My JAMES 516 bookmarks are in!

After hearing Jennifer DeHart Sons (Through the Booking Glass Blog) speak about “swag” at the Houma Jambalaya Writers’ Conference, I researched some online places where I could have bookmarks made. After checking out a couple of them, I settled on Overnight Prints. I threw together a front and back image, uploaded it to their website, requested a thousand copies, paid $62, and then sat back and waited. Five days later, this came in the mail:

My JAMES 516 bookmarks are in!

If anyone is interested in how I made the bookmark, here goes:

I’m no artist, so I have to keep things simple--very simple. For the front of the bookmark, I wanted an obvious sniper logo, since my main character in JAMES 516 is a police sniper, so I dug up a picture of me from sniper training, where I was in a prone position at the range shooting my Accuracy International Model AE sniper rifle chambered in .308 caliber, and realized it would fit the 2 x 6 bookmark size well.

Me during sniper training a few years ago.

Using the “magic wand” tool on Photoshop, I highlighted my silhouette and then used the “fill layer” feature to turn my proned-out body solid white. I then applied the solid white image to a black background, added the cover art, which was done by Trace Edward Zaber, and added my website address. It was that simple.

The finished logo for the front of the bookmark

For the back of the bookmark, I included the title, byline, genre, publisher and ISBN.

The finished logo for the back of the backmark

There you have it . . . 1,000 2 x 6 bookmarks that were easy to make and only cost about $.06 each. As one might imagine, I’m now a big fan of Overnight Prints.

If you like it or dislike it and want to share your thoughts, feel free to do so. This is my first attempt and I’m hoping to get better as I go along . . . of course, I have to hand out 1,000 of these before I can work on another one. :-)

BJ Bourg is the author of JAMES 516 (Amber Quill Press, 2014), THE SEVENTH TAKING (Amber Quill Press, 2015), and HOLLOW CRIB (Five Star-Gale-Cengage, 2016).
 
© 2015 BJ Bourg