The ad apearing today is merely the standard Google Adsense ad, with links to audio books.

I’m disappointed. I was enjoying the videos.

Admittedly, I did place coded messages about proper skin care throughout the epic story of Hannibal.

Yesterday’s ad was for a skin cream. Today’s is for a brand of tequila. What will tomorrow’s be?

May I assume you’re seeking to augment your income?

Anyway, how might skin cream and tequila go with the story of Hannibal in the minds of readers? How about that his skin would have been raw and burned from the deserts of North Africa and Spain, and have been cold and chapped in the snow-bound Alps?

Hannibal would have welcomed, I’m sure, the healing qualities and soothing feeling of cream on his skin. And what better than tequila for him and his soldiery to have downed large quantities of, to celebrate the routing of the Romans.

I wait impatiently for the next ad……..

And the helmet has been improved.

And the offending “Us” in the third line of the subtitle is being moved up (or so I’ve been told).

How psychologically revealing is this?

http://bit.ly/MXPBOX

Have you tried moving the “Us” up? As it stands, it is balanced fairly neatly but moving the “Us” up would actually move 3 characters up (the space and the “Us”). It can be done but you end up with a shorter (by 5) 3rd line than the 1st line. Currently, the 3rd line is shorter by 4 characters. If I counted right, it is 32-20-28 now. If you move the “Us”, you get 32-23-25.

And yes, if the “Us” were moved up one line, the “about” would have to be capitalized for aesthetic reasons alone, as it would simply look wrong to have the first two lines of the subtitle begin with a capital letter and the third one with a lowercase letter.

And then, if anyone were to point out that “about” wasn’t supposed to be capitalized in a title because it’s a preposition, one could counter by presenting the words-of-four-letters-or-more capitalization rule from the New York Times Manual of Style and Usage and make an, I believe, justifiable argument that when it comes to capitalization and punctuation, headlines and titles are identical, i.e., what applies to one applies to the other as well.

Sure, if “about” were capitalized, then “and” would remain as the sole lowercase letter in the subtitle, but that wouldn’t bother me, considerations regarding aesthetic inconsistency notwithstanding. All-caps titles/subtitles are a different story, but to simply capitalize the first letter of every word, including the non-emphasized short ones like “to” and “and,” violates my personal sense of title decorum, unless such a word were to begin a line in a broken-up title where all other lines started with a cap, in which case my sense of aesthetics may trump my sense of decorum.

absolutely no to a cream colored blog, thought you were kidding. nothing clever about vanilla. and the red/black cream combo of your cover is a mid-century modern look that is very hard to pull off without looking “cold”. it’s the clever graphic that warms your cover and gives the viewer a wink.

if you are serious about a background color change try a warm shade of red, see if it’s not too harsh, and keep the grey type, don’t switch to black type for the title.

i have a feeling you are too busy to bother with color changes on the blog anyway! but i cringe at the thought of bad design choices the way CQ cringes at bad grammar. it’s my thang

I’m cool with it being quite subtle. Makes people look longer, and perhaps ropes them in.

i vote for the red helmet. clean, clever, clear. yeah!

Why then, have your publishers changed the design for the paperback of “Hannibal and Me”?

Whatever the reason, I prefer the paperback jacket design of your book to that of the original. I like the design on the left, and suggest it be wholly in black and white.

This would make it more arresting.

I’d vote for the color version as well, but also have some reservations about the concept. Maybe I’m unimaginative, but until I read the comments, I thought the tie was a sword. I simply didn’t see a tie and still don’t totally get it. The idea is clever but maybe too subtle. It might also limit the demographic of the book’s appeal (oh, another business book) and we know that it shouldn’t be limited that way.

I’d stick with the winner that is on the original book. You in a suit adjacent to an elephant is not the same as Hannibal wearing a tie. Hannibal in a tie reminds me of one of my earlier bosses who I’d like to forget.

Aside from that, I think Cyberquill has an excellent point. It seems illogical and uncomfortable to break “teach us.”