It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone in the mystery community who knows me that the minute I heard about authors making trading cards – authors Raquel V. Reyes, Daphne Silver, and Nicole Asselin to be specific – I was all in the idea. I made and ordered my own cards in about twenty minutes. Thus, I’ll soon add them to a supply of promo giveaways so endless that it’s earned me the nickname of The Swag Queen. (“Swag” in this case meaning “stuff we all get,” not stylish swagger, of which I have none.)

My heavy lean into swag didn’t start with my career switch from TV writer to mystery author. Dad was a Mad Man, so I was housed and fed on advertising campaigns. But show business is the lodestar of swag. Whether you’re working on a film or TV show, at some point you’ll go home with a gift commemorating the project, usually but not always featuring its logo.

When I worked on Wings, the showrunners also created Frasier, so we’d get these neat buttons at the combined holiday party…

I’ve seen some of these on eBay, leading me to wonder which cast or crew member decided to trade memories for moolah.

Speaking of memories, here are two picture frames that were show gifts. Can you guess which one is from Wings? (The other is a season-ender photo from Just Shoot Me.)

On the rare occasion I go to the beach, I always take this handy bag from Still Standing, which came with a beach towel I can’t find…

Lap blankets are also a popular gift. In the fourteen or so years that my husband has been working at Warner Brothers, the studio has gone through three owners and three names – and we have swag for all of them, as you can see from this artifact commemorating its brief tenure as “Warner Media.” The brown blanket is a particular favorite of mine. Sometimes the studio and/or network will give special gifts to high-level writers. I was lucky enough to score this luxe blanket from CBS. It inspired a plot point in my short story, “Billy Wilder’s Ghost,” (from HOLLYWOOD KILLS: A CRIME ANTHOLOGY) where executives think they’re doing my protagonist a favor by gifting her, a lowly story editor, with a blanket usually reserved for only co-Executive Producers and showrunners. (Spoiler alert: they are not.)

Some clothing items are a hit. I’ve worn this plain but incredibly useful fleece jacket so much it has a hole in it…

Other gifts totally miss the mark. The Wings writers received luxurious bathrobes featuring the Wings logo one year as a holiday gift. Unfortunately, with only three women out of a dozen writers on the staff, no thought was given to size. But it didn’t matter. When the entire twelve of us tried on our robes, we looked less like scribes and more like a coven…

I didn’t keep every swag gift I received. Somewhere in America, there’s someone wearing an item I donated, due to either a housekeeping or bad memories purge. What I’ve kept means something to me, even this crazy, ill-fitting, coven-y bathrobe, which I had to shake the dust off of because I gave it to my husband and he never wears it either. So, if you see a Wings or Frasier pin for sale on eBay, it won’t be mine.

I hope my readers feel the same way about the swag that I give them.

Readers, do you have a particularly memorable item of swag? What’s your favorite author swag?