Sometimes a new way to get the word out about what Crème de la Crime does just falls into my lap.
About this time last year I bumped into an old friend who I hadn’t seen for a while. She belongs to one of the women’s clubs which seem to proliferate in this area – most areas, in fact, at least here in the UK – and had taken on the task of finding speakers for their meetings.
Me, I’m not a joiner. Not that I don’t enjoy other people’s company, but the highly organised version of company which comprises the Women’s Institute, Townswomen’s Guild, Ladies’ Circle etc etc etc has never really appealed to me.
Which, as it happens, is now working to my advantage. Because they’re always looking for speakers from outside their number.
My old friend was keen to push the boundaries. Speakers who offer an evening of slides of the Holy Land or a hundred and three recipes for broccoli are something of a sardonic cliché in those circles, but they do still exist; my friend was thinking along the lines of beauty therapy demonstrations, or interesting female entrepreneurs.
She was in a bit of a tizzy because one of her speakers had dropped out; and as we stood outside the post office catching up on each other’s families and activities, she had a lightbulb moment. “Hey, you could do it,” she said. “Come and tell us how you started a publishing company.”
Her timing couldn’t have been more perfect; Criminal Tendencies, the short story collection we published last year in support of two breast cancer charities, was about to come out, and it’s a rare bunch of women who haven’t been affected by breast cancer in some way.
They must have enjoyed the talk; they bought a total of twenty-three copies of Criminal Tendencies and a generous handful of backlist titles as well, and issued a return invitation to run a murder mystery evening for them, which I did a few weeks ago.
It got better. A few weeks later the phone rang; the caller had heard I gave talks, and she needed someone at short notice to replace a speaker who had pulled out… Another twelve copies plus backlist. Then someone who had been at the first meeting called to book me to speak to yet another group; they gave me a delicious dinner, and cleaned me out of books within twenty minutes.
When it happened for the fourth and fifth times I decided it was time to get organised. The internet is a useful tool; libraries are wonderful places. Put them together and you get library websites, which are goldmines of information about social groups in their areas.
A few letters and e-mails brought amazing results. Tomorrow evening I give my fourth talk of the year, and have five more in the diary; one of Crème’s most proactive authors has already given two with a couple more scheduled, and another has given one and has two more coming up. And requests are still coming in.
It has its wryly amusing moments – like the response I received from one area asking when the author in question would be available to audition. She commented, equally wryly, that she hadn’t tap-danced since she was seven and wasn’t about to start again.
If I spoke marketing language I’d probably be talking about demographics and calculating the overlap between our target market and their membership. But I speak plain English; maybe a bit of French and the odd word of Welsh, but not marketing language. So the way it works for me, and I hope for Crème’s hardworking authors, is that we get to meet some new people, spread the word about the books we all love and believe in with a passion, and maybe even sell a few.
