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Welcome to Guerilla Marketing 101 where we offer up grass roots techniques for selling your books. This is boot camp and here you'll get the tools to win the war with the fickle book-buying public. These are techniques that are cheap (hopefully even free) and—most important—effective. It's nice to talk about what a publicist can do, but what can the author do to help sell her books herself? That's the information we have here. Today's Guerilla warrior is Broad Universe's Gloria Oliver who tells us how to take advantage of the freebies table. 24 October 2005
Guerilla Marketing 101:The Convention Freebie Kit
Gloria Oliver lives in Texas with her husband, daughter, three cats, and one ferret. She is the author of the novels In the Service of Samurai and Vassal of El, both in the Fantasy genre. She also has stories in The Four Bubbas of the Apocalypse, Small Bites, and Fundamentally Challenged anthologies. When not busy working with numbers at work, she enjoys reading, writing, watching movies, Japanese Anime, trying to learn Japanese, and making her mind mush by translating Japanese comics.
Welcome to Guerilla Marketing 101 where we offer up grass roots techniques for selling your books. This is boot camp and here you'll get the tools to win the war with the fickle book-buying public. These are techniques that are cheap (hopefully even free) and—most important—effective. It's nice to talk about what a publicist can do, but what can the author do to help sell her books herself? That's the information we have here. Today's Guerilla warrior is Broad Universe's Gloria Oliver who tells us how to take advantage of the freebies table. There are two approaches to selling/promoting books that I know of—the hard sell and the soft sell. For the hard sell you need to be the type of individual who is not afraid to push business cards at people, call them from across the room to come over to your table, or go right up to them and tell them why they would want to read your book. As for me, without some heavy blood transfusions and DNA manipulation, the hard sell is out and I must settle for the soft sell. But there are a number of tools to use and little things you can do to punch up the soft sell and entice people to your books. And they don't have to cost a lot of money. Conventions are your best tool and often you don't even need to attend to take advantage of them. Many have freebie tables where you can place your soft sell marketing materials. You can even just mail them to the convention organizers who will place them on the table without requiring you to be there. While it is always more effective to attend conventions, by sending the promo materials when you can't attend, you still get your name seen by others who, when they run across you or your work in the future, will already be familiar with your name and more apt to buy your book. I have five items I currently use in my promotion efforts for convention freebies: flyers, sample mini CDs, bookmarks, business cards, and the newest addition—mini notebooks. The mini notebooks are incredibly cheap, catch a person's eye, and make a useful little knickknack. I learned about these notebooks from Janet Quinn at her "Promoting On A Shoestring Budget" panel at EPICon 2005. I've tried them out at two different conventions since then and they've moved quite well. Mini notebooks are little notepads with a shiny cover that have about 10 to 15 blank pages. They're about two inches by four inches or so. What is great about them is that you can place a label of your book's cover on the outside and a label on the inside cover with your book blurb, website, and purchase info. Then when you give them out, you are handing the convention goers a means to take notes at panels, doodle, pass messages, etc. To make a mini notebook, you will need the following items: Color Printer You can order the mini notebooks from the Oriental Trading Company. Search for item # IN-9/666. They sell for about $2.95 for two dozen. Because they are so cheap, you will want to buy six or more boxes, as the shipping will cost you more than the notebooks if you don't. The notebooks come in four assorted colors: blue, green, red, and purple. Alternate-mini glitter spiral notepads ($3.95/24; IN-12/2143) can be used instead. Most word processors have a label feature and a lot of them have templates for the most popular brands and sizes. The Avery 5163 is one of them. Make one file with the label template for a sheet and save it as Mini Book Cover. Insert your cover pic onto the template. (You will need to rotate the image since these lay long ways, or if you have photo software, you can turn the cover pic there and save with another name.) Center it, then copy and paste into the rest of the label spots. Make another label template file and save it as Mini Book Inside. The text for your blurb will need to be done sideways, something most word processors can do without any trouble. Copy the blurb and other info to the rest of the label slots. Print the cover and inside labels. The inside labels can be low quality to conserve ink, but I would suggest printing the covers at high quality if you can afford it. Some cover pics do not fill up the whole label and that's where the paper cutter comes in. The labels are also a little taller than the notebooks so give yourself room to trim a little off the inside labels as well. Slice off the top and bottom until only the cover fills the label. Now for the tricky part. Remove one of the cover labels, align it on the cover of the mini notebooks and press it down (sounds easy, but if you want it straight it's harder than you might think). The inside label goes on the inside cover. Watch out that you don't pin it to the first page when you open the notebook! That first page tends to ride up and stick to the cover. Another trick is to make sure you have all the notebooks facing the same direction when you stack them to add the labels. The manner in which the notebooks are packaged makes the direction they are laid inside the box rather inconsistent. I placed more than one label upside down on the notebooks due to this. Ugh! It will take a little work to get your labels and files set up, but after the initial set up, you can print them and slap them on the mini notebooks with little effort. Good luck and happy marketing! |
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