Promotional Materials

What we do

Flyers and posters are relatively cheap to produce, but expensive to administer (designing them a number of different ways for different specific events and trying to airfreight them around the world to get there on time can be more complicated than bringing the book itself out). When we produce flyers for this purpose ourselves they usually promote not just one but a number of titles. They tend not to work as inserts in magazines—the response rate is usually under 1% and sales often do not cover the cost of the insertion.

What you can do

Flyers

The simplest method of getting flyers is for you to generate them using the Flyer template and print them off yourself. There is a Flyer template on your Marketing page. Go to Publicity – Flyer Templates – Click create a flyer template – click OK on the dialogue box that appears to download the template to your own PC. Open the file that has downloaded.

The front cover of your book will appear once you have 'enabled editing'. When you 'save as' to your PC, you will see it being saved as a 'web page' (htm, html) file, if you click there, you will find the option to 'save as' Word, or another word processing programme that you use.

Using this you can design a single or double-sided A5 color flyer, print off two flyers onto A4 or US letter paper, cut and distribute. The template feeds title, subtitle, author, pub date and metadata for paperback and ebook automatically from the Book Details page. The flyer is produced in Microsoft Word and so they can be edited to include an event, or other information.

The basic information looks like this:

Here are a number of ways you can use this.

• Bookstores, you can visit local bookstores and let them know that you are a local published author. Many local stores have a 'Local Author' shelf or section, informing them and leaving behind a flyer, gives them the opportunity to order in the title. For this purpose you should always ensure author and order details are included.

Example for Bookstores.

• Include Author Website or Contact information, so the store can get back to you for an event.
• Include Order Information, so that stores can immediately order the book if they are interested.

Example text to include.

They are also available from major wholesalers such as Ingram (USA) and Bertrams (UK) and from our distributors, NBN in America and Orca Marston in Europe.

direct.orders@marston.co.uk/+44 1235 465577

customercare@nbnbooks.com/+1 800 462 6420

Example:

• Talks/Workshops, if this is part of the work that you do, then having a flyer to hand is useful. You can put a flyer on the seat for each of your audience members, or hand them out directly.

• Conferences, whether or not your book will be physically presented at a conference, having a flyer to hand out to delegates is useful. If you are networking with other professionals and you talk about your book, you can leave them with a leaflet. Some authors have multiple books. So a flyer which highlights all your books is a good idea. These are more complicated to produce, the flyer template will not work for multiple titles. Please request a flyer for multiple books on the Admin Help Forum under Marketing and Publicity - Promotional Material. Your publicist can then produce something for you.

Example: Bernardo Kastrup (Iff Books, NonFiction) has six titles published with us, and attends lots of International conferences per year. Here is a flyer we produced for him to use.

You will notice that this also includes a Discount Code, which can be set up by our distributors in different countries. Please read Chapter 16: Ordering – How to run a promotion to your network at extra discount. This can then include an order form, again we have set up templates for these that your publicist can adapt for your use.

Example for Bernardo Kastrup:

Posters

Posters are easy to create and useful to help you promote an event. We suggest you create posters that are A4 size and include the cover image, an endorsement and details of your event. Retailers are usually happy to display posters for signings in their stores. Libraries, public noticeboards and meeting places are other useful places to display posters.

Here is a simple example – this one was created by using an online design programme called www.canva.comMost of the basic elements of this programme are free to use.

Please request a poster on the Admin Help Forum under Marketing and Publicity - Promotional Material. Your publicist can then produce something for you.

Video trailers

We don't usually produce video trailers ourselves and while a few of our imprints do have YouTube channels our aim is not to "go viral" or gain massive sales with the videos on a book-by-book basis, but to find our audience on several channels and gain attention for the imprint as a whole. Singular and isolated book trailers don't often help sales.

Example of one of our authors trailers: https://youtu.be/EXqEjUNqsOw.

Instead of producing our own book trailers we much more often will seek out relationships with youtubers and other "content creators" online and we would encourage you to reach out to online programs or channels if you think they would be interested in your book. If you elect to produce your own video or the book is promoted on an established channel enter this as an “Advert” in the “Activities” section on your Marketing page and include the link to it in the details box. Alert us to it through the forum and Facebook and post the link far and wide.

We would also advise authors to get involved with our social-media activities (see Chapter 12), where you can share updates about online videos, podcasts, blog posts and interviews while interacting with our readers.