Seven Things

The Zeroth Rule

Get Someone Else To Proof Read It

Get at least one other person, who can double-check the details, to proof-read it. It is very common to have typos, and not unknown to get the dates wrong (having the convention from Thursday to Saturday instead of Friday to Sunday by looking at the wrong year on the calendar when checking the dates). Misspelling your Guests names is not a good idea (I very nearly sent out a set of ads for a major convention with our internationally famous Guest of Honour's name misspelled! It was only because I happened to show it to someone else and they said, "Are you sure that's how <insert name of guest here!> spells his name?" and of course it wasn't!)

A good general rule is: if your reputation depends on it, have at least three sets of eyes look at it, and 4 or 5 is not at all unreasonable.

The Seven Things to Make Sure Are On Your Poster/Flyer/PR/Ad/Publication

In no particular order ...

The name of the convention

Pretty obvious you'd think ... but if the person laying out the text assumes the name will be in the logo graphic and that changes (or the one that shows up is missing the text) then it can happen.

The dates of the convention

The dates of the convention (in a format that will be understood internationally. Don't put 04-08-12 since to the US that is the eighth of April 2012 and to Europeans it is the fourth of August. It could be worse 04/06/08 could be the 4th of June 2008, the 6th of April 2008 or even (possibly in Japan) the 12th of August 2004!

The general rule here is: Spell out the month. "23-25 October 2009" is better, and "Fri, 23-Oct - Sun, 25-Oct, 2009" is perfect.

The location of the convention

If you are allowing people to join "at the door", make sure that the name/location of the hotel/convention centre/student union or whatever site you're using is precise enough so that people will be able to find it. In these days of GoogleMaps, give a physical street address, and make sure online mapping programs can locate it.

Contact details for the convention

The contact details for the convention (Address, Phone, Fax, E-mail, Web, etc.)

Make sure it is obvious which address is the contact address and which address is the location of the convention! (Not a common error, but worth double-checking)

The Guests (if any)

And spell their names correctly (consider adding why they are guests (e.g. "Played Captain Kirk in the TV series Star Trek")

The type of convention

e.g. Science Fiction, Star Trek, X-Files, Humor in Science Fiction

The membership rates

If these change often, you can put in a line saying "please write for details" instead. See Tips below)

Another Seven Things ...

Major programme items that will draw people

E.g. Magic-the Gathering World Tournament, Writing for Star Trek workshop, Paul Darrow and William Shatner performing Shakespeare...

Other things at the con or in the area that may draw people

E.g. just one mile from Disneyland, world firework competition outside the hotel on Saturday night, total eclipse of the sun (indoors if wet), free beer from the brewery next door...

Pretty pictures/graphics

There are a *lot* of conventions, and unless you're only distributing your flyers directly to your intended audience, you need to catch the eye of the people who will end up joining your convention.

If you're running a Doctor Who convention, put a large piece of text or a large graphic saying DOCTOR WHO (perhaps the diamond shaped logo) on your flyer (both sides if it is double-sided, because it may be the wrong side up when a potential member glances at it!)

Color

Colour printing is still more expensive, but using a bright/unique colour for the paper for your flyer is a cheap alternative and will help it stand out from all the other flyers.

The names of the committee

This is only useful if a) they are a reasonably well-known bunch of people (to that particular fandom) and have a reputation for running good conventions, or b) if they have enough friends that will look at the poster and say "golly, Bob Smith is on the committee. I guess I'll have to join since he's a good friend and I should support him in his endeavours!" (this second reason does happen more often than you just thought!)

The Theme

If you are running a Star Wars convention, but decide that the special emphasis will be on the fact that most of the bad guys wear masks and you can see the faces of most of the good guys (yeah, I know R2D2 is a major exception to this theory...) then you could put your theme on your flyer since that may intrigue some people and cause them to join up because it sounds interesting to them.

The charities that the profits surplus will be going to

It might be just enough to tip the balance for someone deciding whether to go when they see that the convention is raising money for Audio Books for the Blind, or Climate Change Awareness.

Other Tips and Suggestions

Tear Off Slips

If you are putting a tear-off form/slip on your flyer, make sure that the address/dates/etc for the convention are on the piece the person retains (the information can be on the tear-off slip as well, but once it has been posted off, that won't be any help to the attendee). If you are printing double-sided flyers make sure the information on the back side of the tear-off slip is not important!

Paper Sizes

The US uses paper sizes such as Legal and Letter, most of the rest of the world uses sizes such as A4 and A5. Consider the different paper sizes when designing an ad to go into a publication produced in a different country, or when generating masters that will be printed in the foreign country.

One common sticking point is that the A-sized paper uses a special property of the size so that when you fold a piece of A4 paper in half it becomes two pages of A5 stuck together, but the ratio of height to width remains the same. So you can design at A4, then just scale the page down to 70% (actually 1/sqrt(2) but 70% is close enough) and it fits perfectly on A5. This is not true for American paper sizes. If you produce something that fits on Letter paper and are then targetting a page size of Letter folded in half, it will look wrong (the margins will be off)

Therefore if you are designing an ad for use on European paper sizes, you can just design it once and enlarge/reduce it as necessary (with the obvious caveat that you need to be able to read the small type!) But US paper sizes don't work the same way so if you reduce a Letter sized flyer to put in a programme book that is Letter folded in half in size, it won't fit properly. (The long dimension is longer, in proportion to the shorter edge) So you must be more aware of what size ad/flyer you are producing if it is going into a US publication.

Standard Flyer Layout

One of the most common layouts for a double-sided flyer is to have the large logo, convention name and the rest of the Seven Things listed above on one side, and to have a much wordier reverse side to give all the details you think will get people to join.

Style Tips

If you are laying out your flyer/poster/ad on a computer with 50 million fonts, and all sorts of neat graduated fill patterns and three-dimensional special effects, remember two things.

1. Victorian Music Hall posters used dozens of fonts, and unless you are deliberately trying to look like that for a special effect, it is much better to stick to a small number of fonts, weights and sizes (e.g. maybe two different typefaces (one for headings and one for body text) in two or three sizes (heirarchy of headings perhaps), with perhaps bold used for emphasis, if necessary)
2. How are you going (or someone else) going to print these flyers/posters/ads?

If it is photocopy (as quite a lot is nowadays) then complex fonts, graduated fills, light drop shadows, and pretty colours on the screen are going to reproduce as muddy clumps on paper. If you're not sure how it will look, print it off and fax it to yourself (or photocopy a photocopy of a photocopy of the ad) and see how it looks. Your master print from your expensive postscript laser, if you don't plan ahead, by the time it is copied and perhaps the size changed to fit the programme book page and that pasted-up copy is photocopied for the masters for the print run which is then copied to produce the programme book, will look like absolute rubbish! It's always best to provide an electronic form of the ad if possible.

It is better to have far too many copies of a flyer than not enough

Flyers and posters are useless unless they are where the appropriate people are going to see them. Make sure that you get plenty to all the relevant conventions, book shops, fan clubs and organisations, local libraries and schools, university SF groups etc. and have the flyers in or distributed with the publications for other similar conventions (you can usually do a reciprocal deal where you send out their flyers in your publications in exchange so it will cost you little or nothing in money terms and may increase goodwill between your groups thereby getting you more members, volunteers and advice)

If your convention membership rates rise as time goes by

E.g. if they stay at 30 dollars until one year before the convention, 35 dollars until six months before the convention, 40 dollars until one month before the convention and then 50 dollars at the door) then make it clear on the flyer/poster/ad what the current rate is, and if you can, when the rate changes; and what it will be over time, so that your flyers don't go out of date (and have to be thrown away and new ones printed with the new rate)

Of course you may not know what the new rates will be so you will have to put in a sentence like "30 dollars until December 31st 2009, for rates after that date send a letter/email to the address below"

Seven Things NOT To Do!!

Dozens of addresses for each department at your convention

One address to rule them all, and on the flyer find them ...

Copyright material

If you haven't either

a) received permission to do so or

b) confidence that use of a copyrighted logo/photograph will be ok because it is good publicity for the show/company in question and they haven't objected in the past

or c) a good lawyer!

Anything libellous, pornographic, racist or otherwise objectionable

This is supposed to be good publicity! If you a doing a humorous convention and have a flyer saying "Join our convention or we shoot another puppy" and have a picture of a cute puppy with big soulful eyes then that is probably just about ok, having a picture of a dead puppy is just sick and you need treatment. (NOT a real example!)

Anything ridiculing another fandom

While it might be funny to put on your flyer "Sad? Lonely? No friends? No social life? Unable to wash? Then join The Plan-9 Fanclub! If you don't fit the previous description then A-Team fandom wants YOU!" (again, not a real example) We each have our own interests and hobbies, but from outside SF fandom in general, we are all regarded as Star Trek fans and UFO nuts and the last thing we would want to do is to give them more ammunition to deride and disparage Science Fiction in general and our own sub-genres in particular.

Free beer for everyone!

(Even if it is true!) because a) you get a crowd of non-fans descending on your con just to drink all the beer, get drunk and cause trouble and b) there are laws about serving alcohol to minors and, depending on which country you're in, there may be other legal problems with licencing or with providing alcohol to someone who is already inebriated. I know that your people would be very careful about this, but it only takes one mistake and you can end up legally liable.

Kill Inigo Montoya's Father

Well, you'd probably guessed that one already, but I couldn't think of a seventh thing not to do... hang on... I know. The 7th thing not to do in your PR is to say that there will be a list of 7 things when you can only think of six!