Fundamentals of Successful Newsletters: Everything You Need to Write, Design, and Publish More Effective Newsletters [Paperback]

Thomas Bivins (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: NTC Business Books (March 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0844234842
• ISBN-13: 978-0844234847
• Product Dimensions: 10.9 x 8.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,074,994 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

TOM BIVINS is a professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon. He has worked in broadcasting, advertising, public relations, and as a graphic designer and editorial cartoonist. He is slightly overeducated, but doesn't let that get in the way of having fun with words and pictures.

He is the author of books on media ethics, public relations writing, publication design, advertising, and newsletter publication. He also has published a couple of children's books with his brother and a small book of poetry (all on his own).

He primarily teaches ethics to journalism students. Mark Twain is his moral inspiration. His critique of all things powerful made him the perfect literary defender of all things not so powerful, yet deserving.

You can visit his website at:

http://jcomm.uoregon.edu/~tbivins/Bivins/index.html.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Smashing Newsletters, November 13, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Fundamentals of Successful Newsletters: Everything You Need to Write, Design, and Publish More Effective Newsletters (Paperback)

Thomas Bivins identifies USA Today as a model, with its colorful banner, easy-to-follow page design, full-color photographs, inviting table of contents, and short articles. As FUNDAMENTALS OF SUCCESSFUL NEWSLETTERS guidelines, the author also points to simple graphic design, with boxes, sparingly appropriate illustrations or photographs, rules, tint blocks, and no more than two typefaces, used not only for getting out an entertaining or informative or persuasive message but also decoratively as initial caps, pull quotes, and reverses. He then throws in limiting printing to two colors, with black, dark blue or dark brown giving a quality look; blue, brown, or green screening nicely as a second color; and with colored paper lending a second- or third-color look. Finally, he sees the end goal as a compatible, consistent, unified artwork all in black and white or all in color, with all formal or all informal text layout and with optically weighted sequencing from left to right and from top to bottom on each page of big to smaller, bright to muted, colorful to black and white, dark to lighter, and unusual oddly shaped to usual. It works particularly well to pool the book's information with Barbara Fanson's PRODUCING A FIRST-CLASS NEWSLETTER and Rita and Roberta Street's CREATIVE NEWSLETTERS AND ANNUAL REPORTS.