Okay, so I’ve blogged before about how I’m trying to get my head in the PR game. With said game in mind, I decided I’d get some postcards printed (both regular size and oversize) to promote my next release, A RED HOT NEW YEAR. On the front of the cards, I wanted to have the image of the book. On the back, I wanted blurb info, contest info, and, well, contact-me info. 🙂 Once I knew what I wanted, the problem became deciding which printing service to use.

I did a bit of online price comparisons, and I discovered that VistaPrint was generally very thrifty–actually, super thrifty. They always seem to be running sales, and you either get discounts or (for the smaller quantities), you can get items for free (provided you pay shipping and upload fees–but you generally only upload your image one time, and after that, well, you’re just paying shipping if you make additional orders.)

Based on their prices, I decided to get my feet wet with VistaPrint. I spent an hour on August 1st designing and uploading my postcard info (and, yep, I did this myself, no help from the techno savvy Nick). The instructions were very easy to follow, and when I made a mistake (cuz, yeah, you knew I would!), it was an easy enough matter to go back and fix my bumble.

I ordered my postcards (not too many–I wanted to see what the print quality was like before I dove all the way into this print company), and today (even though I selected the slowest delivery option), I got my postcards.

The result: Very satisfied. Actually, I love the cards! And, since I’m planning to send out cards like this to several upcoming romance writers’/readers’ conferences, I’m gonna definitely order more. (Then I’ll autograph those babies.) Now, as an experiment, I did the cards in two different styles–basically bleed and no bleed (um, in one, the image goes all the way to the edge of the card, and in the other, a small white box/line skirts the edge of the image). Again, I’m pleased with both images–like ’em a lot; however, I think I may be more partial to the image that goes straight to the edge of the card. But that’s just me (or, heck, maybe I just like the oversize cards more b/c they look more realistically–in terms of size, anyway–like a book, or at least the front of a book.)

So, if you’re a writer looking to produce some promotional materials on a budget, then I would most heartily recommend the magical, not-so-mysterious VistaPrint.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 9th, 2007 at 10:05 pm and is filed under Romance. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.