Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Dragonfriend Postcards and Bookmarks

Hot off the presses, these beauties arrived early last week. Designed by the excellent Mike Wykowski, I love how they turned out and look forward to giving them out at readings and signings. Penguin sprang for a bunch of postcards for my picture book, Road Trip, and I was surprised at how helpful they were in terms of generating reader interest. I mailed them out to bookstores and left stacks of them at places where there were likely readers -- libraries, bookstores, schools, churches, etc. -- and received invitations to read/sign from these places as well as some mentions of postcard inspired purchases on my website.

Naturally, I had to have some postcards for Dragonfriend and, as publisher, made the savvy executive decision to have some bookmarks printed, too. Yeah, that's me, savvy.

Got any promotional suggestions you'd like to share? Please leave them in the comments.

5 comments:

Scott Bury said...

Great idea! May I borrow it?

Anonymous said...

I like the idea of sending out postcards. I'm working on a project that I'm planning to self-publish and postcards are a marketing tool I hadn't considered.

Roger Eschbacher said...

@girlseekplace -- I also keep a few in my backpack to hand out to folks I may run into when I'm doing errands. If the conversation drifts toward "What do you do?," it provides a low pressure, non-salesy way to talk about my book.

Daniel R. Marvello said...

Your postcards and bookmarks look great, Roger!

My wife did this for her non-fiction books and I'd like to do it for Vaetra Unveiled.

I've also seen authors use business cards with the book cover on the front and book info on the back. They're small and convenient. I'm looking into extending that idea by getting cards printed with a BookCrossing.com identifier on them, which effectively sets up a private discussion area for the readers who get one of your cards.

Roger Eschbacher said...

Daniel -- I almost pulled the trigger and ordered business cards, too, but for some reason didn't. Seriously considering doing that in the near future. BookCrossing sounds interesting. I'll have to check that out. Do you have experience with them?

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