Merchandising is not a dirty word. It means selling stuff and, if you're going to publish a book, you might as well try to make money on it. You can sell more books if you bundle related products with it.
I didn't think of this for our book until I went to a book signing for a Guide for the Modern Bear a field guide to Gay hairy men. If you're a Gay man, you know from bears; they are the thing right now. (I'm hoping we Gingers will be the next thing.) At their event they had books and tshirts for sale. I bought both. The tshirt has a drawing from their book: a muscle bear in Jockey briefs. Got me two date offers.
So I suggested to David we have tshirts. He brought up the fact that our Ginger market was limited (only 2% of the human species). What about the other 98%? I came up with--tah dah!--the gingerphile tee. So if you like gingers or are one, we got you covered--literally.
I went to Cafe Press, an online design and sales site I'd used before, and designed our tshirts. They have a store option but I didn't set one up immediately. When you self publish, you dance as fast as you can, i.e., there are more good ideas than you have time and energy to pursue. I designed and ordered the tshirts, dude. Give me a break. However, recently Logosportswear, which is the actual source of our tshirts sent me an email mentioning setting up a store with them. I thought: why not? Maybe I'd been drinking.
Set up was pretty easy though and now we gots a Ginger & Gingerphile Store online. The good thing about this is that tshirts are cheaper so people who aren't sure they want to buy a $25 full color book are more open to buying a $15 tshirt. (Those are event prices: we pass along our discount.) And then they say what the hell and buy the book too. We wear the shirts at events so they have to stare at them for an hour. That might lead to sales. Also, the shirts are RED, which is a motivating color. Ask any bull.
It doesn't have to be tshirts. The Modern Bear boys have dog tags and other products. David is going to sell prints and cards of the book photos. Someone said we should do a calendar since we have 13 images, one for the front and one for each month. A little late to get going on it now but a good idea for 2014 maybe.
For now, check out the Ginger stuff we do have:
Ginger Snaps: the Book http://blurb.com/bookstore/detail/3577527
Ginger & Gingerphile tshirts http://gingergingerphiletee.logosoftwear.com
No comments:
Post a Comment