Want to stir up some online interest in your novel? During a guest stint at the Powell’s Books blog, Kirkus Reviews editor Elaine Szewczyk posted a paper doll (with a costume change) of the character the protagonist of her debut novel, I’m With Stupid, has a one-night stand with, thereby setting the plot in motion. Sure, somebody’s probably done a Flash-y version of this with an entire closet’s worth of clothes, most likely for some bestselling romance author, but we sorta like the lo-tech approach of forcing viewers to print out the images and break out their scissors.
As an alternative, instead of letting your readers just dress your characters, you could get them to create some for you. To keep her mystery series moving forward, Monica Ferris is inviting her fans to invent a boyfriend for protagonist Betsy Devonshire, a “short, plump, intelligent, hard-working, funny, open-minded” church-going woman of independent means with a cat who solves crimes in Minnesota when she’s not running her needlework supply shop. If you can come up with a character description that catches Ferris’s fancy, the potential prizes range from an antique typewriter to a full skein of fuzzy yarn to an autographed galley of her latest book. Crowdsourcing in action!
For a moment, we thought it might be innovative to combine these two ideas, and invite readers to design clothes for a character in a popular series, but then we remembered that comic books from Millie the Model to Dial H for Hero used to use that gimmick constantly. Doesn’t mean it’s still not a fun idea, though: YA publishers, take note!