Reaching readers requires showing up (and ugh, paperwork)

Last week, I got to present RomanceClass and pitch five featured (and appropriate) books to an audience of over 200 public school educators specifically tasked to acquire books for their schools and students.

There’s work to be done to get to this point. Registering, showing up, participating gets you inside the room, so to speak. When you’re inside the room, and you have 10 minutes to talk about 5 books and your writing community, you bring in all that you learned from being outside.

I made a case for our books (fiction novellas that aren’t textbooks, not overtly educational) being available in their schools. I told them I know the age group reads this (I have analytics), and the material provides the talking points they expect and more.

This is just another day to you if you actually work in local publishing! But I’m indie, and RomanceClass is actually all indie authors who hate paperwork and will do everything but that, I’m just documenting what’s happening when I tell myself to do the paperwork for the team, and show up.

But, Mina, isn’t this just a ten-minute presentation? How much work could that be? Don’t you know all the books already? Surely it won’t take a lot of time to show up and talk about this, why do you keep describing this as “work”?

I realize that some people may be not as paperwork-averse as I am! This should be a walk in the park for you guys. But this is what it looks like for me:

First there was registering to be known by a government agency as a writing professional (1), partnering with a distributor with all the necessary accreditation (2), then applying to be considered for a booth at a literary festival (3), upon acceptance there was identifying five books to highlight to the educators by providing metadata (4), submitting print copies for sample and exhibit purposes (5), filling out a template tool for each of the five books to help the educators identify if these books meet their requirements (6), creating a deck about RomanceClass and the books (7), writing a script and practicing it (8), presenting it (9).

What am I trying to say by sharing this?

On a regular day in, say 2019, I would not do the 9-point list mentioned above. I did not do anything similar to that for years. I could argue that the option was not available, I was not aware of how to get our books in front of an audience of educators, or we were doing fine just tweeting “buy my book” links out into social media. But it also meant that for years we were writing books that were just never being discovered by young Filipino readers through their schools. And why? Because of my aversion to forms and paperwork.

I just so happened to have mustered up the energy to start doing this because social media completely collapsed on us. I was not okay with our books completely disappearing. I’m sharing the general steps here so you (fellow paperwork-averse person) will know, and if this doesn’t yet make you just want to lie down then at least you have an idea where to start and how to proceed. Not just for yourself but also for your writing community, because once you start the process it’s easy to bring similar books and authors along.

I hope this leads to purchases and ultimately new readers and fans for the books and authors I pitched. This session was organized by NBDB and DepEd.

The books I presented were My Quarantine Diary by Ines Bautista-Yao, Choco Chip Hips by Agay Llanera, Hearts and Sciences by Celestine Trinidad, Flipping the Script by Danice Mae P. Sison, and Feels Like Home by Angel C. Aquino.

[Modified from a thread on Bluesky]

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