Looking for a Handout

PJ Nunn

Here are some thoughts from Neil Plakcy, author of the soon to be released Mahu Fire!

Looking for a Handout

Do you go to conferences and conventions looking for handouts? Probably not, unless you need a few extra bucks to pay for your airfare back home. But if you bring your own handouts with you, they can be an effective marketing tool for your books.

Maybe it’s the teacher in me (my day job is as a community college professor of writing) but I like the idea of giving people something more than just a few words of wisdom from up on the dais. It doesn’t take long to put together a one-page handout that might interest your audience, and the benefit is that they’ll be taking something of value home with your name, and your book’s name on it.

Everybody who reads needs bookmarks—but if you’re like me, you get a few favorites and then use them until they fall apart. But a flyer that relates to the topic of your talk is something that could hand around for a lot longer.

Here are some examples I’ve done. For a panel discussion about “The Sleuth’s Journey” at Sleuthfest recently, I went back to a great book, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, by Christopher Vogler. There was so much to cover there, though, that I knew I wouldn’t be able to talk much about it. So I quickly summarized the 12 points and put them into a handout.

My hero, Honolulu homicide detective Kimo Kanapa’aka, is an openly gay cop. For a reading in New York a couple of years ago that was cosponsored by GOAL (Gay Officer’s Action League), I put together a list of other mysteries that had similar heroes. I’m always looking for new books to read, and I figured if there were other readers like me in the audience, they’d take home that list and keep it around for a while.

At Left Coast Crime in Denver this year, I was on a panel called “Working with the Man,” about how writers without a lot of police background get their information. It didn’t take me long to put together a list of the resources I use—websites, list serves, and books among them. The audience seemed to appreciate that they didn’t have to worry about copying down long URLs—and my handout gave them an easy place to write additional notes. I hope that at least a few of those pages made it home with the audience—and that after seeing my name, and the name of my books, on the bottom of the page, I might get a few sales, too.

I’ve also put together a handout called “Enriching Your Writing Through Research,” for a similar panel at another conference. Any time I do one of these, it includes my name, website and the titles of my books at the bottom. It’s not flashy, but it’s there as people go back and refer to the material in the handout.

I’m not the first guy to figure this out. At one of my first Sleuthfests, I picked up a multi-page handout from Jeremiah Healy about book promotion.  I still have it, and Jerry’s name is burned into my brain because of it.

Joanna Campbell Slan is great at this. I have a handout she created to promote Sisters in Crime’s Forensics University with helpful hints from D. P. Lyle, Jan Burke, and Detective Lee Lofland. If you’ve been to conferences or workshops in the past, you probably have similar handouts. And you probably have something to say, too. Wouldn’t you like your words to go home with potential readers? I know I would.

Till next time,