Tips for Event Follow-Up

Attending events is an important task for authors and publishers, but so is the follow-up.

Last year, PTP Press invested in the IBPA (Independent Book Publishers Association) partnership program, where they displayed our inaugural title, The Price We Pay by Nikki T. Anthony at the annual American Library Association conference. We also purchased an ad in their ALA catalog. The cost included IBPA giving us the contact information for every librarian who entered the IBPA's booth.

Although no one can represent and pitch your book, products, and services better than you can, the deliverables we received from the IBPA alone were worth the investment.

It's not just some random list we bought from some random spammer who landed in our inbox or DM. These are real, live librarians who entered that booth and laid eyes on our book. Worth every penny paid, indeed. Plus, had we planned on attending ALA, we would have also received admission, as well as a time slot to host a signing session for our author. Again, it was an investment that paid off based on our specific goals and intentions.

So that IBPA could maintain its reputation and relationship with the librarians, they provided us with tips and instructions regarding contacting any of the librarians to prevent spamming and, instead, form true and lasting connections. We added a few tips of our own that we're sharing below that will be helpful in nurturing your own relationships with librarians:

• We advise not even connecting with the contacts you make at events and conferences via email until a couple weeks later. There are always going to be the people who spam, spam, and spam information about themselves and their book versus try to build REALationships. Let them have at it those first couple weeks, and then you slide in once they are done spamming.

  
  

• For postcard mailings, you can drop any of them a postcard in the mail, as fewer and fewer people still do that. If your list of contacts is quite extensive, we suggest sending 25-50 cards a month until you've hit everyone on the list—even if it takes you ten months. So what? No getting overwhelmed. It's a big elephant. Eat it one bite at a time.

  
  

• Strategically plan out emailing the librarians as well as visiting them. For example, if you plan on visiting their town, I would recommend contacting them via email to let them know you'll be in town and ask if perhaps you can stop by and introduce yourself to them, set up a reading, event, etc. Or, of course, if you drive through their town, do a drop-in to introduce yourself randomly. Face time will forever be king.

  
  

If you want more in-depth information on how to run a successful library campaign, consider investing in our "Beyond the Basics of Publishing" online course/curriculum, which is the Day 1 teachings of our annual Path To Publishing Act Like an Author, Think Like a Business conference.