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| Vulcan Captain "Live long and prosper, here's my card." Zefram Cochran "Err..sure..but I don't have a wallet, I'm just going to put that...over here.." |
Arguably one of the hardest thing to do these days is to stand out from the crowd. First Contact is incredibly important and so is being remembered. We can polish our pitch and get our small talk down to an elegant and practiced piece of perfect prose, but when we walk away what will we leave behind?
When I first started out and my first book was published I got
myself a lovely business card holder and spent a pleasant afternoon designing
my own cards. I was so excited to hand these out to people and, just out of
interest, I made a little note of where I’d handed them out. I have a secret
for you – none of those business cards resulted in extra work, but lots of them
resulted in me being asked for favours or to work for free. This made me rethink.
I had a think about what I do with business cards in my
professional life. As a librarian and literacy campaigner I was given hundreds
and hundreds of business cards and I’ll be honest with you, most of those were
just dropped into the bottom of my bag and only found again when the handle
fell off and I needed to transfer my junk over to a new one. Sometimes I’d find
a business card in my purse and spend a baffled moment staring at it trying to
remember who had given it to me and when.
With my author hat on I wanted to have a think about where I
was spending my hard-earned and whether or not it was good sense. With my
librarian and bookseller hat on I had a look around my desk, my files, and my walls and
thought about what I kept and what I threw away. For what it’s worth, here’s my
two-pennorth…
Business cards are great for industry contacts and I’d say
that you should spend a little bit to make sure they are attractive and on
quality card. Beautiful ones go in the purse or wallet, cheap ones go in the bottom of
whatever tote is being carried around that day. Make sure your business card
has a tagline that says what you do (“author of non-fiction”, “YA and children’s author” etc) and
that you have your socials listed on the cards as well as your website. Don’t
cram it with information, just the bare minimum.
Flyers and postcards are your friends when it comes to
contact with bookshops, schools and libraries. I would say that A5 flyers that are
designed to look great when folded in half are lovely things. If you can
stretch to double sided printing that’s great. One side should look like a little
poster (preferably the cover of your book or artwork from the book) and the
other has your contact details and a little bit of sales pitch about what you
do. Once again, not too much information, just a teaser to take someone to your
website or socials to find out more. I didn’t have time to read a whole load of
stuff or to work out between the lines.
Personally, I would say that the thing I genuinely enjoyed
being given was a postcard. I particularly loved cards that had space to write on
and were thick enough to use as actual postcards. These ones I kept, pinned up
on my wall until I used them to write notes for people or posted them out to
others. Nice looking, cute, beautiful or funny postcards had lives that ran and
ran because they went off on adventures beyond me but by then I’d looked at
them so many times that I could remember the names of the authors and
illustrators on them.
The attractive flyers, small posters and postcards turned
into real money for their creators as these were the people who I booked for
visits, recommended to others and remembered at events. They were the ones who
I said, “hey, have you heard of this person?” because I'd seen their stuff, remembered it, liked it and bought it.
Spend your money wisely, and only on what makes sense, and
you can be remembered. That’s what we all want – to be remembered, and with a
smile.
Dawn McLachlan (aka Dawn Finch) is a former children's librarian and current author and bookseller.
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