Sponsorship Terms

While we are happy to sponsor both small and large events, we might not be able to sponsor your event if there will be very few people present. For example, if you are running a small competition, just for your local club of 6 or 8 people, then we may not be able to provide sponsorship, unless you can demonstrate how your event is helping to develop the HEMA community and move it forwards.

It is always worth getting in touch and asking us, but please be prepared to show how your event meets our aims and objectives for helping the HEMA community to develop.

Please note, however, that you must contact us in advance of the event, ideally at least a month beforehand. If you leave it until the last moment, then we will be unable to help, and will probably resent the sudden burst of activity required to deal with the matter quickly.

Contents

What we may offer to send

Over the last few years, we have offered to send books to events, but we have seen very little return on this investment. Such sponsorship does not seem to lead to further sales, which makes providing sponsorship more of a project of charity than a sensible business plan. Also, as more and more events are approaching us about sponsorship, the burden of providing books without gaining any noticeable sales in return is becoming too onerous for us to continue.

As a result, we now provide discount vouchers, so that there is incentive for people to place orders with us and put some money our way while still benefiting from their prize or award.

Providing physical books

We may still provide books for an event, if the event is sufficiently large and also if you can make a sufficiently good case to show why our investment will have a tangible benefit on a large number of people in the HEMA community. In such a case, we would request that the event budget pays for any postage or shipping costs, and we may also require a greater amount of advertising on our behalf from the event organisers. If the event cannot budget for postage costs, then we cannot sponsor the event with physical items.

Discounts for purchasing books for prizes

If you would like to purchase books to award as prizes at your event, then you are welcome to do so, and of course that means that you are free to do as you want with them once you buy them. If you would like to buy a number of books for prizes, we might be able to offer you a discount on the total price, in exchange for following our terms about advertising and distribution of the awards. Please get in touch with us by email to say that you would like to buy some books for prizes, and we can discuss what sort of discount we can offer you.

Advertising our name and logo

You should put our name (Fallen Rook Publishing), website link (www.fallenrookpublishing.co.uk) and logo on the event website and any social media involved with the event.

You should also download and print a poster to place beside any other sponsorship posters or banners, or on a table where prizes are displayed:

Additionally, both the website link and the logo should be present on any other media about the event where sponsors are mentioned, such as, for example, posters and flyers, or any t-shirts that come with sponsor logos.

Event participants (and potential participants) must be aware of the fact that we are sponsoring the event. Therefore, the event organisers should announce our sponsorship during the course of the event, and also beforehand via email and/or social media.

When sponsored books or vouchers are awarded or otherwise distributed, our organisation’s name should be mentioned, so that people are aware that we are sponsoring the event.

Sample press release

The following piece of text may be used for press releases, announcements in person or on social media, or for describing our company on your website:

Fallen Rook Publishing is a company based in Scotland that has a strong interest in helping the international HEMA community grow and develop, supporting practitioners, instructors and events with scholarly books, facsimiles and reproductions of both historical fencing treatises and contextual history books.

We provide an opportunity for researchers and instructors to develop books, DVDs and other published teaching materials. Since there are very few traditional publishers in the western martial arts community, we intend to help generate more written material of a scholarly nature and to bring more teaching materials to the community at large. By providing editing services for authors, we hope to improve the level of quality in works that would otherwise be self-published.

Our best-selling title to date is the AHA German Longsword Study Guide by Keith Farrell and Alex Bourdas, which has become the default beginner’s guide for many longsword clubs in Europe and North America. It is also an award-winning book, with the authors winning the HEMA Scholar Award for Best Instructor for research published in this book in 2013.

Other popular titles include Scottish Broadsword and British Singlestick by Keith Farrell, Lessons on the Thrust by Reinier van Noort, and our facsimile of Charles Roworth’s The Art of Defence on Foot. Browse our catalogue of publications at https://www.fallenrookpublishing.co.uk

Distribution of sponsorship

When it comes to distributing sponsored books as prizes or rewards, we want to support as many individuals within the community as we can, so we would prefer that no single medal or reward comes with more than one of our books. Therefore, if we sponsor six books for a tournament event, then that would be ideally one book for each of gold, silver and bronze medals in two separate tournaments; alternatively, if we sponsor books for a non-tournament event, perhaps for instructors teaching at the event, then we would prefer to see each instructor go home with one of our books, rather than a single instructor go home with several copies!

We may donate books or vouchers for specific prizes or awards, for example as prizes for technical excellence or sportsmanship, or for an individual who has contributed significant research to the HEMA community over a period of time; awards will not always be solely for tournament winners.

Summary

In summary, we are happy to provide sponsorship for an event, but we do require some advertising and marketing on our behalf, to help raise our profile within the international community, and to bring sales our way to help us continue to afford to be able to offer community sponsorship.