UW-Whitewater and the Wisconsin Gazette Come Through!
After a relaxing pre-holiday weekend which included great visits with out of town friends, I was ready to do everything I could to get ads for Flesh Wound into the newspapers in time for the December shopping season. It's been a great Monday as two of the papers I'd contacted last week called me today, and I'm well on the way to getting ads in consecutive December issues in both of them.
The Wisconsin Gazette, Wisconsin's LGBT Community newspaper and the only non-university affiliated paper I'd contacted, sent an email to me on Saturday with their media kit attached. It explained all the details of placing display ads, and questions like file format, sizing of ads, and layout and design considerations for camera ready artwork were all addressed. They followed that up this morning with a call to discuss the ad, including an offer to help resize my PDF file to fit the ad space I was buying. This is extremely helpful to me, and working with the Gazette thus far has been an excellent experience. My sales rep there asked me about my background and how I came to write Flesh Wound, and after hearing the story she said she'd bring my info to the attention of the Gazette's publisher as they may want to run a feature story about me. How cool is that??? That would be a powerful complement to the ad (if it could be written and run before Christmas – but even if it runs in January, it would still be fantastic exposure!), and would bring much more attention to FW. Yes!
After I'd put together my contact info and PDF and sent it off to the Gazette, the phone rang again and an advertising rep from the Royal Purple, UW-Whitewater's student newspaper, called to provide similar info to me on running a display ad. I was very happy, as UW-Whitewater was one of the schools I'd liked a great deal when I was there hanging posters. We had a similar discussion about deadlines, file formats, and sizing, and if I can get a correctly sized PDF to them by Wednesday (no problem there!) I will be able to run ads in the December 1 and 8 issues, the last two prior to Christmas break. Yes!
The third and final paper I'm going to pursue for ads is the Advance Titan at UW-Oshkosh. I really liked that campus too, and if I can get into their issues prior to Christmas I'll have good coverage in three papers at the same time. The total bill for all six of these ads will be less than $1,000. I'll post the exact amount when I know what it is.
It feels absolutely great to have made this progress! I'm looking forward to seeing the ads, seeing how they are received, and moving to the third step in my PR plan which is to contact student organizations on campus to invite them to review and discuss Flesh Wound as an organizational event.
I'll write another blog on Wednesday before taking a break on Thanksgiving. Enjoy the short week! Read something today that reminds you of when you were a child. Thanks for reading! -Jon
