The Aardvark’s Tongue

Being only able to steal short bursts of time to work on the only progress I have made this week is on the cover. At the suggestion of a publishing expert and the people who will probably print this first run I have redesigned the cover so that it is color (for better stand-out) and has a spine instead of being spiral bound (so that bookstores will want to stock it - apparently they don’t like spiral because to display it face out takes up too much space). So below is the original cover design and the new color version.

Any thoughts?

Things have been fairly slow on the book publishing front. The front cover design needs to be modified and some of the distribution details need to be decided upon, but life keeps getting in the way.

Things on the Captain Niekerk’s Fine Rooibos Tea front are moving much more quickly. The packaging for the tea arrived this week however dimension-wise it is about 15% less in every respect than “as advertised.” Thankfully it will squeak by in terms of acceptability. We need to get the packaging completed and shoot the photography for the website anyway to be ready for the web sales. Now, if you will excuse me…my tea is getting cold.

It’s official - Sun-Dried Aardvark-Tongue Swizzle-Sticks now has its copyright, straight from the desk of Marybeth Peters. One step closer to launch!

Us east coast folk use words to impress…out west they do things quite differently. If you are out Portland way and want to have a smack down with the best darn video creative minds you can find, then mosey on over to KampGrizzly (actually they know how to write too).

In case you were wondering if there were any other projects in the pipeline, the answer is a resounding yes.

Upcoming titles (the final titles may change) include:

• The Cannibal’s Cookbook
• Jake and the Booger Crane (or some variant thereof)
• and an illustrated book of Mixed Metaphors
  • which begs the question “Does the Pope $*@+ in the woods?”

Any suggestions for other projects or titles are very welcome.

No rest for the weary. It has been a great day to get caught up on some of the more pressing Aardvark tasks. The key things that need to be finalized for the Sun-Dried Aardvark-Tongue Swizzle-Sticks book are:

• Amend the cover design
• Begin the audio recordings
• Finalize the packaging for the Rooibos Tea

Yes, Rooibos Tea!
Captain Niekerk’s Fine Rooibos Tea features handsomely in the book, so we will be selling it on the website as well. Here is the new logo:

This is Jamie (the illustrator) trying out the posting setup we’ve got running here.

This book has been Bob’s baby for as long as I can remember, and to see finalized page spreads and actually flick through printed mock-ups is terrific. I originally agreed to draw the illustrations a few years back, and fed bunches of drawings to Bob whenever I could sit down and churn a few out. With Bob constantly dealing with consulting clients and me in school, the process was drawn out longer than I had anticipated, but now that the book is about to be published I can confidently look back on it all and say it was worth the wait. There is a lot of twistedly brilliant humor in this book accompanied by some pretty fun drawings. As artist this is definitely one of the more unique projects I’ve worked on. Attempting to bring all of Bob’s warped ideas together and draw up somewhat plausible products was an adventure in itself, and getting to run with a few extra illustrations and help craft new ideas for the catalogue was really rewarding. I can’t wait for everyone to dig into it all once this sucker hits shelves.

Now if you’ll excuse me I have springbok penises to redraw.

Today is a milestone! If you Google “Aardvark Tongue” we rank second - sitting squarely behind Wikipedia. This is great however I doubt that anyone ever searches for Aardvark Tongue. Aardvark is the real objective. Currently we aren’t even showing on pages where things like “The Ant and the Aardvark” or “Aardvark Aardwolf” appear. We are doing search optimization so hopefully when the site is fully up and running  the optimizaiton will get us to where we want to be.