Lots of publishers add their Event Grids to Edelweiss, providing an interactive way to collect event proposals / bids for their touring authors. Basically, you can provide a list of your touring authors, including their tentative tour stops and any other information you would like to provide. Your accounts can submit their proposals based on the information you’ve provided, as well as the publisher-generated title information…all that rich bibliographic content found in all your Edelweiss title entries. You’ll see each account’s General Event Profile, and their specific “event proposal” for each author. Bookstores, libraries, festivals, radio shows, etc. all use the Event Grids in Edelweiss to request author appearances.
Note that you need to have a full Edelweiss catalog subscription or Independent Publisher Listing to use Event Grids. Contact sales@abovethetreeline.com for details.
Here’s how to set them up!
The first step is to create a catalog or a collection listing all the titles you’d like included in an Event Grid. Then, click on your profile picture or initials in the top right corner of any Edelweiss page, then Your Profile and Account. To manage grids, you’ll need to be sure your account has Publicity Admin privileges, as shown below.
Click Administration to get to the administration pages (or follow this link once you’re logged in: https://admin.edelweiss.plus/)
On the general Administration page, click Administer under the Event Grids dropdown:
Click New Campaign. Here, you can name your grid, provide a brief description, decide which venues your grids will be available to, add a due date (the date after which your grids will be closed for all users), and choose the catalog or collection you’d like the grid to be related to.
Once saved, scroll down to this new grid and click the “tools” icon to edit the grid… this re-opens the screen shown above.
Click the Upload button to import a spreadsheet with tour details. In the screen that pops up, it’s easiest to “Click here to export current event grid in Excel” to quickly create a spreadsheet of all the titles in your grid in the format required for upload.
Once you’ve added your tour details to the spreadsheet, upload the file to add all of that information to your grid! Be sure to match the sample grid’s format and be sure your file is in .xls format without any special characters in the file name.
You can also go to your Event Grids page (click the Edelweiss icon at the top to get back to Edelweiss proper), to edit your grids title-by-title if that’s more your thing:
Click the name of your grid to enter it:
There, you can edit the Tour Information manually for each title:
Once completed, you can share this grid with your accounts. Go back to the Administration page, find that grid in the list, and click the Share icon here:
This will make the Event Grid visible for all users that you and your reps have granted access. Learn more about granting Event Grid access to accounts here. You’ll likely want to send an email to your contacts (outside of Edelweiss) to let them know that your grid is ready for their requests, along with whatever other pertinent information you generally like to provide. You may wish to provide a link to help documents that explain Event Grid use from their perspective. Those can be found here!
See details about working with these requests once your grid’s deadline has passed here. You will then simply go through the event proposals to find and schedule the most promising events.
It’s up to you how you’d like to communicate with your accounts. A best practice is to respond to each account who submitted a request and let them know the status… yay or nay. This is, of course, up to you, and something that is not done through Edelweiss.
Once an Event Grid is “Closed,” or the Due Date has passed, you can Archive it to clean up your view. You’ll want to wait until your team is finished working on it, of course!
Watch a video on the process of loading an event grid: