Should You Buy Swag For Your Book?
It's fun! But should you?
Hi Friends,
I bought swag for my book.
I bought about 100 pencils and 50 custom sticky note pads and it cost about $165. I’m going to give some to my publisher to give out in mailings and I’m going to give out some at events coming up. I might buy more pencils depending on what events look like. Honestly, I had a lot of fun ordering this stuff! I don’t have any special hook-up for it—I used VistaPrint—and I am not blazing trails in the areas of swag innovation, book marketing, or whatever. Of course I thought of swag when I thought of marketing stuff for the book, but I came to a few conclusions about it, which I want to share with you today. In the end, I just did something that would be fun for me. And you can, too.
What’s the deal with swag anyway?
I’m sure someone somewhere can figure out what the first literary swag was. Did readers bring flowers to the Mrs. Dalloway launch? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯The internet tells me the first Strand bookstore tote bags came out in the 1980s. Maybe Jay McInerney had branded cigarettes for his book parties. I could think of a dozen more cool ideas, but it would because I remembered the book, not because I remembered the swag. Only publishing nerds really remember the Sally Rooney bucket hat of 2021. Next time I see
, I’m definitely going to snag one of her fantastic matchbooks promoting her new book I WANT TO BURN THIS PLACE DOWN.The point of book swag has always been to promote a book. Carry a tote bag with a book cover on it and you’re a walking billboard for that book. (I don’t mind being a billboard for a book tbh. It’s better than other things you could be a billboard for.) Then there were phones with cameras and social media like instagram, and with that came increasing brinksmanship about whose publisher sent out what special box with how many different piece of flair to which influencers to promote their books. To authors, it became a way to gauge how much their publisher loved them/their book (more swag = more money = more love) and to influencers it became a way to measure how cool publishing thought they were by which mailings they did or didn’t get, probably. I’m not an influencer but that’s how I would feel/do feel when I don’t get cool swag. I don’t get that much swag period, lol.
What’s the point of swag?
The point of swag is not to quantify how cool you are or how much your publisher loves you. The point of swag is to get influencers (both formal and informal ones) to take pictures of it and post them on the internet. If you’re really lucky, the New York Times will write a whole article about your swag, like they did with the Sally Rooney Bucket Hat. Are money and love and attention and potential and all that tied together? Yes. Do publishers spend thousands of dollars on a book that really needs the boost instead of the already-bestselling author’s next book? No. If you are not an already-bestselling author (or otherwise notable), is that swag really going to help you that much? Probably not. Or at least not in proportion to how much you (or your publisher, but let’s be real) would have to spend to make it really make a difference.
What’s swag worth?
Doing completely back of the envelope math and not looking up my actual royalty rates in my contract, I have to sell about 55 books to make back the $165 I spent on my swag. That’s actually pretty reasonable. I could probably do that over a few months of posting pictures of the pencils and asking others to do the same. I’ll never know, though, if the pencils made a difference, or if any old post would have done it. There’s no way to link a single post to all the sales it might bring in, even if you track a link to a retailer or whatever. Someone might see a pencil post and then three weeks later see my book in a store (out June 10th!) and buy it then, and we’ll never know if the pencil post made the difference or not. Half of the reason to do swag is just to have another reason to post about your book. The posting reminds people your book exists.
I’m not going to get a check for that $165 of course, so I won’t be “reimbursed” for this expenditure. (But I can write it off my taxes next year.) The money will go against my advance. Does this mean this money was worth it? Was it well spent? Financially speaking, probably not, because it all depends on other people posting the swag. I have no control over it. I cannot post enough pictures of the pencils myself to make a difference because at some point, my audience will just be like enough with the pencils already and ignore it. All I can do is send my intrepid pencils out in the world and hope people take a picture. (And now that I think about it, it’s really hard to take a good picture of a pencil, lol.) But it’s worth it insofar as I enjoyed it and it felt like I was doing something and it’s another reason to post and that’s good enough for me.
Should you invest in swag?
If you want! It can be fun! It’s a new reason to talk about about your book on the internet! It feels good to give people trinkets! If you have the money to spend, it can’t hurt. But it’s not going to significantly move the sales needle. There probably isn’t a special swag thing you can buy that will move the needle. I mean, if you want to buy 100 people a new computer that’s cool but that feels excessive. (And in this economy?) I think publicity teams, influencers, the general media population (outside of movie studios—their swag game is bonkers because they have money) have moved on from stuff. How much more stuff do we even need? Your publisher also does not need to spend all their marketing dollars on swag. It’s not the sure thing you think it is, in terms of publicity.
My friends Kevin Nguyen, author of the new novel My Documents, and Arianna Rebolini, author of the forthcoming memoir Better, both have done zines for their book launches (and I contributed to Kevin’s!). What a fun idea! Zines, or any other out of the box promotional idea, do a few things at the same time: they offer the reader something of value; they provide the writer with something to talk about that isn’t buy my book; and they’re thematically linked to the book’s subject. Do you now have to do a zine? No! But if you have a cool idea and you want to implement it, go ahead. Why not?
HAPPY PUB DAY TO BATCAT 3: COOKING CONTEST by Meggie Ramm!
If you’re not on the Batcat train, I don’t know what to tell you. This middle grade chapter book is THE BIGGEST deal in my third grader’s classroom, so much so that my kid brought my early copy to class just to show off that they had it. :) (We allow book bragging in this house.) Get the whole series for your kiddos today!
TONIGHT, Tuesday April 22, you can see me and six other illustrious publishing people—including editors, agents, and authors—reveal the Secrets of Publishing at PT Knitwear bookstore on the LES in NYC. Not in the city? You can buy a ticket to view the livestream! Click that link above!
Take care my friends. XOXOXOXO,
Kate
"The point of swag is to get influencers (both formal and informal ones) to take pictures of it and post them on the internet." Aha moment for me!
I'm not sure this count as swag, but in 1996, the galley of John Lanchester's THE DEBT TO PLEASURE came wrapped in what I remember as a wooden box with lots of tissue paper and ribbon. That's the first Instagram-worthy mailing that I remember in those pre-Instagram days, and it made an impact considering that I still remember it almost 30 years later.