Susan and John Ruff, Fantasy Authors

With the summer science-fiction/fantasy convention season in full swing, John and I have been playing with new and creative ways to advertise our books. Badge ribbons are always popular and a lot of fun, so we purchased some to give away.

While it’s easy to order the badge ribbons from on-line vendors, it’s a lot harder to choose what to put on them. We wanted something unique to our books that would generate interest (and hopefully questions) when convention-goers saw the ribbons affixed to other people’s badges.

At first, we considered putting our book titles on them, but that seemed a little bland, so we got more creative. John put together the first design, using the name of the village in our cozy fantasy books: Starwatch.

Then we came up with the idea of a ribbon referring to Bullfinch, the mysterious mascot in Recipes for the Copper Snake. A fan club for the little guy sounded like fun. Once again, John designed the ribbon. You can see his design at the top of this post.

The idea of a Bullfinch fan club is so amusing, that I am tempted to create the club and give away autographed (paw-tographed?) pictures of our little furry friend at conventions.

Last year, we tried displaying posters on easels behind our book table, but they did not work well. The pictures on the posters were hard to see, and I kept worrying that I would bump the easels and knock them down. This year we decided to get fancy and ordered a display banner to put behind our book table instead. It rolls into a case for easy transport, and it’s tall enough for people to see over the rest of the table.

Of course, we’ll also have the usual convention swag — bookmarks, business cards, etc.

I guess I would be foolish to spend this post talking all about our book advertising and not include a link to one of our books. In case you’re intrigued about Starwatch or Bullfinch, you can read all about them in Recipes for the Copper Snake.

Talk to you in September!

-Susan 8/7/2026