Exhibitors: How to Use Heartland Summer

Join us for Heartland Summer, a creative way to bring our industry together during challenging times.

Here's a how-to overview for our valued exhibitors.

Vision
Heartland Summer is an interactive content generator that offers multiple forms of engagement for your promotions.

We are offering real-time virtual events for booksellers to come together with authors, reps, and session leaders of all kinds. Yet booksellers also have stores to run, so none of our virtual events will live in a vacuum. Each will be recorded, and the content will be pulled out, promoted across all of our platforms, and hosted on your Exhibit Gallery to view any time. Our Exhibit Gallery goes live this month (i.e., as soon as you register to exhibit) and runs through the end of the year.

We're hosting our virtual events on a consistent schedule every other week from June 23 through September. October will feature "grand finale" marquee celebrations and will be announced soon.

Each week of programming will feature two newsletters:

1) Monday Heartland Preview featuring the virtual events happening that week alongside registration links

2) Friday Heartland Review featuring all recorded events, the main take-aways, and title support, such as Edelweiss collections from Rep Picks, links to the authors' books, and ARC request forms

VIEW OUR SCHEDULE HERE

How to Do Heartland Summer
By its very nature, Heartland Summer offers fewer placement opportunities than our in-person show, and we aim to create streamlined content that rises above the noise of the online world and inspires our booksellers to action: attend that event, buy that book, promote that author.

Re: author pitches. We encourage you be judicious with your Heartland Summer promotional choices. Strategize carefully across all of our opportunities and design an approach that works for you.

​1) Pitch strategically because spots are limited. 2) Pitch a culturally representative set of authors. 3) Use the Exhibit Gallery and Rep Picks to promote authors that aren't hosted in our events.

1. Pitch us authors: Pinpoint your most indie-friendly and charismatic authors and pitch them for one of two main events: Meet the Authors ($200) or Marquee Author ($1,000) (see our detailed event descriptions). We are also hosting a grand finale marquee author event called Heartland Book Club ($1,500) and we are taking pitches for this event as well. 

3. Sign up for Rep Picks: Convey the broader scope of your list by applying for a spot in our multiple Rep Picks events from now thorough September ($175)

4. Exhibit Gallery: Host the following content from now through the end of the year ($250)

• All Heartland Summer videos in which you participated
• Heartland show specials
• ARC request forms
• Publisher-chosen featured content
• Links for booksellers to request meetings with reps and publicists

5. Become a Heartland Sponsor: Go beyond a standard exhibit space by becoming sponsoring our show ($1,500)

​Everything listed above plus . . .

• Top placement on exhibits page
• Newsletter featuring your unique content
• Banner on Heartland, MIBA, and GLIBA websites for 1 week
• Ongoing sponsorship acknowledgment in all newsletters

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6. Book additional promotions: Boost your signal even further by featuring your unique sponsored content in the Heartland Preview and the Heartland Review

7. Education: Do you have a strong voice or topic that would lend itself well to an educational session? Please email Larry Law with your idea at larry@gliba.org

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