One of the busiest groups I’m on in Yahoo is the Love Romances Cafe group, which seems to have a million members. (I won’t link directly because it is an adults-only group. Check out their blog instead.) There is always a party going on. It’s probably one of the best free marketing tools this lazy person has ever found, for its weekly and monthly promo and excerpt days, which I know have brought me sales. It is also one of the friendliest ways to meet up with authors in every sub-genre of romance.
They have swag and book giveaway contests all the time. I won one last week. I rarely win things like this.
The first prize arrived a few days ago: an e-book copy of Ari Thatcher’s The Substitute Stripper, which I am looking forward to reading (since racy contemporary is a genre I want to get into.) Thank you, Ari!
The owner of the group, Dawn Roberto, emailed to let me know the box of goodies had shipped. I got it yesterday. Thank you, Dawn!
Figure 1: This is what it looked like after a quick box-opener swipe. 
Figure 3: Now I have a floor of goodies. This is hilarious and awe-inspiring and a little bittersweet. Look at this stuff! I have business cards, flyers, suggestive Do-No-Disturb signs, chits for free ebooks, fridge magnets, large and small trading cards, mousepads, a coffee cup, a can cooler, a T-shirt, stretch bracelets, three flashlights (one of which is going to become my leather and brass Steampunk Flash Wand, thank you Jupiter Gardens Press!), almost a hundred bookmarks, books on CD, letter openers, an anti-vampire kit, some gorgeous pens and pencils, press-on tattoos, a calculator, a ruler and a tape measure for judging male endowments, notepads, biscotti, mints, lip gloss, and edible body lotion (chocolate!). I may have left off listing something. Forgive my spinning head.
Some are from names I know in the romance genres, and many I don’t know – yet. Many items are signed. I’m going to have fun working my way through and checking out books from all the authors.
It’s wonderful to behold. I feel like I’ve gone to an RWA national meeting or a Romantic Times conference, without the jet lag, the sore feet, and hotel food.
It’s also bittersweet because the jury is out on whether this stuff works well as author advertising. Swag is one of the birthrights of convention attendance. (I still have Farscape buttons from the 1999 NASFiC, so there). Swag is often promoted for self-published, vanity-published, and small-press-published authors who may not have access to a large promo budget.
But even back in 2011, I heard rumbles at a local writers meeting that swag wasn’t measuring up, that designing, buying, and distributing it only generated a small percentage of buy-through leads. It’s here to stay as long as people are magpies about souvenirs, but I’ll weigh the pros and cons of generating my own swag very carefully.
In the meantime, I have a lot of new authors to research!
So glad you enjoyed your goodie box. 🙂