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As regular readers will know, I am gearing up for a very exciting event: an authors’ appearance at the Central Library here in Cambridge, on Saturday 27 September.  (And yes, it’s authors in the plural, as there are seven of us taking part.)  I will be firing up the laminating machine, of course, to make some eye-catching posters for my desk, but then I read this blog post by Debbie Young, herself a successful self-published author (and also the nicest reviewer, as you can see here), and in this post she sings the praises of the old-fashioned bookmark as a marketing tool.  (I will confess that when I stumbled on the link to her post, I clicked on it expecting to find a clever new way to use online bookmarks, or hashtags, or some such electronic cleverness – I didn’t think of the traditional bookmark at all!)

So this morning I toddled over to Vistaprint and ordered myself some, well, they’re not bookmarks exactly, but slightly larger “rack cards”.  On the front I have put the “Fatal Forgery” book cover (which everyone agrees is very strong and memorable) and the back-cover blurb, and on the reverse, a selection of my reviews.  I won’t hand them out too freely, as they cost 13p each, but if someone seems genuinely interested, I think it’s worth giving them something to take away.  And certainly anyone who buys a copy of “Fatal Forgery” will get one as a rather large bookmark!  It’s cost me £19.80 for a hundred of them.  So I figure that I need to sell between five and six extra copies of the book to recoup my outlay.  It will be hard to know whether the bookmarks have led to the extra sales (should they materialise…) but, hey, it was fun to design them!