Trading Spaces

Apparently the new cool thing this year as far as swag goes is trading cards. I first ran into the concept on Twitter a few weeks ago and the more I thought about it, the more I really liked it. I mean, sure, it's a little cheeseball to hand out cards with your character's stats, but the inner geek in me started fangirling almost immediately.

There's a lot of flexibility here - both in the overall design and the details you might want to include on the back. As a reader, I love to collect things like this - just a few more insights into the characters or books I've come to love.  As an author, it gives me a chance to express my vision of my characters in an unrestricted way.

At any rate, the trading card movement (at least for romance) has taken off over at Romance Trading Cards If you're getting cards made up for any of the conventions, be sure to stop by there and upload a few of them and add your name to the list so that readers will know you'll have them. (They are doing several auctions for charity as well, so it's always worth it to have something to go to a good cause.)

As far as getting them made up - I know RTC does have a template you can use, but there are a number of print shops that do it as well, so you're not limited by any means. (I had the artist who did the designs for my website do mine - I love her interpretation and this way it all goes together.)

The only thing to keep in mind is that the cards are small - 2.5 x 3.5 inches, so a little larger than a business card. That can make it difficult design-wise. Too much info and it will get lost. I stuck with fairly simple stuff, myself - just a teaser quote and left it at that. Think I will start out with four designs to start with and add to them as the next book in the Brush of Darkness series continues.

You can see the fronts of all four cards on my website. I'll have the backs up there later this week. :)