Album Cover (maybe)

Jukejoint Handmedowns, music, self portrait

callwildweb
After six months of ‘busy’, I find myself suddenly in the summer slowdown period. Keeping myself busy with personal projects, and since the band is in the planning stages of another album, I got ahead of the ball and started work on the album cover. The concept of this next CD is a collection of songs about our home state, Michigan, and we’ve only just begun gathering and learning the songs, but as with the previous three albums, I’ve gotten the cover art done way ahead of the actual recording. I may change my mind in the coming months, and some revisions may still be taking place in the design, but so far I’m liking the direction.

Everything but the Squeal

Jukejoint Handmedowns, Self Promotion

Getting to be that time again, so I’m designing a new promo postcard to send out to potential clients. Since I’m also in the process of recording a cd for my band, I thought I’d get double duty out of these cards, and print the overrun with a blank back side, and then I can also use this postcard to mail out to music venues/record shops in the area to promote the cd. The image is one that I did earlier this summer as a cd cover for the music that we hadn’t yet begun recording (but we did have the title, and that was good enough for me).

Got a call from our mailing list vendor, and we had a discussion about different marketing tools, and one thing he suggested was to include something on the postcard that requires some sort of action on the part of the recipient, like entering a code on a website or offering some sort of % discount in exchange for a response. I’ve decided to offer a series of free gifts to the first 25 or 30 people to sign up in response to the card (I haven’t quite set up my website for this yet, but will work on it over the next few weeks). The gifts will probably be in the form of free copies of a recent paperdoll book that I got a LOT of complimentary samples from the publisher, plus a few items from my zazzle store. In exchange, I’ll likely design some sort of survey form that can be filled out and submitted online through my main website.