Organizing a Writers Workshop: Marketing (Part 2)

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Today's guest post is by NO RULES regular Susan
Cushman, director of the 2011 Memphis Creative Nonfiction Workshop.




Last month, I
wrote about how to plan the budget, faculty, venue, housing, meals, and social events
for a writing workshop—specifically for the 2011 Memphis Creative Nonfiction Workshop.
Today's post is about what comes next: scheduling, marketing and promotion.



SCHEDULE


Setting the schedule is a bit like putting together a puzzle—you have to find just
the right shape and space for each piece, and the picture isn't complete until all
the pieces are included.




Deciding how much time is needed for each event—craft talks, manuscript critique sessions,
panels, meals—is something you learn from experience. And it's helpful to always remember
that things take longer than you think they will.




But arranging the lunches on site (in a room next to the workshop room) saves valuable
minutes, and overlapping where you can (pulling participants out of the workshop for
10-15 minutes each for their pitch session with a literary agent) also gives you the
most value for the allotted time.




In the end, our schedule ended up with 10 hours of manuscript critique sessions, 7
hours of craft talks/presentations, 1½ hours of panel discussion, and up to 5 hours
of pitch sessions, depending upon how many people sign up for those.




You can see the complete
schedule here.






MARKETING & PROMOTION


With a large conference, you can count on some extra money for advertising, but with
a small workshop the budget is tight. If you spend more than you take in, you put
yourself at personal risk.




After considering the options available for paid advertising, I chose to only place
one ad, in an online creative nonfiction newsletter that reaches 9,000 active subscribers
each month and has an average click-through rate of  28%. The ad cost $75 and
will run in May, four months before the workshop.




The rest of the promotion only cost some time and thoughtful "product placement."

Social Networks. Blogs, Facebook and Twitter are great places to
promote events. I have a personal
blog, and I post monthly here at No Rules and also at the Southern Authors' blog, A
Good Blog is Hard to Find.




You can create an event page on Facebook, and link back and forth between all of these
avenues each time you post more information. Keep your readers interested by posting
new information at least once a week on the workshop site. This can be in the form
of promoting faculty readings at bookstores, linking to interesting posts about various
aspects of creative nonfiction (or whatever your workshop's genre) to start a discussion,
and even citing good resources for emerging writers to tap into before the workshop.




And don't forget the oldest social network—e-mail. If you have access to e-mail lists
from neighboring workshops and conferences, send out a group e-mail announcing the
workshop to those participants.

Local Media. Press releases are free. So are event
listings in community and arts calendars in many city and neighborhood newspapers.
Send this information out as many months in advance as the papers will allow, and
then follow up with a reminder—just a couple of sentences—a month before the workshop.




How far should you reach? Since this is a small workshop and not a conference, I'm
limiting my reach to Memphis, and about 5 surrounding states.

Bookstores and Coffee Shops. Create posters and fliers
and take them (or mail them if you can't get to all of them) to area bookstores and
coffee shops, where lots of emerging writers hang out. If you can coordinate your
effort with an event—like a book signing by one of your faculty members—all the better.




When I learned that one of our speakers was coming to a bookstore in Memphis in March,
I called and asked if I could hand out fliers for the workshop at his signing. Look
for ways like this to connect the dots in your marketing and promotional efforts.




A note about libraries: our public library won't allow notifications to be posted
unless the event is free, which is too bad, since I'm not going to make any money
off the event. Be sure and check to see if you might be allowed to post information
in the libraries near you.

[image error]So
there you have it. I'm having a great time planning this workshop. If you'd like to
organize a writing workshop in your area and have any questions, feel free to contact
me. I'd love to hear from you.




And, if you have organized a writing workshop and have more tips and suggestions to
share, please leave a comment. Check back in September or October to find out how
successful the workshop was!





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You can read Susan's
blog here, and follow her on Facebook or Twitter.

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