I don’t know if it’s just me, but as a writer I’ve become so locked into digital marketing that asking me to promote something tangible and local leaves me scratching my head.
Although Chindi Authors were always going to run a series of events at this summer’s Festival of Chichester I hadn’t really envisaged joining in. For a start, I would be in the middle of a long distance house move. But since the arts’ editor of the local paper persuaded me to take part it has kind of become my Chichester swan song.
Chindi are running six events in all. We kick off with a crime writers’ panel on 20th June, the next night host a ghost walk around the city, followed by an indie publishing panel on the 22nd and on the 23rd I’m going to talk about how starting my writing career as an indie helped me to win my publishing deal. On Saturday 24th we have two events planned: a creative writing workshop during the day and a wine & words quiz in the evening. The latter came about because our festival home is the function room above Hennings, Chichester’s independent wine merchant.
As ever, children’s author Christopher Joyce is the moving force behind the project. As ever, I was two steps behind him, nodding enthusiastically. As a result of this enthusiasm I find myself taking part in the indie panel, hosting the editing table, and if numbers dictate helping him to run the creative writing workshop. But numbers are the thing – bookings for our events are starting to come in, but they are not all as popular as we hoped.
Some of this is to do with being part of a festival. The upside is being featured in their programme, on their website and across their social media (in theory – the last time they tweeted anything was two weeks ago). The downside is that there are so many great events for people to choose from, so how do we make ours stand out?
We need to reach local readers and writers – mainly writers – and they are a limited audience. The local papers are being supportive but how else do we make sure they know about our events? Twitter is a massive stage for this sort of thing and although we have lovely Canva graphics to post we need to make sure we are using the correct hashtags. So perhaps social media isn’t the best approach.
Our email newsletter goes out next week and features the events so hopefully that will help increase the numbers. At least the audience is targeted locally and we know they love books.
As a group we decided against leaflets because everyone hates giving them out, but I think this could have been a mistake. We have a poster in the window of Hennings, and I have designed one for my own event which will go into the library and anywhere else I can persuade to take it. Although we are a group and we all promote each others’ events our biggest responsibility is to our own. And from my point of view, local promotion is something I’ve lost the knack for.
Actually, event or not, being visible in the locality of your book, or where you live, is an essential part of the author’s marketing toolkit. People are always so much more interested when they feel they may be able to recognise something of their own lives in your work it’s vital we don’t become so focused on the global horizon we forget our own back yards.
For more information about spoken word events at the Festival of Chichester look here: http://festivalofchichester.co.uk/spoken-word/
