Promotion Tip: A Successful Book Signing
Or…The Dragon offers some nifty ideas to augment your book signing

(Ed. Note: I'm writing this post late at night after a long day of editing and working and not getting in a nap, so please forgive all rambling and errors.) I’m sure you’ve heard the rumor that e-mail is dead. So how do you invite people to your book signings? Believe it or not, for the signing I had Saturday morning, I snail-mailed a few postcards…not many, of course. But I also sent out a notice to my fan page on facebook, and to my friends on my “normal” page on facebook. Then I did a status update on LinkedIn. Tweeted on Twitter. You get the picture. Of course I sent e-mails to those friends who don’t network. (Yes, I have friends who don’t spend 20 hours a day on the computer. In fact, I have friends who needed the postcard in the mailbox…)

Anyway, once you’ve invited the fanbase, you want to have an attractive display in the book store to catch the attention of browsers. Don’t skimp on this. Go all out and make it fabulous! I lost track of how many compliments I received Saturday on the Choices Meant for Gods and Choices Meant for Kings setup. I write fantasy so I wanted everything to look immediately identifiable as “you can enter a fantasy world here.” No question about it. With antique, romantic boxes of purple candy and business cards and decorative, olde world-looking book stands to hold the recent magazine that published one of my short stories and to hold the newest release, the ambience was set. I used a royal purple tablecloth to cover the risers that the book stands were on, which stood out nicely against the shiny white tablecloth I put down beneath everything. Of course I had my big ol’ banner up behind me and my purple pens for signing. In the picture of Marci and me in this post, you see us goofing around, but you also see Marci pointing to one of the purple dragon magnets I also had on the table as a nice little give-away for folks who appreciated the humor...

I had to hold the sword because there just wasn’t room for it on the table; I wore a finger weapon on my left hand and a purple gem on my cheek, just like Chariss.

That’s all I’ve got the energy to put in this Promotion Tip post, but I hope it’s useful to new authors and first-time book signers. Note that I don’t mention the table in my description above. It’s always a good idea to have a folding table in the trunk of your car for just in case the book store doesn’t have a table ready and waiting for you. The ladies who put together the book events at my local Barnes & Noble have got it together, though, and there was no fear of being without a table. They even gave me water. Aren’t they lovely?

It was a wildly successful morning, even with an empty-parking-lot start at 10 a.m. Things really picked up and we had a lovely time. There were several cameras clicking around so hopefully those pictures are going up on facebook and blogs just everywhere.

“Some days, I just want the dragon to win.”

Tags: book signing, Barnes & Noble, Choices Meant for Gods, Choices Meant for Kings, fantasy, purple, gem, facebook, LinkedIn, twitter