Kindle Cards: Documenting A Process

The Dragon’s Rocketship Collection.

This is still an untried promotional tool, so I can’t say if it is worth the time and effort.  I am going to be using them at Archon, a large Midwestern Science Fiction Convention being held on the first weekend of October. I will be reporting back after the convention if any of the authors report a spike in Kindle sales.

However, I want to write down my notes while they are still fresh in my mind, in case it does work.  We have a table in the Dealer’s room where we will be selling 40-something titles representing 15-20 different authors.

First Page Converted to PDF

The idea was to print out a card for each title that would have the title and a QR code that links to the Amazon sales page.  I wanted to be able to offer one-click Kindle purchase at POS, or as close as possible to it.

To create the cards themselves I used three programs, Open Office, Paint.net, and TEC-IT QR-Code Studio 1.0. All three are free to use.

First I downloaded the cover image from Amazon, which I then converted to grayscale and resized to 1.5 inches wide (144 pixels at 96dpi).  They weren’t all the same proportions, so the height varied, but I wanted them all to be consistent width.

Next I created the QR code, which I also sized to 1.5 inches wide.  I added a caption to each code with the title of the book, because I can’t read those dots.  That turned out to be a very good move when I started assembling the pages.

One note, I used the full Amazon sales page URL when making the codes. (example: http://www.amazon.com/Catskinners-Book-Lost-Doors-ebook/dp/B008MPNBNS/ ).  I realized partially through the process that I could have been using a shortened version with just the ASIN (example: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008MPNBNS/ ). It would make the QR codes marginally less complex, which might make them quicker to load.  Loading the ones I used hasn’t been an issue on any device that they have been tested on so far, so this might be a non-issue.

I played with the format a lot before I came up with the final version. What I ended up with was a table in Open Office.  I set the page to “Landscape” (8.5 x 11, since I wanted to print on card stock and Kinkos doesn’t offer card stock in legal size.) I then set the margins to .25″ all around.  (The printing area turned out to be a little less, which was fine.  The borders were fine.)

I set the table to six columns wide and five rows deep.  So I had six titles on each page.  Given the number of titles we’ll have, I ended up with eight pages.

The top row says “Want This Book On Kindle?”  I used white on black to make it stand out.

The next row has the title and author.  Some of the titles were kind of large and I had to use a smaller font to get them to fit, but mostly I used 16 point Times New Roman, bold italic for the title and bold for the author’s name.

Then I inserted the cover picture.  (As an aside all of the covers came out very nicely in b&w thumbnail.  I was prepared to tweak them if needed, but they all looked good using just a straight conversion. )

The fourth cell has a brief description of the book.  This turned out the be the hardest part of the whole process.  I had naively thought that I could just copy the book’s description from the Amazon sales page, but I didn’t have near enough room for that.  So I ended up asking the authors to submit taglines of 20-50 words.  30 seems to fit the best.  I adjusted font size to fill the block.

Once I got to the cutting phase I realized that I should have put extra margin space in the book descriptions.  The rest of the cells were centered, so I had room, but I had left justified the descriptions which didn’t give much room for error when cutting them apart. A few got some letters sliced, in fact, but fortunately I allowed for screwups and had extras printed.

Because the group is called “The Dragon’s Rocketship”

I ended up making cards for 47 titles, which left me one blank column at the end.  I used it to make some “Support Astrodraconian Literature” cards which we will attach to candy and give out.

It’s all about getting people to the table.

Okay, so once I had the cards made up it was time to begin the manufacturing process.

FedEx Kinkos. I love these guys!

The first set, printed out at last.

Fortunately they also sell boxes of envelopes.

The first set, cut.

Peeking out

Look! A bookmark!

Kinko’s excellent paper cutter. We grew very close this morning.

A place for everything, and everything in its place.

At long last, the entire collection.

Whew!

They’ll be sticking out of all the books on the rack. Eye-catching, right? I hope.

It’s been a lot of work, but much of that was figuring out the process.  If this works and I do it again the next set will be easier.  As far as a promotional expense, the entire thing–including the box of envelopes–ran right about thirty bucks.  I figure it’s worth gambling that much.