DIY Promotional Materials

A photo of my table.

 

            Being invited to my first convention I sat down to consider what promotional materials I would need to successfully promote Rise and Walk.  I am a big believer in the Cory Doctorow philosophy of offering free stuff to entice readers.  So I decided to make up some Chapbooks of the first chapter to offer at my table.  I also thought that Bookmarks would be a good idea and business cards with the Rise and Walk logo.  It would be more work than I realized but I have always been a DIY cat, whether it is graphic design, swapping a tranny on my 280zx or video production, I like to do some things myself.

 

Chapbooks:

            I had not heard of Chapbooks until recently in my adventure as a writer.  Apparently they are little books usually made by self published authors to promote their work.  They can be of varying quality with some very well made by publishers as promotional materials and others made at home by people such as myself.   I designed a booklet that would consist of an eight and a half by eleven sheet of paper, folded in half long-ways.  This looked like a little booklet.  I used Microsoft Publisher to coax the text into each of the four pages that would be created by folding the paper.  It was very easy in Publisher to make an eight page booklet out of two pages of paper printed on both sides.  I made a black and white version of Rise’s cover for the chapbook but after printing out a few I realized that this would quickly burn through my ink.

  As I carefully considered the costs of producing Chapbooks I realized that I might have to sell them rather than give them away for free.  I was not motivated by rapacious capitalism, rather the realities of my dwindling promotional budget.  I didn’t want people to take them and just throw them away.  I wanted to add some value to the books so I put a cost of fifty-cents on the cover.  Everyone has a couple of quarters in their pocket so I thought this was fair.  I decided that I would have Staples copy center print the front page of my booklets to conserve my printer ink and do the rest of the pages on my laser printer.  I converted the Publisher file to an Adobe Acrobat PDF and had them printed for twenty eight cents each.  I used the hard edge of my paper cutter to fold the pages carefully and stapled the booklets with a long reach stapler that I picked up for thirty bucks.  At the con they did well.  People who had not heard of Rise before could pick up a sample for fifty cents and check out the work.  One guy came back and bought the book the next day after reading the sample.  After Saturday, I started to hand them out to interested people for free with a bookmark.  The costs of production were well worth the results.  I made three hundred chapbooks and came home with less than eighty. 

 

Bookmarks:

            I figured that I could make up some bookmarks by having the copy place print color copies on cardstock.  I experimented with sizes and shapes by folding eight and a half by eleven paper into different configurations to see how I could best make use of the available space.   I found that I could pull off eight bookmarks to one sheet of paper.  If I had 50 sheets of cardstock printed that would make for four hundred bookmarks.  I set to designing them in Adobe Photoshop.  Because I wasn’t sure how accurate I would be with my paper cutter, I kept the text and photos within a safe area in the middle of the bookmark.  This would leave me some “Mess Up” room on each side when I made my cuts.  Paper cutters, even good ones, are a little tricky to get right.  So I used a gradient background as the background and kept my details within a safe area.  It turned out that the chicks at the copy center were pretty cool and they offered to cut the bookmarks for me with a special machine.  So I scored there!  They had a total cost of fifty bucks but I have a slew of bookmarks to keep handing out.  I gave away just under two hundred at the con. 

 

Everybody Wants Some:

            Candy, no one argues with free candy.  A friend of mine attends large music conventions each year and he advised me to have a bucket of candy to entice interest.  I went to the discount grocery store and picked up five bags of Halloween candy for a couple of bucks each.  Taking my friend’s advice I stayed away from stuff that would easily melt.  I bought some Tootsie Pops, Sugar Babies, Tootsie Rolls, Lemonheads and Double Bubble gum.  Staples had sheets of sticker paper that I used to make a large Rise and Walk logo with text that said “Have a Bite on us”.  I wrapped the sticker around a bucket and bingo, I had a display.  People stopped by my table to swipe some free candy and I was able to talk to them for a while.  It was a very effective to gain table traffic.  I highly recommend it as an affordable draw.

 

Displays:

            I opened up my book cover in Photoshop and added some splash text saying “The #1 Horror Title at Lulu.com”, for dramatic effect.  The copy center printed the front and back covers as ten by fourteen prints for a couple of bucks each and I put them in a ten dollar frame from Target.  I borrowed an easel from a friend and set up the display next to my table.  I also borrowed a small display from my friend that holds a standard size piece of paper on which I printed “Signed Editions” to leave on the table.  These clear displays look pretty professional and are available for around six bucks at office supply stores.

            I also picked up a couple of 18 by 24 inch pieces of clear acrylic from a hardware store for around eight bucks each.  I affixed my sell-sheet and printed reviews on the acrylic so that they could be displayed on the table without getting messed up.  I could leave the sheets of acrylic on the table when I wasn’t there to allow passersby to read information about the book.  Conventioneers dropped by during the day, after reading the reviews the night before. 

 

Miscellanea:

            Vistaprint.com was a good place to get one thousand business cards for twenty bucks.  They let you design them yourself and even work with Photoshop files.  I also made a mailing list form with the Rise and Walk logo in Photoshop.  I printed out a few and put them on a clipboard so that I could build a mailing list of interested parties.