Help Please! Something to Leave Behind

[BrianY]

Well, it's time for me to attend another one of those conferences. I've got a couple of agent and publisher meetings and I'm not really sure what I should leave behind. Certainly a business card and probably a sell sheet (for each title) too. But would it make sense to have a few proposals printed out? These would cost a huge sum in time and money and might not be received at all.

These days, you can't even burn a CD! So I've thought of carrying a few extra USB flash drives that could have pitches, proposals, or even fulls burned to them in a few moments. These would cost far less than printouts and could be re-purposed if all else failed.

Am I barking up the wrong tree here? What are the rest of you doing?

 

[James Charles]

I'm not sure how it works for proposals for food books. Like most everything these days, short and to the point is best. So perhaps a pitch, like as with a novel, should be one paragraph, with contact details below. If they are interested, they will contact you and you can email a larger proposal etc. You could have 5x7 cards with the pitch on it to easily hand out because a one page printout might get lost too easily in the stack of pages they get.

 

[BrianY]

Cookbook (and other how-to) book proposals differ in size. Both proposals that I'm offering at the conference are more than forty-five pages long and each has dozens of color photos. Giving printed copies away at each meeting could make a great impression, but if they turn them down, that's hundreds of dollars in color printing down the drain.

After sleeping on it, I'll bring multiple copies of a sell sheet printed on good paper, and a few blank USB sticks. If somebody wants a full proposal, or even a full manuscript, I can copy it to a stick and hand to them, along with a business card and CV/resume. It's not as memorable as a printout, but it's much cheaper and easier to repurpose should things go south.

... and, should any publishing professionals get really excited about my work, I'll gift them a copy of an existing book. That should keep the momentum going for at least a short while.

 

[BrianY]

Just a quick comment - at the conference I am attending this weekend, authors aren't permitted to leave anything larger than a business card with agents or publishers.