Simple, Easy, Effective, and Free

We’ve been talking a lot about promotion lately. We’ve touched on websites, giveaways, book tours, and social networking of all kinds. But all these things involve work, and most also take money. That’s no reason to skip doing them, of course, and I highly recommend doing all of them. But there’s also a form of promotion that’s simple in format, easy to set up, extremely effective, and 100-percent free. Even better, it’s available to everyone with an email address, and it allows you to reach everyone you ever send an email to. If you belong to any discussion lists, such as Yahoo groups, that can be a lot of people.

What am I talking about? Signature lines―the running footers on emails. Called sig lines for short, they can be set up to provide anything from just your name to a full résumé of your accomplishments. Some even present elaborate pieces of “artwork.” Who hasn’t gotten an email with a three-inch-tall slash-and-caret angel at the bottom?

I use a number of sig lines, a different one for each of my email addresses, each of which serves a different purpose. For my business email, I have a block signature consisting of five lines: my full name and the name of my business, what I do (in my case, “manuscript editing and production”), my business website address, my business email address (yes, it’s up in the header, but not everyone realizes that), and my business phone number. Does that sound like a business card? You got it! Whenever I send a business email, this “electronic business card” goes with it, much the way I drop paper business cards into envelopes before sending things by snail mail. If my email is saved, my contact information is always just a mouse click away.

While I’m more modest with my personal email, I also don’t let any opportunities slip by. I don’t clutter it up with a full business card of information, but I do present my business website address and the address to reach this blog. Since the sig line can be easily edited, I can reverse the order of those two lines or delete one or both, depending on who the recipient is.

For my writing-related email, I don’t use my name at all. Instead, I have a motto: “Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality.” This quote from Jules de Gaultier just struck my fancy one day. But while I love that quote and use it in other places, too, I hope I’ll be changing my writing sig line in the very near future. I’m thinking of something along the lines of:

Elaine Will Sparber
www.womenofmystery.net
SPEAKING OF MURDER, Hotsy Totsy Press (coming to bookstores tomorrow)

Sounds good to me!