Selling your event

There are multiple ways to sell an event. Most of all, I recommend using any and all networking resources at your disposal to hype your event. This networking is very dependent on your personal contacts and social skills, so it is very hard for me to write about.

The presentation of your event, however, can be helped.

The first thing you need to work on is knowing your audience. Think about the people you want playing your event and about what type of roles they enjoy. If all they want is to play is a game of modern-day heroes killing zombies with diamond-tipped chainsaws, don’t try and force a psychological drama play on them. It is not going to work. If you cannot find enough players that would fit your event, think about redefining the event in question.

The most common sorts of publicity for this kind of event are posters and websites. Websites will usually also contain information for your established players, but that is cause for another discussion.
The first thing that will grab your player’s eye is the graphic design. If you can get a talented artist to cook up something nice, use it. Make sure the theme of the event is well represented by the design. If you cannot find a talented artist to do it for you, go with a simpler design rather than use a bad one that draws too much attention to itself.

The next thing the audience will notice is the title and the introduction text. In a poster, 3 short lines is the maximum you should put to detail the setting. In a website, you can use the standard 6-line introduction used in most current-day novels. The best guide I ever found to write those introduction lines is available on Will Greenway’s website, The Ring Realms. I could never tell this as well as he does, so I suggest you just follow the link to his own description and examples. Will Greenway is awesome. http://www.ringrealms.com/rrmainindex.php?PAGE=inspiration&SUBPAGE=dfictech_07

At the bottom of the poster or website, you need to put the date, time and location of the event, and your contact information. Make sure that it is easy to read, but mostly out of the way. It’s not there to sell your event: just to inform potential participants who were sold by the rest of your publicity.