The Black Widow Calling Card is a green rectangular card with a black widow on the front and red lip prints on the back. It is Jill’s official calling card, which she leaves at each crime scene.
Replicas of the Black Widow Calling Card can be found for free around the Seattle area, in promotion for Jill‘s upcoming release and is intended to be used as a bookmark.
There is no text on the card. Schultz considered putting information such as the title, release date and website to help steer attention towards the book; however, he decided that any text will render the calling card inauthentic. The idea behind the calling cards is to have someone type its descriptions into a search engine and have the search results direct them to further information about the book. Schultz explains:
“My main agenda is to have a cool souvenir right out of the book. This is a first for one of my stories and I don’t want to contaminate this cool milestone by pushing the product. In the book, there is no text on the calling card, so why should these bookmarks have any text? The promotional value that these bookmarks/calling-cards have is secondary to me. It’s less fun to advertise it and more fun to steer people in the direction, allowing their interest to tell them about the book—their own curiosity luring them to my novel… my web.”
