Attention!: Get It, Keep It is a business/finance guide written by Erik van der Luijt, and it does exactly what it promises. It's a handy and entertaining guide to marketing and sales strategy. The author shows how marketers can use graphics, fonts and other techniques to quickly get the attention of their target audience. He delves into the psychological aspects of business marketing and shows the reader how to differentiate between getting a reader's attention versus holding their interest. Attention!: Get It, Keep It is filled with examples of both types of communication for marketing and sales.

While most people expect business and finance guides to be rather dry and boring, Attention!: Get It, Keep It proved to be most entertaining. Author Erik van der Luijt quickly aroused both my attention and my interest. I felt as though he were in the room discussing his marketing knowledge. He is a direct and unassuming writer who shows by example that he knows how to reach an audience. His ideas are easy to understand and to put into effect, and his conversational style will keep even the most reluctant readers reading on. Attention!: Get It, Keep It is a short, informative guide that could deliver big on getting your message across to your target audience. Even if you're not into sales or marketing, you might find, as I did, that the principles presented in this guide could be useful for other purposes, such as getting your next promotion or persuading a spouse to go along with a major purchase. This guide is easy, enlightening reading and is recommended.

If Erik van der Luijt’s cover for Attention! Get It. Keep It does not grab your attention, the first pages will. The author begins with a warning, and then surprises readers with an unusual opening. In so doing, he illustrates some tools for getting the attention of others. These he goes on to identify and discuss more fully, yet simply. Specifically, Erik van der Luijt identifies how our senses and our brains take in information from the outside world, then communicate and interpret that information. Those things threatening what is important to us get our attention, while those things that appear “safe” to us garner our interest. With this simple concept, the reader is presented with ideas and illustrations for grasping and maintaining the attention of others.

It is interesting how a simple concept, one that controls our actions on a continual basis, can be “unknown” to our conscious selves. Erik van der Luijt presents this simple concept in Attention! Get It. Keep It. The concept immediately rang true to me: associate something with safety and you get my interest—unless it lasts too long, in which case I will become bored; associate it with danger and you get my attention, which ultimately may cause stress. He explains the tools for manipulating this simple phenomenon: how to create expectation through patterns, for example, or how to use contrast, which allows for things to “stand out,” creating intensity. Erik van der Luijt then offers short discussions on the use of these tools in advertising, speech, art (including the visual arts and music) and storytelling. As a reader, I found the information interesting. As a writer, I found an important tool I can add to my storytelling tool belt.

For anyone in business or who simply needs to make a presentation in front of one or more people, Attention!: Get it, Keep It by Erik van der Luijt is an invaluable tool. Whether the message is oral, textual or visual, van der Luijt provides a concise guide to assuring that you capture the audience’s attention and keep it so that your message is received loud and clear. In quite practical terms, the psychology of human attention-getting is discussed, beginning with the concept of identifying priorities. It further advocates shaking up the comfort of the audience and providing relief from that upset to ensure maintaining attention. This can be accomplished by creating contradictions in the audience’s attitude through contrasting viewpoints relative to your goal. In other words, relate your message to the audience’s priorities and sense of perceived value. By learning to alter your approach to the audience by continually keeping them on their toes and allowing them to adapt before changing your approach again, you repeatedly catch their attention and preserve their interest in what you have to say.

With so many demands on our time and attention these days, finding a way to capture an audience’s attention and keeping it is crucial to the success of any business or the promotion of any program. Erik van der Luijt has written an incredible guide for doing just that and presents his information clearly and simply. Attention!: Get It, Keep It provides a vital resource that can help anyone present information to one person or a crowd so that the message is clear and the audience is tuned in.