Blowing Marketing Bubbles with Trouble Gum

I’m a fan of Matthew Cordell’s work in general, and specifically his first book as both author and illustrator, Trouble Gum.  I stumbled upon Matthew’s work a couple years ago when I was checking out the snowflakes for Robert’s Snow, a charity event where children’s book illustrators create unique snowflakes to be auctioned off for charity.  I really liked Matthew’s snowflake featuring children in their winter knit hats.

His style reminds me of William Steig of Shrek fame.  Wonderful pen and ink drawings with a scribble and doodle sensibility that adds a lot of warmth and interest.

What does all of this have to do with marketing?  Good question.  You see, Matthew, like a lot of writers, illustrators and artists, is deftly using marketing in general and social marketing specifically to cultivate an audience, drive sales and build long-term relationships with fans.  Major brands could learn a lot from someone like Matthew.

Once I recognized that I enjoyed his work, I started to periodically read Matthew’s blog where he provides insights into his in-progress projects, discusses his motivations, gives behind the scenes glimpses into his development process, talks about his family, and gives his audience a depth of information that you can’t get from a book’s dust jacket.  Social marketing gives writers and artists the power to grow their own fan base and build important relationships with their individual fans.

Matthew runs contests to build traffic to his blog, to generate buzz and to promote his work.

I happened to win a couple of those contests.  In the first, I won an original drawing from his book Trouble Gum.  Besides the drawing, he sent me a nice handwritten note and copies of promotional postcards from his other books.  I must say that I was very excited to receive this amazing prize.

In the other contest, I won a couple packs of promotional gum called Trouble Gum.  The packs were an ingenious promotional giveaway developed by Matthew and his publisher to promote his book at various events.

So, Matthew is building his brand, his audience and his business through hands-on, personable and memorable interactions with his books, his artwork, his website, his blog, his contests and his willingness to share himself with his fans.

He’s a growing marketing machine in the world of children’s literature and he’s doing it well.