Bookmarks

ScottAJohnson · Apr 16, 2005

Something a great many of us do is create bookmarks as a cheep way of advertising our books. But, a big mistake that some make is to have bookmarks that do not look professional. You've all seen them. Hand-cut cardstock with ink-jet printed images and words, sometimes with a pretty ribbon through an off-center hole in the top. The whole thing screams amateur, and when we put our babies (books) out there in front of the public, we want to seem professional, right?
Brouchures.com (no, I don't work for them) lets you print full-color, full-bleed, glossy front, black and white matt back bookmarks on the cheep and they REALLY look professional. The best part is that you design the graphics and images for them yourselves. They charge $99 for 1000 bookmarks and deliver them to your door.
It's one of the best investments I've ever made promoting my book, and I'll be using them again to promote every other book I do after.
If you want to check them out, the address is http://www.brochures.com

Hope someone can get some use out of this.

Ella · Apr 16, 2005

Thanks for sharing that, Scott.

Also as important as the quality of the product, is the information that is on it. Give the reader a little extra instead of just saying "My new book, title, cool picture."
Include such things as:
-Your URL
-cool quotes from your characters
-lists of other titles, especially if it's a series, and include forecasted publication dates
-invitation to an event

Play with it and have fun.

ScottAJohnson · Apr 17, 2005

Definately right, Ella. On mine, I have the ISBN of my book, one of the jacket blurbs, and the publisher's logo. On the back (since it's in black and white) I have previous book covers, another blurb, the websites where my work can be found, etc. The main thing is to make it look professional and not like something a fifth-grader did. Nothing against fifth graders, but authors should present themselves as professionally as possible.

Cathy C · Jun 10, 2005

Two places that I like for bookmarks:

Earthly Charms, at http://www.earthlycharms.com. They deal specifically with writers, so they're really good with either accepting designs that authors prepared, or doing the design for a small extra fee. They also have "Autographed Copy" labels (plus other things like "Award Winning Author" and "Local Author") REALLY CHEAP! Only $5 for a roll of 100 in gold or silver, removable foil.

I also found a brand new place just recently that was recommended by a printer friend. The company is 4 Over 4 at: http://www.4over4.com. They print on double-sided 12pt. super heavy weight glossy stock, and color on both sides for the same price as b/w. We got 5,000 postcards for only $299, which is about HALF what other places charge. They even took the time to notify us that we needed to adjust our color percentages because it was going to print too purple, so a real person actually LOOKED at the project and noticed a problem. I consider that a huge thing when ordering. They also insist on NOT using the standard 10% over/under that most web printers do. In other words, most contracts with printers say that if you order 1,000 postcards and only 900 arrive, they're still in compliance. Well, when I have a mailing list of 1,000, I sort of NEED 1,000. 4over4 delivers the full thousand, if not more than requested (we actually received 1,020 because of the way the paper ran.) They run the press 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, so you can get the print job in 2 DAYS, instead of the 2 WEEKS that some other presses offer.

Just my two bits!

Christine N. · Jun 11, 2005

I agree, earthly charms is great. Especially if you don't want 1,000 bookmarks, just 100. Of course it's cheaper to buy in bulk, but sometimes you just don't need that many LOL.

Bookmarks

ScottAJohnson

Ella

ScottAJohnson

Cathy C

Ooo! Shiny new cover!

Christine N.

haz a shiny new book cover