AftenBrook Szymanski On Finding New Ways to Stand Out With Your Swag

Most authors will agree that the creative part of the job is where we excel, the business and marketing side, slightly less. It’s lovely when the two can meet in the form of SWAG – Shit We All Generate. I’ve invited some published authors to share with us their secret to swag… little freebies that can sell a book longer after the author is no longer standing in front of a prospective reader. In order to create great swag, you have to be crafty – in more ways than one.

Today's guest for the SWAG is AftenBrooke Szymanski, author of KILLER POTENTIAL, a young adult psychological thriller with a psych ward, a murder trial and revenge.

Finding something that represents your book and hasn’t been played out by a million authors before is difficult. What’s your swag?

I attempt to find novel ways to engage readers/writers, but honestly, the best I do is twist things to fit my personality. I’m crap at hard sale methods. Salesmanship is not my strength. I do connect with people conversationally and hate pissing people off with spammy stuff. So, I post gif games and try to have fun. I have no evidence any of my interactions lead to sales. 

But, I feel like less of a desperate loser begging readers to pay for my creative powers and more like a the everyday-loveable quirky-nerd I am, interacting with a wide range of readers (not all readers who like gif games and quizzes are going to be interested in my writing, but we can still connect with shit I generate) 😉

I bring colored gel pens to signings, attendees pick their favorite pen for me to sign with and get to keep the pen.

I also carry mini Pokémon figures in case younger kids stop by—they have to pick a Pokémon without looking because the Pokémon picks them. It’s fun for everyone and I get adults wanting to pick Pokémon all the time.

I have a book filled with pictures of things I’ve done since choosing to pursue writing full boar, very fun things, like being haunted in a hotel for three days, flying a Cessna, running in a 200ish marathon with Mercedes Yardley, and other nuts stuff I’d never have done if I wasn’t a writer. I have the book available to flip through at events. So aspiring writers can go, ‘daaaang, I want to be a writer too!’—hahaha). I didn’t have any pictures saved on my phone. Also, plug for chatbooks. I totally use them 😉

For online swag, I’ve created a free quiz connected to my book Killer Potential. It can be accessed at anytime, not just for those who’ve read the book. And it goes through personality strength to determine an area where the persons potential can shine through in their real life. I’ve been amazed at the accuracy and responses so far.

I also created a contest for photo uploads as part of a release I have coming out next year. That contest hasn’t launched yet, but it’s going to be awesome. Based around the tag line “forget covering your butt, cover your code. Cheat Code is coming.” The early feedback I’ve seen for the contest is awesome. I will have a $100 gift card for Amazon as a prize, as well as possibly featuring winning entries during promotional run.

How much money per piece did your swag cost out of pocket?

For signing event swag, it’s less than $.50 per item. I am happy to give the gifts to passers by without feeling like I’m blowing money. And I don’t offer candy unless it’s gluten/peanut/allergy free. That’s why I try to have useful swag such as pens.

Contest items are generally gift cards, because if I’m winning something, I want to spend however the blast I want and I might not want a necklace. I don’t wear jewelry other than my wedding ring and prescription glasses (my glasses count as both makeup and jewelry). For prizes requiring big actions I offer 50-100$ gift cards.

Do you find that swag helps you stand out at an event? 

I see other authors with bigger swag and bigger names. I honestly don’t see my swag as having an impact other than I appear prepared and ready to interact/aware of my audience. Even if I don’t compete with bigger names, I feel it matters that I come to events showing I care about my fans and want to demonstrate appreciation for their time. Maybe that’s quantifiable, maybe it’s not.

What do you think of big item swag pieces versus cheaper, yet more easily discarded swag like bookmarks?

I think of gift cards and electronics as big items. I’ve seen people give away skateboards, tickets to events, and baskets of book specific items. These are more engaging than bookmarks to me. I intend to have hourly giveaways at my next launch signing, where  I’ll gift a store card at the bookstore I’m signing in, every hour. It’s fun and keeps patrons in the store, which benefits the bookstore as well

What’s the most clever / best swag by another author?

Things that have driven me to enter things include illustrated Harry Potter Books, big money gift cards, and tickets to events I won’t pay for myself but would attend if I won tickets (such as a comic con or concert) I also admire when authors offer to put someone’s name in their next story. So fun.

And the biggest question – do you think swag helps sell books?

No. At least not directly. I think swag helps generate name recognition, author/book awareness and a connection to author/book. I don’t think it directly affects sales other than getting people talking about an author/book, which might lead to future or later sales. 

I keep all my online swag links available at my website If anyone has particular shit they’d like me to offer, they’re welcome to contact me through the website contact form. If it’s feasible, I’ll make it happen. 😊

Research, But Not Too Soon by Julia Glass

by Julia Glass

When I teach, I like debunking the mythical dictates carved in the styrofoam pillars supporting the shrine built to deify the Real Writer. (Picture the Lincoln Memorial, but it’s Ernest Hemingway up on that throne, fountain pen clenched in a fist as big as a Thanksgiving turkey.) There’s a reason, I point out, that novelists do not have to pass exams to practice their trade. Architects and sea captains, sure. Surgeons, you bet. Why not novelists? Simple: Our form of malpractice won’t kill anybody. The worst we can do is bore you silly, fail to suspend your disbelief, make you waste a little money. So we get to do this thing we do by whatever rules and rituals we devise.

Prominent among those dictates (close on the heels of Write every day) is Write what you know. Which holds true, admittedly, to the extent that every journey begins at home. But I like Grace Paley’s retort: “We don’t write about what we know; we write about what we don’t know about what we know.” Write what you want to know, and start out pretending you know a lot more than you do. Surmise, invent, and bluff your way through it as far as you can. Flex your imagination. Why else are you here?

One of the ancillary pleasures in writing fiction, however, is finding out stuff, “real” stuff, stuff you never knew before, stuff you need to know if the story you’re telling is to hold up as true. Curiosity is the apprentice to your imagination. Yet I have found that the longer I can put off my research, the stronger and tighter my stories are. This is personal, of course; maybe you, setting out to write the great modern Western, need to pack up and live as a Wyoming cowhand before you can write a single word. Herman Melville went on an honest-to-God whaling voyage, no luxury cruise, before sitting down to write Moby-Dick. I hasten to add that I am not writing historical fiction, so the broad context of my work is the world we live in now; nevertheless, I delve deeply into my characters’ personal histories, which means I’m facing history with a capital H. I may need to find out about, for instance, the rationing of farm equipment during World War II. (Wars of the last century have influenced the lives of my fictional people as dramatically as they have the lives of actual people.)

I won’t deny that laziness factors into my method. Years ago, I loved nothing more than a good excuse to roam the library stacks. Now, even heading downscreen to Safari seems like a chore when all I want to do is hang around with my characters, eavesdrop on their secrets, and get them in trouble just to find out how they’ll endure (or not).

In every story, I challenge myself to create characters outside my know-it-all zone, but never arbitrarily. Though I may not understand why, I will have felt a deep curiosity to inhabit the psyche of a wildlife biologist, a pastry chef, a Guatemalan gardener, an elderly widower, a music critic, the devout Catholic mother of two gay sons, a cancer patient, a cellist, a lonely film star, an insolent young man bent on what he sees as constructive anarchy.

To know their passions, preoccupations, and afflictions, I have researched the infrastructure of wedding cakes, the culture of a 1960s summer camp for teenage musicians, the pathology and treatment of AIDS in the 1980s, the training of Border collies, the politics of water rights in the Southwest, the conservation of grizzly bears – but I began by writing from instinct and hearsay. The problem with doing research too soon is this: If I uncover too much captivating knowledge in advance, I cannot resist including it, nor can I tell when it dilutes or distracts from the story I’m trying to tell. If, on the other hand, I must pack it into the brimming suitcase of an existing story, only the pertinent details will fit. (The vast lore I uncovered on the variously eccentric traditions surrounding wedding confections was hard to leave behind, but because I was working to authenticate an existing scene, the narrative had only so much give.) The story must be the boss of the research, not the other way around.

I like doing my research live, using people as sources whenever I can. And sometimes those people find me. Years ago, while struggling to craft a character living with the after-effects of head trauma, after reading medical journals had left me more confused than informed, I was called for jury duty – where I happened to meet a stranger who had gone through an experience parallel to that of my character. I conducted some enormously fruitful “research” over lunch breaks from the courthouse.

Inevitably, you miss things. If you’re lucky, people who read your work early on catch those gaffes before it’s too late: the clam sauce with onions, the cello seated behind the flute; an idiom or a gadget or a popular song deployed before its time. Sometimes, however, alternative facts wind up in print. In Three Junes, I began by using memory and guesswork to describe the surroundings of a Scottish country home, an essential setting, knowing I’d fine-tune the details later. Several drafts later, I consulted a guide to British birding, overwriting my placeholder blue jays, robins, and cardinals with yellowhammers, chiffchaffs, and collared doves. Botanically, however, it turns out I wasn’t so thorough.

There I was, out on tour, closing my book after reading to a small audience, when a hand shot up, emphatically. “Excuse me,” said my questioner, “but please see page 117. It isn’t possible, you realize, for the women’s final at Wimbledon to fall within the month of June. And, on page 47, can you tell me what a dogwood tree is doing in Scotland? Dogwoods grow only in North America.” He was holding a copy of my book sprouting a thicket of Post-Its. He was my first of a certain kind of reader. I want to hug and slug these people at the very same time. They are, after all, devoted to the truth.

Okay, so he had me on Wimbledon – a necessary torqueing of reality that I had hoped no one would notice. “But as for the dogwood,” I said, keeping my cool, “there were these American houseguests who, wanting to make a memorable impression on their Scottish hosts, and knowing how much they cherished their garden, smuggled a dogwood sapling in their luggage as a house present. The climate proved perfectly hospitable. The guests were invited back. Next time, they brought a pair blue jays.”

Julia Glass the author of six novels, including the best-selling Three Junes, winner of the National Book Award, and I See You Everywhere, winner of the Binghamton University John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Other published works include Chairs in the Rafters and essays in several anthologies. Glass is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emerson College. She lives with her family in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

Julia's essay is excerpted from Signature's 2017 Ultimate Writing Guide - which you can download for free!

Natalie Rompella On Plots That Change As The Story Evolves (And That's Okay)

Inspiration is a funny thing. It can come to us like a lightning bolt, through the lyrics of a song, or in the fog of a dream. Ask any writer where their stories come from and you’ll get a myriad of answers, and in that vein I created the WHAT (What the Hell Are you Thinking?) interview. Always including in the WHAT is one random question to really dig down into the interviewees mind, and probably supply some illumination into my own as well.

Today's guest is Natalie Rompella, a former museum educator, elementary and middle school teacher, as well as the author of more than forty books and educational guides for young readers. She is also the winner of a Work-in-Progress grant from the Society for Children's BookWriters and Illustrators. Her most recent release, COOKIE CUTTERS & SLED RUNNERS releases November 21 from SkyPony Press!

Ideas for our books can come from just about anywhere, and sometimes even we can’t pinpoint exactly how or why. Did you have a specific origin point for your book?

I wish I could remember! I know the idea of sled dog racing came from doing research for another of my books: Famous Firsts about sports that started in the U.S. Ironically, sled dog racing was the last sport I chose. I knew nothing about it until I began my research. Then I fell in love with the sport so much I traveled to Alaska to see the start of the Iditarod.

Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?

I’m not even really sure how it all pieced together. My main character has OCD—I’m not sure how that came to be. I believe the baking part came from my own experience of loving to bake growing up. And then a lot of it wrote itself. I wasn’t aware of the twists and turns that ended up occurring until I put fingers to the keyboard.

Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?

Definitely. This story used to have the main character moving to Alaska. But it took about fifty pages for that to even happen. Eventually the idea of the main character moving got taken out all together.

Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by?

I get tons of story ideas a day. Usually the timing is poor, though (such as in the shower or while driving), and I forget them. I do find that if I need to write something new and get stuck, I will not get re-inspired unless I go do something else, such as go for a run.

How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?

I really bounce around a lot. I often set timelines to stay motivated, so maybe I plan out to work on one chapter of project X on Monday and then work on edits of project Y on Tuesday just to keep things fresh.

I have 8 cats (seriously, check my Instagram feed) and I usually have at least one or two snuggling with me when I write. Do you have a writing buddy, or do you find it distracting?

LOL. Absolutely. My writing buddy is the reason I finished this book!

As I mention in my Acknowledgements, this book had been put away in a drawer. Then I got a call from the SCBWI Work-In-Progress committee that I had won the WIP grant. I immediately pulled my manuscript out of the drawer to see if I could finish it.

At the same time, we had just gotten a puppy: Luna. As is typically done with potty training a puppy, we limited her to a small space. We had just expanded to include the living room/dining room area for her. Because I was doing the training, I also was confined to those rooms of the house to hurry her outside if need be. I set up camp at the dining room table and thought, might as well work on my novel while I’m in here. I ended up finishing it.

Luna is still my writing companion today. When she hears that I’m making coffee, she knows I’ll be headed to my computer. She joins me in my office and “gets to work”/naps. She has heard so many versions of this novel. But really, I do think of her as my muse/writing buddy/lazy assistant.