Anyone Thinks This Type of Publicity is a Flyer...?

[Ursa major]

I was talking to a friend this morning and he mentioned that he'd had a leaflet put through his door. Nothing unusual there, obviously; but the reason he mentioned it was that it was advertising a book, a ghost story set in Dorset. (According to Amazon, the author lives down the coast in Swanage.)

Has anyone else been the recipient of this sort of book promotion?

 

[Jo Zebedee]

I've seen flyers in local shops and what not but always for sort of local interest titles, usualy self or small-pubbed. I think it works okay but is obviously limited in impact.

 

[Ursa major]

Adverts in local** shops -- or on community notice boards -- I can understand, but I've never heard of leaflets advertising a book posted through people's letterboxes before.







** - Swanage is quite a way (in UK terms, not US terms ) from where my friend lives, which is near the centre of Poole.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

Bookshops are normally keen on local authors, as are readers. Tying a novel to a geographical location can sometimes be a good bonus.

 

[thaddeus6th]

Hmm. Sounds like an interesting approach.

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

Sounds expensive to me. Leaflets could cost anywhere from ten cents to maybe fifty - at least they do when we get some made up for our various health campaigns. So to spend that when every leaflet will not produce a sale - if you're lucky one in a hundred might - seems like tricky economics.

Cheers, Greg.

 

[Overread]

The market is being swamped with new books - no longer is it a case that publishers control the release. As such we'll see more and more of these new marketing ideas as people aim to get the word out about their book.

The big publishing firms might not jump into this as much; they've already got large fanbases, release patterns and a whole infrastructure built up. Your smaller publishing groups, local bookshops and independent published authors will try anything (already a good few get "friends" to write glowing reviews on amazon)

 

[Brian G Turner]

The problem is that leaflets are a very untargeted approach, and even for general products and services, has a very low response rate.

I would not rate a leaflet drop for a SFF book, unless done on a mass gathering of SFF people. Even then, at conventions, leaflets are everywhere.

 

[ratsy]

Do you think that getting a local paper to do a write up would be a better use of resources? That would probably reach a fairly decent 'local' audience with, what I assume, would be no cost. I have seen a fair number of local papers do write-ups on authors to support them.

 

[Overread]

Local paper doing a write-up would be cheaper and a lot easier I would suspect; plus people are more likely to read it than ads in the post (most are getting more and more used to just dumping them).

You could probably do leaflets yourself if you did them on a cheap home printer - problem is you have to print LOADS and then deliver them to get any where.

 

[Parson]

Have done a little direct mail, personal drop off stuff, related to church work. The experts say that getting ANY response greater than 1 in a 1000 is phenomenal. Obviously, then putting flyers in the post is not a cost effective plan to sell books. --- But you might be thinking to create some other noise. (like what's happening on the site) and any publicity is better than no publicity.

As to the local paper, that's a bit iffier than you might expect. The newspapers in this area are much, much, much more interested in selling advertising than in finding "filler" for their paper. You have reporters and corespondents and wire services, et. al. all providing content. To get even a well written article in the paper promoting an activity of our church we almost always have to do a quid pro quo. They will publish your article if you buy some advertising for the event. (We're talking community events here, not just something for the church.)

 

[tinkerdan]

Direct mail might work if you were privy to a list of mailing addresses of people who read the genre you write. It would have to be a targeted list rather than some global mailing or you'd sink too much into it to get a reasonable chance of return.

 

[Ursa major]

Direct mail might work if you were privy to a list of mailing addresses of people who read the genre you write. It would have to be a targeted list rather than some global mailing or you'd sink too much into it to get a reasonable chance of return.

I can see that might be an approach one might use, I suppose.


In this case, a small unaddressed piece of paper was put through the letterbox of someone who doesn't read any SFF or horror, as well as the letterboxes of all his neighbours. (As of yet, a copy has not arrived here.)