Arts in Franklin County? Or How To Promote Your Book?

I took some time out from my day to go up to Greenfield, where a meeting was starting at 10:30 am to promote Franklin County as an arts destination. The room was full of artists, the chamber rep, and other people who run museums and care about the topic…I was invited because I helped start Deerfield Attractions, and manage to get my name in the papers quite a bit.

The conversation was lively, a back and forth dialogue about how much we love our area and how we might promote arts and culture to visitors. The general consensus was that a big part of our solution lay in Facebook. Yep, we were all in agreement that creating a fan page for The Arts in Franklin County was a good way to knit us all together and create more awareness of our diversity and the variety of endeavors we all pursued. The web, ultimately is how we can achieve the kind of recognition and awareness we seek.

At 11:20 am, a familiar face walked in, holding sheaves of papers and bookmarks. She impatiently raised her hand, asking to be allowed to introduce herself, and finally she did. Then she held forth for an uncomfortably long time about her new book and all of the ways she was promoting it. She then proceeded to pass out tw0-page copies of all of the events where we could go and hear more about this book, and then passed us all, unasked, copies of her specially-made bookmark.

I kept thinking, ‘wow’ you have big cahones coming in an hour late and then hijacking the discussion to promote your book. Despite what I felt was an incredible display of rudeness, the meeting was a good start. Now I’ll become a facebook fan of the arts here and pass it along with all my might into the cybersphere.