In August last year, I hit the print button at home on my first draft of ‘Watertight Marketing’ – due out later this year. At the time, I was seven months pregnant and starting to struggle with maintaining my energy and motivation. But, there it was – from end to end. On my first read-through it became clear that a lot of my writing draws on visual metaphors. As such, an illustrative accompaniment made sense.

Somewhere in the back of my mind was a cartoonist I’d hooked up with on Twitter – Cartoono, aka Simon Ellinas. He regularly shares snippets of his work, and it was exactly the style I had in mind. We exchanged a few tweets and emails, and I drew up a brief.

Step one: background and context

• A run-down of my target reader, which went something like this…

The reader is a busy business owner. Probably a small business – from one man band up to 200 odd people. They are intelligent, articulate, business people. They are likely to read business-related materials online, in the press and in books pretty frequently. I envisage people reading this book on the train, on holiday, etc.

• A quick summary of the book, which went like this…

The book is ‘Watertight Marketing – the easy way to long term sales results’. This is an end-to-end look at how marketing supports your business from generating general awareness, right through to customer loyalty. It maps marketing to the way that real people really buy things. It explains and illustrates practical things that business owners can actually do in their businesses and why they should. The whole book builds to give the reader a framework for marketing in their business. It uses a central idea of Buckets – what you’re selling, Funnels – convincing people to buy it, and Taps – how people hear about your stuff. The cartoons need to strike a chord on a human level and hook into this analogy.

• One or two lines on each cartoon I was looking for.

I had expected that Simon would need much more detail. But, from this he was able to come up with some great rough sketches. Let’s run you through one of the cartoons as it emerged.

Step two: the visual requirement

There’s a great deal in the book about ensuring that you have a marketing tool or technique for every step in a buying decision. Specifically, that if you don’t provide stepping stones you can risk losing people part way through the process. My one line brief to Simon on this was:

A path of stepping stones, but one of the stones is actually a great big hole.

Step three: the roughs

From this background, and one liner, Simon came up with a rough idea for the cartoon:

The Rough Sketch

Step four: reviewing the roughs

It was only at this point that Simon and I met in person. At this stage I was 39 weeks pregnant, so Simon kindly made the trip to Bristol in return for a cuppa at my kitchen table. We went through each of the roughs. I pulled up the part of the manuscript it related to and we looked at the image together to see if it worked as a visual. For this particular cartoon, I felt that it needed to show the effect more vividly – that of losing your prospect down a gaping hole. With pencil in hand, Simon scribbled away in the meeting until we had something we were both happy with.

Step five: the final image

He then went away to craft the final drawings. I approved these when my daughter was about two weeks old. It was great to be able to feel I was still making a little progress without the major brain work of writing and editing. And, for this cartoon, we now have…

The Final Cartoon

So, there you have it… a sneaky peek at one of the cartoons from the book, and a quick summary of the process. I’m really excited to have all the cartoons ready. It’s helped me to maintain my motivation too. Something tangible to put on my wall as I finish my final edits.

Simon Ellinas is a professional cartoonist and caricaturist. He can be found on Twitter @cartoono or on his websites: caricatures.org.uk

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