May 2025 Doing Marketing for a Book Coming Out Soon? Don’t Forget Vital Print Collateral
If you are an author or soon-to-be-author, you know you need a few marketing things in place before you meet your public, right?
You will have already worked incredibly hard by the time you get to that amazing day when you hold a book in your hands for the first time.
Among the things you’ve been working on, your marketing has likely started with your social media accounts, and you may have other things in the works.
But do you have your print collateral?
Some of you reading this may already have a branding package done for yourself that is evidenced on your website and as possible on your social media account pages.
If that’s you, then you likely have already thought about the items sometimes called print collateral that we are discussing here in this post and have them planned or already done and similarly branded.
But for others, this is all new territory. And that’s who today’s post and next week’s are written for.
Collateral is a funny-to-me marketing term that just means the bits and pieces, print or digital, that talk about your book and promote your author brand.
While we all spend many hours in the digital world, some book promotion rightfully exists in the real world, meeting face to face with other people.
I’ve written about this here before, and at least one of those times was not so long after meeting face to face had just returned post Covid lockdown days to delight us all.
But I wrote then, and will repeat here now, that for those face-to-face encounters, I believe every author needs these three most basic real-world items:
· Business card
· Bookmark
· Retractable (pull up) banner
If you want people to remember you, tell other people about you, and sometimes just literally see you, you need these things.
These three pieces of collateral need to be professionally designed and coordinated with each other (which means they are basically variations on the same design). That unified look and those professionally produced items play a subtle but important role in how people see you. If you design and produce your own business cards and they look like it, and are flimsy and unmemorable, people that matter to you will take you less seriously. That applies to potential book buyers and other readers, those seeking speakers, as well as the media.
You may be able to do your own design in Canva but do take a look first at what other people have done. To be honest, sometimes I think I recognize Canva in the designs I see and that isn’t a good thing. You are unique and so is your book – and so should your branding and graphic design be.
If you show up with a well-designed and nicely printed business card, an eye-catching bookmark, as well as a coordinating banner you sit next to for your signings, you’ll look more serious which will translate into people being more willing to take a look at your book, as well as consider you for an interview or speaking engagement.
I’d suggest you get all three of these things done at the same time. You’ll have some savings on design but the main reason is so you show up looking put together and professional. Also, I’m assuming you have already gotten your website done and it also is going to coordinate with these items. Whether someone comes to the website before you hand them a card or afterwards, you want a unified look.
And these days, Americans have finally caught on to QR codes and they can be really helpful to move things along for people who want to connect with you. As long as someone has a smart phone, they can hover their camera over that QR code and click on the link that pops up that will send them to another site you have connected to it.
The big surprise to me is that you can generate QR codes for yourself and they are free. My web expert sent me to this site
But there are also others.
You do need to think about where you want to send people with the QR code. Do you just want them to buy the book, or do you want them to connect with you on your website? If you send them to your website, do you sell your book from there? Different authors will have different goals. Make sure you are clear about where the QR code will take them, and make sure it’s not a dead end for doing more with you.
So do consider including a well-thought-out QR code on your business card, bookmark and maybe even on your banner.
Now a word about folks enamored of electronic business cards. I try to keep an open mind about new ideas in marketing, and know some folks are amazingly paper free and seem to be able to function well that way.
But over time, I’ve been watching people from all the generations currently active in the world, and I would argue people need some paper. I’ve discussed this with business folks from generations younger than mine, and they also agree.
For me, although I love having someone’s contact shared with me to go into my phone when I know I need their number, if it’s someone new to me and something I need to remember to do to follow up, putting that electronic info in my phone basically means it disappears.
And then what do I do?
Write myself a note.
So, make your plans but don’t completely eliminate paper. Offer your info both ways.
Other authors believe their bookmarks can substitute for a business card and so they are pleased they have saved money by eliminating the business card.
But have you ever been to an in-person conference or tradeshow? I don’t know about you, but in those settings, I prefer collecting business cards because I collect a lot of print collateral from a lot of people.
I do love it when there’s a bookmark in a book I get at a signing, however. That I trust will give me a way to connect with the author later, so make sure your bookmark includes your contact information, not just information on how to buy the book.
Not saying my preferences are the norm, but I think you need both, and once you are printing things, it’s not much more cost to do a bookmark and a business card at the same time, both on the design costs and the printing costs.
There are other things to decide about the business card and bookmark. I personally think they should coordinate but not just completely repeat the same info. A bookmark is a good place to include a scripture verse, for example, or a request to leave a review and where to put it, or maybe even a line about booking you to speak.
By the way, you may have noticed in this post we didn’t discuss the third item we consider vital, those retractable, pull-up banners. That we will return to next week in part two on this print collateral topic for new authors.
Preparing all of these items takes some time and thought, so ifyou are planning on attending the Christian Product Expo (CPE) in August, it’s a good time to get started on these things.
Prices can also vary by a lot for producing them. If you would like to get some help with this, let me know as we at Buoyancy PR have trustworthy resources with reasonable prices who can help you get this exciting preparation done.
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