Booklet Tips – Graphics or Not

You want your tips booklet to be as attractive and appealing as possible. And you’ve got lots of information you want to share about your expertise. Creating the balance of text and graphics can be challenging for you unless you consider certain possibilities and decide what you want to accomplish.The earliest suggestion given to tips booklets authors who wanted to write a lot of tips was to keep illustrations and graphics to a minimum unless the topic truly warranted the support of those graphics. If your topic is about staying healthy while sitting all day at your computer, visual illustrations about posture and exercises to do while sitting at your desk make all the sense in the world.Ideas for living a happier life need fewer graphics to make the point. Your booklet is likely to be primarily text. You may want to include small graphic images of sunshine, smiles, or some other generic representation of happiness to separate the topic sections. That’s different than a drawing of the best way to sit at a computer station.You might have a vision of your booklet being mostly graphics or illustrations with very little text. The text supports the visuals rather than the visuals supporting the text. That is certainly another way to do it, while less common among tips booklet authors.Maybe you want to write a tips booklet about organizing a child’s room. Each page could have one or more images of a product or system used for organizing that space, with a sentence or two about how to use it. The booklet could be part of a series about organizing different parts of the home, or it could be on different aspects of parenting.Be as strategic as you can in whatever you decide to do. Your booklet is intended to whet the appetite of the reader rather than to provide a comprehensive treatment of everything you know on the topic. Besides, you’ll know more tomorrow than you do today anyway. The booklet is the basics, the starting point rather than the entire thing. Giving people less so they can absorb that is the best way to serve them. There are always ways to give them more as they are ready, whether that is in other products, other product formats, at your website, or all of these.ACTION – Think as broadly as you can before you start. That means how much text and how much visual illustration of any kind goes into one tips booklet. As you are thinking of more visuals, consider where else you can provide them. Sending people to your website for more is always a great idea. The website content is easier to update than a product, and you can offer other products and services at your site. You will undoubtedly come up with new information to share as you learn it, new ways to offer it, and have new people coming to you. The website is ideal for accommodating all of that as you progress.”Turn Your Tips Into Products, Your Tips Products Into Moneymakers.TM” © 2014

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