Planning the Book Launch

Having decided to do a print run of my book, This Place is Awesome, I started to think about how to launch the book. A decent book launch seemed like an essential part of getting the project off the ground and getting some attention. Thankfully a dear friend who works at a number of Vancouver's best known and most loved music and social venues took an immediate and extremely enthusiastic interest. With D on board to help make the arrangements the question became "how many people should I expect and how big a venue should I book?"

It was very hard for me to guess how many people might take an interest in the launch. Would 100 people show up? Would I be lucky if I got ten? How on earth do you estimate this sort of thing?

For someone who never throws a party because he lives in mortal dread of having no one show up (or even worse - having one person show up - leaving me feeling doubly embarrassed), it was a more difficult decision than how many books to order. In the end I went with the north bar at The Railway Club. It's a venerable Vancouver institution, it was very familiar and comfortable (having shot countless shows there), it was comfortable and familiar to the people I expected to be interested in my book, it was conducive to speaking and being seen, it had decent gin, and it could fit 50 people comfortably - 70 in a pinch - and it wouldn't look completely deserted and sad if there were only 15.

Having a comfortable location was very important to me. As someone who had spent years learning how to be inconspicuous and unnoticed in a venue, I was now faced with the challenge of being the centre of attention. Public speaking is not something new to me, but this was a kind of speaking that I'd never done before. I wanted to appear at home and at ease.

I started to think about how to promote the event. Posters and handbills were a simple and obvious choice. I sent out a press release to all the local media announcing the book and the event, and I created the obligatory Facebook event.

Facebook events are regrettably not the reliable tool that they used to be. For a time they were a great way to let people know about upcoming shows. These days it seems they are a victim of Facebook's success. I sent the invitation out to about 500 people in the local area, but when I spoke to friends that I knew would be interested they said they hadn't seen the invite. It would appear that people are so swamped with invitations on Facebook these days that they routinely just ignore them. (I confess that while I always read each invitation I get these days, I rarely take the time to respond anymore.) I've also noticed, when observing other people's events, that they are not a particularly good predictor of who will actually show up, regardless of what the event page suggests.

In my case, my FB event showed over 100 people attending the event. On the day, I had about 65 people with many "confirmed" people absent. This isn't a criticism of those people - more a cautionary tale for those who might take the FB stats as a reliable indicator.

I should also mention that I did what I could to promote the upcoming event inside the venue. I made sure they had posters and handbills, and that the staff knew about the show. This falls under what I consider to be the "so obvious I can't believe people don't do it" category. Nevertheless, lots of bands fail to court the venue before a show in the belief, I can only presume, that the venue will set aside the attention being demanded by every other band to take an interest in and a make special effort to promote -their- show. With so much stuff competing for people's interest these days it's not enough to assume that anyone will come seek you out and pry out of you the reasons why they should be excited. The best thing you can do to endear yourself to others, and get them to want to pay attention to you, is to make their lives (and possibly their jobs) easier. But that's another posting.

In the meantime I had sent out ten copies of the book to various people in the hopes of getting some good quotes to use in promoting the book. I got lucky and received a very positive review from one of the city's daily papers. The local entertainment weekly picked up the story of the launch and ran a piece both online and in the print edition.

With the date set, the promotional materials in the community, and D excitedly telling everyone she knew that they -must- attend, there was nothing to do but wait. Actually... there was tons to do.