This is where I'll be posting my final presentation.

Title

– Dark Ages

Logo

http://twitpic.com/9w11bl/full

The types of books I’ve decided to publish are all “dark” themed works. The main genres in my publishing house will be crime (true & fictional), horror and thrillers. These would be geared towards our target market of Adult readers. There is a huge market for these books and our publishing house would take advantage of that. As a new publishing house, it is important to catch people's eye and our dark, spooky take on literature would do just that.

Some examples of the types of books we will be publishing are as follows:

Thriller/Fictional Crime: Two Little Girls In Blue by Mary Higgins Clark
True Crime: Small Sacrifices by Ann Rule
Horror: The Other by Thomas Tryon

These books are all very good examples of the types of books we aim to publish. While the genres are all quite similar, there are many different stories that will be told and many different takes on each genre will be available in our books.

We understand that both paperbooks and e-books have their own specific advantages. However, as our target market is Adult, we are more on the side of delivering an authentic reading experience with paperbooks.

Technology such as e-books generally appeals to the younger generation and a lot of adults (particularly older ones) wouldn’t even consider an e-book, or maybe don’t know much about them. The Kindle and other e-readers aren’t on everyone’s radars and taking into account the target market, it would be a mistake to favour e-books over paper ones. There may be difficulty reading on an e-book, or knowing where to obtain the books from. While this isn’t true of all adults, of course, we don’t wish to alienate any part of our target market.

However, in the future, once our fanbase is established and people know more about our company, introducing e-books is definitely a big possibility.

Week One:

In the first week, we would do some free promotion of the book. Some strategies we have planned are as follows:


 The first important step for our campaign will be customising a FaceBook page for our book. This will be used as a place where people can go for extra information on buying the book and the author of this book.

 We would offer a certain amount of copies of our new book to help some new public libraries, and in turn create a good reputation for our company already. This would get people’s eyes on the books, cost us very little and we would hope that news of our book would travel fast by word of mouth. This would be a great introduction for our publishing house, and this book.

 On Wednesday, a free reading of the book would take place in a library, with the author signing copies of the book at the end. We hope this would gather the interest a bit more, and further the good impression of our publishing house and the author. Bookmarks will also be provided here.

 On Friday of the first week, we will have some of our staff (and possibly some volunteers from the author’s family and friends) out on the streets, handing out postcards. On the front will be the cover of the book, and on the back will be the synopsis and of course, a link to our FaceBook page. These will be given to every person we meet and will hopefully arouse some more interest in the book.

In doing all of this in the first week, we hope that there would be some local radio stations, perhaps in the authors home area, that would pick up on all of this promotion and offer some extra by broadcasting about it.

Week Two

In the second week, we would be doing the following:

 Promotional copies of the book will be made and distributed.

 Monday, we would be paying for some print advertising in some smaller newspapers.

 Email blasts to publishers lists, which would include hundreds of retailers and librarians. This would be extremely useful for promotion.

 A website for the book would be set up, and we will run some online contests this week, all the way through until the end of the campaign.

 At the end of the week, we will have set up some pitches to some smaller magazines to review the book. Again, a lot of focus will be on the author’s local area, which is where the main buzz will form.


Week Three


 This week, we will be setting up some banner ads on certain websites. We will also be putting advertisements on book forums and links to our websites.

 The author will be doing some interviews with some book and entertainment websites. In these interviews, the webpage and the Facebook page will be made available.


Week Four


 This week, as interest in the book is gearing up, the author will be doing a small promotional book tour. They will be visiting a lot of smaller towns around England and signing some copies as well as doing a reading of the book. At the signings, there will be some free goody bags, with a bookmark, a pen and a book voucher for future publications from our publishing house.

 This week, we are hopeful that the reviews will be published in the magazines and newspapers that we pitched to around England and that the buzz will be well and truly there for the book.

Launch Party

For our launch, we will be organising a “Dark Characters” themed party. This is based on the fact that the theme of the publishing house, and of all our books, is dark and spooky. All those attending will be expected to dress as a well-known “evil” character from any publication.

The whole atmosphere of the party will be that of horror and thriller with many scary surprises happening throughout the night. There will be staged murders at the most unexpected moments, and the room will be dimly lit throughout the evening. There will be cocktails such as “Blood Red” and “Murder Mystery” served as well as some similarly creepily names shots. On entrance to the party, guests will be provided with a goody bag of treats related to the book and throughout the evening there will also be a screening of the books trailer and some other scary clips that will be played throughout the evening from famous horror films. The room will be decorated with big pictures of famous literary murderers all over the walls and there will be a piece written about each of them. Throughout the night the guests will be able to ramble around and read each one.

Promotion wise, there will be a copy of the book provided for each attendant and there will also be a Q&A session with the author for the press that decide to attend. On each table we will provide a small biography for one of the books main characters, so each table has a different character. On the invitation list to this party, there will be the competition winners from the promotions week and a guest of their choice, representatives from retailers and libraries as well as the press and some magazines. The author’s family and friends will also be invited.

To briefly evaluate this plan, I feel it could be very successful. I think the theme of the house and its books adds a lot of intrigue. While deciding on these, I considered all aspects of each genre. I decided I wanted my publishing house to be more geared towards the adult market after taking into consideration the fact that there are a lot of publishers out there that are mainly focussed on the Young Adult/Teenagers market. The reason I feel this would be successful is that due to being a smaller publishing house, we would be more likely to attract an audience by focussing on one specific “theme”, in this case the “darkness” one. There is a big adult fan base for the horror/crime/thriller genres and I think a small publishing company based around those would appeal greatly to Adult readers. I believe it’s extremely marketable and would be very intriguing to the avid reader of these genres. I feel, as a smaller company, these genres would be the easiest to get noticed and get people interested. I feel that the entire plan is well focussed and would really work.

This concludes my presentation, thank you all for reading.