Customer Reviews

Your Attention Please: How to Appeal to Today's Distracted, Disinterested, Disengaged, Disenchanted, and Busy Consumer

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
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When I initially picked up the book I thought it was going to be about how you can keep a person's attention around a product or service. A marketing book of some sort. To my surprise it ended up being much more than just that. The book provided tips about how to write stories, articles and communication that will keep your audience engaged. This is the book I have been looking for. I found it on a little book store on my vacation and I will recommend it to everyone I know.

A couple of things I learned in one day:

1. The audience is busy. Less than 600 words for short articles. 1200 words for long articles. This will make your writing more accessible to busy readers.

2. Write about stuff they want to read. It's about me and my time is limited. Too often we choose subjects that we ourselves find interesting but the reader just doesn't care.

3. Titles of articles should promise and benefit the audience. For Example - How to, Be a better, You can, Learn ways, Become a, Deliver on, Make more, Get more...

4. Be the audience. Try not to tell us things we already know or understand. Write about things we want to know. If you love the topic it will show through and your audience will be engaged.

5. Create high concepts when writing the excerpts. Titles should be no longer than six words. Excerpts should be no longer than 10-15 words. High concepts summarize the article and let's the reader decide if they need to invest the time.

6. Draw mental pictures of what you are writing about so the audience can visualize it. Illustrate the problem and communicate that by continuing to read this they will have the solution they seek.

This is only the surface. Buy this book you won't be disappointed.

Quite simply, the most comprehensive look at the new procedures for trying to talk to prospective clients that I've read in the last couple of years. I bought 3 to hand out to past and hopefully future clients.
It's practical and short and to the point, emulating what the book tells us to do.

A very intuitive yet refreshingly nuts and bolts book that cuts across all communication dynamics. As a professional (not in sales or marketing), I did not expect the book to be anything other than tangentially or anecdotally relevant. Boy was I wrong. As I read the book I began to envision myself effortlessly utilizing the insights, advice and techniques literally packed throughout the book in all sorts of everyday situations from new and existing client contacts to "simple" colleague communications. I even see scenarios where the techniques will come in quite handy in more...stressful situations.

The book gingerly moves from lesson to hand-on examples that anyone can identify with, and is rich with (short) stories that lead you into the wilderness and out the other side, better-off for the experience. I recommend the book to anyone who has ever looked back on any communication opportunity of any nature, and thought "... I could have done that better..."

Subtitled: How to appear to today's distracted, disinterested, disengaged, disenchanted and busy audience.

(Good resource for writers or business people)

As someone who writes business content for brochures, web sits, etc., this book had a ton of good information. Usually I don't write in books, however this one is splattered full of "good," or "keep."

These following facts will tell you why you need to write differently for today's audience:

-- 4.3% of adult population has ADHD-that's 8 million Americans
-- People will throw out more than 50% of the paper mail without any more than a quick glance--or pile it to "read later"
-- People will delete email without reading them, even those they need to have read in office emails (not just spam)
-- 84% of adults read magazines regularly while 50% read novels. 7,000 magazines are published in North America and 480 new magazines were introduced in 2004.
-- Professionals spend 53% of their time seeking information (5.4 billion hours a year)
-- The average TV viewer changes channels 8,000 a week
-- We retain 10% of what we hear, but 50% if visuals are included (pictures, graphics, type variations)
-- The Gettysburg Address (one of the greatest speeches in history) was only 272 words long
-- Average story in USA Today (introduced in 1982) is 300 words long.

Why all these facts? To show that our audience today, especially if you need to reach people younger than 35, wants to be communicated with differently.

The authors said that writing for the (recommended) reading level (7-8th grade) is not because our audience is illiterate but because they are busy, distracted, and reluctant to read complicated prose.

You can go to [...] to take a free reading test based on the state standards for competency in reading and math. (The book tells what happened when the author did that!)

Simple, short, friendly tone, one-to-one conversational approach. Watch your voice/personality. Get over yourself and your ego and write for your audience.

Brevity: People have so little time to absorb information that everything is getting shorter (except this review).

Armchair Interviews says: Anyone who writes for business should read this book to remember what you know--and to learn something new.

You can invest a lot of money in online ebooks about how to write articles, in course on how to write sales copy, et. al. but this little book (not short, it's just in a sort of truncated trade-paperback format) contains incredible information about what really works.

See, today the default reaction everybody has is "I'm too busy" and thus, unless your message instantly grabs them, they ignore it.

This book shows you how and why to put "hooks" in your writing. It also gets into layout quite a bit. If you're a copywriter you might assume you already know this stuff... but I'm a copywriter and I've read tons of books about it and this one is one of the most useful. It is not about writing salesletters or ads, actually. What it's really about is the kind of pedestrian day-to-day business writing many of us must do: blogging, articles, and emails.

If you have a gut-level suspicion that readers are ignoring your message, they probably are. This book can help you change that.

Truly excellent, but judging from used book prices, under-appreciated.

Getting your message across is becoming more difficult. People suffer an excess of information and clutter. Audiences are demanding and selective, and they vary widely in their needs and interests. That's why business writer Paul B. Brown and employee-communications consultant Alison Davis deserve a lot of credit for creating this handy, practical manual on basic communication skills for the Internet age. Their ideas may not be profound, but their fundamental lessons are highly applicable, as their examples and their blocky, jazzy layout attest. Their book offers the expected list of pitfalls, but it also provides great guidelines that can improve the practices of any communicator. getAbstract recommends it to anyone who needs to break through the tumult and get a message across to the public. Follow its advice and everyone, including the members of your audience, will benefit.

First off, this is one of the few books that describes writing and does what they describe, from the personal tone of the book, to the little stories to help you remember the point. A really good read, with lots of tid bits of information that can be used in everyday writing and corporate America. A good read and probably one that should be included in a Writing Course for some college.

This amazingly compact book is packed with invaluable information and instruction on how to create writing that's clear, concise, and compelling. No matter what type of writing you do, it will teach you how to use words (or lack of them) to frame their intended meaning with brevity, less distraction and greater comprehension. Order it now. You won't be disappointed.

Of the hundreds of books on marketing, advertising and sales that are available, few offer the valuable insight that you will get from this book. The three chapters on "Focus on 'You'", "Tell a Story" and "Stay Short and Sweet" are worth the price of the book alone.

Unfortunately, too many people will probably think that the ideas that are presented in the book are too simple to work. Don't make that mistake! As a consultant who helps companies improve the effectiveness of their advertising and related communications, I can tell you that I have been using many of these ideas with my clients for years and they do work!

If you are in business and want to improve your advertising and communications, buy the book and read it at least three times. Then put the ideas to work. You will see a positive impact on your business!

If you're like me, you've been writing for a good long time and it's something you can handle with ease. But guess what? People don't read! Why? If Sleepless in Seattle were re-written today, the "You've got mail" voice would say "You've got more mail than you can hope to read. Ever."

Even if your message is GOOD, even if your message is IMPORTANT, even if your message is WELL WRITTEN, it's no guarantee it will even be read, much less remembered.

So, _Your Attention Please_ introduces you to "the high concept" and other techniques you can employ to create a well-crafted message (email, blog, report, presentation). There's nothing _really_ ground-breaking in terms of writing techniques in this book--focus on your audience, develop a clear message, keep it short--but it's *how* the book covers the topic that makes it so good. It walks its own talk: examples, visuals, sidebars, and anecdotes keep you flipping. I have an outlined summary of the book that I keep on my computer desktop and scan before sending out any important emails or creating presentations and trainings. Actually, to improve one more on the book, I would include a quick-reference card for those of us who want to practice the message without having to crack the book again.

And now the bad news. Did you hear the one about the writer who handed in her 600-page novel to her publisher, saying, "I was going to write a short story, but I didn't have the time"? _Designing_ a message takes a lot more effort than just writing one, which is probably why there are so many awful emails out there. Just try it once: take an idea you have and see if you can "high concept" it. You have to work harder than if you just started blathering on. So you can read the book, but you still have to wax-on and wax-off before you can be the karate kid.

One last note: I would give this book 5 stars, except that it had peppered throughout a number of anecdotes that didn't really support the point being made, and since the book was otherwise so tightly designed, they felt like pebbles in my shoe. For example, to illustrate a point about reading levels, they tell a good story about an online reading comprehension test. Great! But then they follow that with a story about visiting a website that can translate your writing into pig latin, jive, valley girl, and swedish chef. Ok, fun, but not at all relevant to the point about reading levels.