\n<\/strong>Professional, appealing\u00a0design\u00a0impresses customers and makes them take more notice of an event. While many stores do a fine job creating flyers for events, your designers’\u00a0efforts will generally knock ours out of the park\u00a0every time. It’s a one-time design job for publishers that hundreds of stores can use. If you come up with an eye-catching, professionally designed, downloadable flyer that we can plug our time, date, and logo info into, I guarantee you that your authors’ events will be promoted earlier\u00a0and more effectively. (For picture books, the book’s illustrator might be happy to help create a flyer; we’ve had a couple of visiting artists who were incredibly proactive and created their own flyers to offer stores. You can imagine how charming and wonderful those flyers were!)<\/p>\n
To make it even simpler on your end, you could\u00a0post the template on Edelweiss instead of emailing it to event stores.<\/p>\n
If you wanted to get fancy and extra helpful, you could generate\u00a0two sizes: 8.5″ x 11″ to post at the store and around town, and 18″ x 24″\u00a0to mount\u00a0on foam core at the store with the book display. We always love the pre-printed poster boards you sometimes send, but remember, even a PDF of these to print out ourselves is helpful.<\/p>\n
Sample Facebook Event Page Copy\u00a0<\/strong>\u2014Promotional writing is a special kind of writing, and not everyone is good at it.\u00a0Not only that, but the person responsible for creating promotional materials at a bookstore is not always the person who has scheduled\u00a0the event and knows the book. It can be a challenge to make a\u00a0reading\u00a0sound\u00a0brand new, to capture the essence of a book in a few sentences, and to present an author’s personality and appeal to customers who may not be familiar with his or her\u00a0work.<\/p>\n “But don’t independent bookstores want to be unique?” you ask. Of course we do, and of course we are. But we are also overworked and always, always short of enough time to make things as perfect as we’d like.\u00a0So it could be extremely helpful to have some snappy text to use as a jumping-off point.<\/p>\n Demo Pop-Up Books How About Some Promo for the\u00a0Midlist?<\/strong> These are a few of my wish list items. The main one is the event flyer — it seems like such a natural, easy solution to offer stores, and one with a potentially big payoff of higher attendance, more sales, and fewer returns. Traditional promo we do love, for TELL ME A TATTOO STORY by Alison McGee & Eliza Wheeler (Chronicle). The finished book, the carefully wrapped tattoo packet, the little promo sheet affixed to a kraft card, and the colorful art — all simple, beautiful, and useful items for booksellers.<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A bookseller’s wish list for helpful promotional items that could help stores sell more books.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18395\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/strong>You know this problem: pop-up books are expensive, and gorgeous, and everyone wants to look before they buy. Often, small stores won’t buy those books because they know they will take a loss on damages. We can\u00a0lose hundreds of dollars on those books we have to remove from their\u00a0protective shrink wrap so customers can see their glorious contents. I would SO much rather see\u00a0some of that book’s\u00a0marketing budget be spent on a demo book we can display without taking a loss every time.<\/p>\n
\nWe know that a few books get the lion’s share of marketing dollars, and the rest need to make their way in a Darwinian world. But what if a few of those big-budget-book dollars made their way toward shelftalkers for the quieter titles that need help to\u00a0find their readers? Small shelftalkers, with an eye-catching graphic and maybe one review pull-quote. Not too many words, just enough to catch the attention of a bookstore browser.<\/p>\n
\nBookseller colleagues,\u00a0which promotional items do you find useful, which don’t you, and what promo efforts\u00a0would help you sell more books?
\n![\"good](\"http:\/\/wordpress.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/good-promo-2.jpg\")