit derivatives to Big Brother and data tracking, social media monetization and digital “privacy,” author Antonio García Martínez shares his scathing observations and outrageous antics, taking us on a humorous, subversive tour of the fascinatingly insular tech industry. Chaos Monkeys lays bare the hijinks, trade secrets, and power plays of the visionaries, grunts, sociopaths, opportunists, accidental tourists, and money cowboys who are revolutionizing our world. The question is, will we survive?
Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood’s Creative Artists Agency by
From the bestselling co-author of Live from New York and Those Guys Have All the Fun, this pick is an astonishing—and astonishingly entertaining—history of Hollywood’s transformation over the past five decades as seen through Creative Artists Agency, the agency at the heart of it all. Drawing on unprecedented and exclusive access to the men and women who built and battled with CAA, as well as financial information never before made public, author James Andrew Miller spins a tale of boundless ambition, ruthless egomania, ceaseless empire building, greed, and personal betrayal. It is also a story of prophetic brilliance, magnificent artistry, singular genius, entrepreneurial courage, strategic daring, foxhole brotherhood, and how one firm utterly transformed the entertainment business.
The Video Marketers Cookbook is a compilation of tutorials, systems, and tactics to help small business owners use the author’s “recipes” to create awesome videos. Cooking and creating video is actually quite similar. Once you have a good base of tools and knowledge you can create your own recipes for your own needs. This guide teaches you the basics of why video is one of the best marketing tools at your disposal. Many of the commonly asked questions about video are answered, and the questions that people should be asking are answered as well. Focusing on four major “ingredients”—entertainment, engagement, elimination, and repurposing—this book is also for business people who want to elevate their brand exposure, create a real connection with their audience and build evergreen marketing material that can drive sales.
If you are looking for new ways to drive traffic to your business, this is the book for you. It covers how the video marketplace works and how to incorporate video into your current business processes. Along with a working vocabulary of the industry, this guide lays out eight simple steps to creating dynamic video content, the five best topics to drive traffic, the keys to camera work and cinematography for video, the real secret of viral videos, low-cost special effects, the power of product placement, and much more. These powerful tools, tips and techniques can help make your traffic flow better and boost your site’s popularity.
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Posted by: Margot Knorr Mancini
