Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Product Placement

--Blog Tour kicks off tomorrow! Getting a jump start over at the fabulous Christine Fonseca's blog with an interview. Go check it out! :) And the awesome Amparo over at the OA is having a contest to win a copy of my book and some fun swag....winner announced tomorrow! Go enter!

I've been answering a lot of questions lately about promotion...what I'm doing to help promote my book specifically. Now, my book is a non-fiction book about writing, so when it comes to promotional items I did writing type stuff: bookmarks, pens, that kind of thing. But it got me thinking about the fun promo stuff fiction authors get to do.

- Jessica Verday has perfumes that go along with the characters in her Hollow books (her MC makes perfumes)
- Beth Revis has some awesome Godspeed swag for Across the Universe
- You can get jewelry with the Mockingjay design from the Hunger Games series
- You can get jewelry depicting the different years for the House of Night series
- You can get everything under the sun Twilight and Harry Potter

So I'm curious....when writing your books, do you ever do "product placement"? Do you have your MC wear a favorite necklace that you know would be a cool promo item if your book ever hits the shelves? Do you design a special logo for your MCs rebel alliance that you know would look on awesome on everything from T-shirts to coffee mugs?

It's not something I used to think about when writing, but with the growing necessity for authors to promote their own books, and especially over the past year or so as I've been focused on promoting my own book, it has become more present in my mind as I write.


Does it ever cross your minds?

10 comments:

Abby Annis said...

I never really thought about it until I came across a site that sells tons of items based on the Mortal Instruments series. Then I realized there are a few things in my story already that will work this way. Now all I have to do is get the darn thing published. ;)

Congrats on your book release tomorrow!

Stina said...

I haven't given this much though, but I did buy a dolphin charm like the one in the novel I'm now querying. ;)

Melissa said...

Ummm, no. I've never even thought about it. When I think about it, there are a couple trinkets people could get but nothing was on purpose .....

Interesting though. Now I'm going to start thinking about this.

Katrina L. Lantz said...

I do this, but not for promotional purposes. I just like to imagine bringing something I wrote to life, like a piece of jewelry or a shoe design. That's why I write--to bring my imagination to life in a way that nothing else does.

I love it when authors use things like that for promotion, though! Like Beth and her water bottles or Suzanne Collins and the Mockingjay jewelry. It's one more fun thing for fans to rally around.

Stephanie McGee said...

Never have. But it'll probably pop up next time I read through my manuscript.

There's one thing that comes to mind for a different manuscript, but that one will probably never see the light of day (*sniff*) so it's of no consequence.

For the current? Maybe an action figure of the MC, with different incarnations for his different facets.

Golden Eagle said...

I've thought of it before, but I never used them for that exact purpose. There are logos and symbols in the novel I'm working on now, for instance, but they became part of the story before I'd even heard of this kind of tihng.

Christine Fonseca said...

Dude! You KNOW I'm always thinking about this stuff.

RED~Scribe said...

My sister (an amazing artist and digital-3D wonder) is already planning to turn my current novel into a movie some day, so everything in my novel, from the lamps to the characters to the planets, is already partially designed. I don't know about T-shirts, though.

Elana Johnson said...

Totally does not cross my mind. I think it's harder in dystopian though, since it's a lot of tech gadgets and futuristic stuff.

Anonymous said...

Never crossed my mind! I always thought product placement is for movies and tv shows