Why You Should Do Character Cosplay at B2B CyCon 2017
B2B CyCon is coming up in April 2017 and there are so many cool new events this year that I am very excited about! One of those events is the Character Cosplay.
What is the Character Cosplay? Well, authors dress up as one of their main characters (or I suppose you could get someone else you know who embodies that character to dress up as them. Just make sure you have permission to use their photo for the event.) Submit the picture of your character to CyCon for the event. We will have an area reserved with all the authors in their Cosplay and the attendies will vote on the best costume.
It sounds pretty simple, right? But there is so much awesomeness that you can do to promote and expand and make this a great crossover marketing tool.
There is the obvious method of sharing all over social media and asking fans to vote. That is a given. You can also promote it on Goodreads in the communities that are focused on your genre. Send it out to your mailing list and urge them to vote for you. All of this is pretty basic stuff. But I have a couple of great ideas you could also implement.
What about a "Cardboard cutout photo" opportunity? Except instead of a card board cut out, you photo shop fans in the picture with you? The highlight of last Comicon for me, was getting a picture with Ichigo from Bleach. Totally fangirled! (And it wasn't even like it was the guy who voiced Ichigo, it was just some tall kid who totally rocked the costume!)
That would be a great give back to your fans.
But we are also looking at ways to get you new fans, right?
One of the ideas I had was to use your selfie to motivate your fans. Run a contest. Ask your readers to go and vote for your cosplay and then invite them to submit their own cosplay of your character and do a side-by-side of the two of you and have them post to your social media platform of choice (I will be using Instagram.) Assign hashtags for the event and offer a prize for the Cosplayer who gets the most likes. Watch that thing BLOW UP! By having them put it out there on social media, you are no longer just promoting to your following, you are promoting to their following. Get a bunch of authors in your genre to do the same thing and use similar hashtags and all of a sudden, we have thousands of people seeing images of our online convention.
Google Cosplay. There are tons of images out there. Cosplayers LOVE to get their picture taken!
You have now taken the CyCon Cosplay event and crossed it with your social media. Event attendees will be joining your account to see all the fans cosplay. And if the cosplay is super awesome, then people will want to pick your book up. Seriously, as a huge cosplay fan, I cannot tell you how many new animes I have watched (IE: Death Note) video games my husband has played (IE Gods of War) and Comic Books we have gotten interested in all because of Cosplay!
Cosplay is basically Halloween for adults. And it is FUN! If you've ever been to an anime or comic book convention, it is one of the most popular things for fans to do. Why have we not added this to book conventions before now?!
Participating in CyCon's Character Cosplay is a great way to show off how awesome your characters look, and to build intrigue into that character. Get them interested, and they will buy the book.
You can create all that buzz and momentum simply by participating in The Character Cosplay for B2B 2017. Totally worth $5, am I right? Go ahead, add this to your package today!
Until Next Time,
