Book Progress

The book has now been updated for all the pub changes that have recently happened, and is now completely up to date. It covers 300 pubs and bars and has photos for lots of them.

A mate, who works as a computer games artist, has almost finished making 9 maps for the book. They look fantastic, really professional.

I've been pursuing people for sponsorship and advertising. Out of about 160 letters I sent out (most with a colour print of the draft cover, attached) I only got 1 response! Really disappointing considering I spent ages getting the wording right, carefully selected businesses that I thought the book would appeal to and mainly targetting businesses who already pay for advertising in other Brighton publications (Whats On, The Source, etc). Luckily the 1 has now been confirmed after 2 meetings and will be paying for £xxx worth of advertising! Fantastic!

The book is still being considered by both Harveys Brewery and CAMRA for sponsorship/advertising. Also, a friend's company, which deals with small businesses, including hospitality, is considering advertising in it as well!

I am still pursuing my list of 160 possible advertisers with phone calls and some of them sound interested, but usually its a "send me more information by email" and then I hear nothing. I'm going to keep going with these, as basically the publication of the book is now going ahead, thanks to xxxxxx, so any more advertisers are just going to help.

To be honest its harder than I expected. The book is the ideal place for a number of businesses to advertise, and I'm undercutting the competition in terms of prices. I would have bet real money that Brighton night clubs would want to advertise in it. And casinos, curry houses, etc. After all it is very possible that the book will be in the hand of groups of guys with packed evenings in mind and wallets full of cash....

Otherwise I have 1 major task - preparing the book for printing. This is hard when you have never done it before. I am especially struggling with the cover. The printing company wants me to make a whole cover file (back/spine/front) in one image. This is really difficult, as it has to be the right dimensions, I am dealing with complex images (lots of pub pictures) and its basically a headache.

Then once its printed and I get over the excitement of holding a copy in my hand, I move on to the challenge of retail.....