Publicity
image by CannedTuna
Author interviews are very much on my mind these days from two perspectives: as the interviewer and as the interviewee.
As the interviewee, I’m talking a lot these days about my novel GIRL IN DISGUISE, coming out in paperback Tuesday, March 6. A paperback launch doesn’t involve as much publicity and marketing as a hardcover launch, at least in my case, but it does involve interviews. Which is great for me! I love interviews.
I also have a major interviewing project underway where I’m talking to authors about their novels, not mine. Each day in March, in honor of Women’s History Month, I’m posting an interview on my blog with an author whose work is inspired by amazing women in history. 31 interviews is, well, a lot of interviews. (The #womenshistoryreads project may even extend into April — I keep thinking of more authors I want to include, and they keep saying yes!)
Plus I’m now doing author interviews for the Chicago Review of Books, like this one with Leslie Pietrzyk, whose riveting, evocative novel SILVER GIRL just came out last week.
So that’s my situation. What about yours? If you’re an author, should you care about author interviews, from either side of the table? If you’re an avid reader and blogger, should you conduct them?
Here are a few lessons learned from my recent experiences, both asking questions and giving answers.
They’re almost always a good idea. Sure, there are counterexamples. If you’re an author, giving a very long interview to a website with very little reach may not be worth your time. You can always say no. But as an effort-to-yield undertaking, in general, interviews are great. So many readers turn to the internet as a way to connect with writers whose work they admire or enjoy. Your interview will be there when they do. Reviews are good too, but I’d rather interview a fellow writer than review their work. A review implies evaluation of the work, determining whether or not it’s worth someone’s time. Interviews provide a lot of information without judgment. That’s great for writers and readers alike.
If you do them, E-mail is easiest. Is it great to have the back-and-forth of talking to someone live? Yes. Is it worth the hassle of transcribing, trying to capture spoken words and get them precisely right, to get that energy?
Read More
Image: Procter & Gamble, Business Wire, the 2017 Times Square holiday restrooms, a promotion for Charmin. The line too small to read in this image is: “The best seats on Broadway.”
This “media opportunity alert” arrived in my inbox:
Hi, Porter, Thought you might have interest in checking out this event spotlighting Mark Ballas and girlfriend BC Jean.
The singer-songwriter duo has teamed up with Charmin for the December celebration of restrooms in Times Square–an entire storefront of unique, unforgettable, state-of-the-art bathrooms free to the public (timely for the holiday season in NYC).
On December 19th, Jean and Ballas will perform singing and dance routines on-site.
Happy to have you there for a front row seat/interview with BC and Mark.
Please let me know if you’re interested?
I wrote back:
Hi, Nadia, I cover the international book publishing industry. Despite what many may think of books these days, our publishers do not believe we’re talking about toilet paper. Yet. Thanks, though.
With the help of AdWeek, I’ve learned that from 2006 to 2010, Charmin rented space in which to create bathrooms for seasonal shoppers in Times Square. It has revived this holiday tradition this year at 1601 Broadway between 48th and 49th Streets with 14 “themed bathrooms” open 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. for shoppers, through December 24.
The first thing we learn here is that if you work for a toilet paper company, you’d better love bathroom jokes. This is Procter & Gamble at work, squeezing the Charmin for every last available pun. All’s fair in love and advertising.
But the second thing we learn here–and the reason I’m subjecting you to this plumber’s view of American marketing–is how a publicity person/PR agent should not be operating. If you’ve got a publicist for your books or are thinking of hiring one, you need to know what this dynamic looks like from the journalist’s side of the stall door.
My provocation for you today comes in the form of three questions with which to quiz your publicity person.
Read More
One of the things I am most grateful for in my post-writing-life adventure of running a small but busy literary PR agency is the wonderfully talented team that makes it all possible. Their creativity, insights, storytelling acumen and dedication are a gift to all those who work with them. Today I’m filled with pride and gratitude as I introduce Emily Adams, of my firm, who crafted this post based on her spot-on observations of certain industry trends and is a strong emerging voice in the business-of-writing conversation. Take it away, Emily!
There’s a lot of uncertainty when it comes to shelling out for a publicist. Don’t get us wrong, we’re firm believers in the power of publicity! But if you hire a good publicist, they will be the first to tell you that there are no guarantees where media attention is concerned. News cycles can change in the blink of an eye, which means that even if you want everyone to be looking at your book, no matter how good it is or how well it is being pitched, the media may have their eyes glued to the president’s latest gaffe, a major celebrity divorce, or what Stephen King just tweeted. Throw a new Ann Patchett novel into the mix and it’s absolute madness.
Because of the relatively high uncertainty factor, we get a bevy of questions from authors who retain our services. Most are new to hiring PR professionals and so, understandably, they look for ways to understand what we’re doing and to gauge and track our progress.
A vast majority of the questions we receive revolve around who we are pitching. This is a sensible question — you can’t get your book into the hands of a reviewer unless that reviewer is pitched. We even hold a call with our authors to determine what their “wish list” is — combing through outlets and contacts they’d like to make sure we include in their press lists.
But there’s one question we rarely hear, and as PR insiders, we think of it as the magic question — the litmus test
Read More
image by Damian Kliman
Writing is work. And for some lucky writers, it becomes a profession, a way to trade words for dollars to make a living. Freelance writers often work by the mantra Never write for free — it tends to lower the amount that publications and sites are willing to pay for content, and it takes time away from paid writing, so the prevailing wisdom is to steer clear.
Yet for those of us who are less established, writing for free is sometimes a temptation and sometimes even a necessity. I’m not willing to give the blanket advice of “Sure, writing for free is no problem!” but here are two cases where it makes sense and two where it doesn’t.
Personally, I find myself writing for free:
When it’s social media. If I’m putting words into my computer that other people are going to read, to me, that’s writing. So I count Twitter and Facebook as writing I do for free. I was on a panel recently with several other authors, and when the conversation turned to social media, they each said they didn’t find social media worth their time. Which is fine! It’s a choice. I choose to use it to connect with readers and other authors, but I’m always mindful that this is writing time, and I’m using it to further my professional goals (while, of course, having some fun).
When I’m expanding my reach. At this point, I’m primarily a novelist, not an essayist, and no one’s going to mistake me for Meghan Daum or Roxane Gay. Pitching essays to highly competitive magazines or websites is both time-consuming and low-yield — it can take two months to hear a no, and it’s almost always no, if I even hear back at all. (Queriers, sound familiar?) So I’m building a portfolio with outlets that pay less, or even nothing, as long as they reach the audience I’m trying to reach.
Read More
Are you an author? Is your book about to be published? Are you wondering how to promote your book?
Please welcome twenty-year veteran of the publishing industry Claire McKinney to Writer Unboxed today!
Claire has worked for major publishers, including Little, Brown and Company, Putnam, and Disney Publishing, and is now the author of a new book for writers called Do You Know What a Book Publicist Does? A Guide for Creating Your Own Campaigns. It’s chockfull of insights, and is so grabby that Therese consumed it in one sitting. Trust us: This book is jam-packed with good ideas. More about it:
Over the years, Claire McKinney has found that the lack of information on how book promotion works has left most authors in the dark, without a clear idea of how they can contribute to their own campaigns. In her book, she opens a window into the world of media relations and publicity so that authors will learn:
How to promote your book to the media
How to create your own media contact list
How to write press materials and how to use them
How to create a timeline and plan a campaign on your own
How to pitch, who to pitch to, and when
How to talk to your publisher about publicity
Claire has appeared as an expert on self-publishing on CSPAN and the Today Show. She travels regularly to speak to authors and audiences about book promotion, publishing, and social media marketing. We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from her book with you today.
Learn more about Claire and her book on her website, and follow her on Twitter.
Planning Your Publicity Timeline: When to Publish
When you start a campaign and when you publish used to be very critical. it still is for some books, but not for all. Prior to the time of blockbuster publishing, books that were released were “launched.” Publishers used to have nice parties, and reviews and press were timed to the book’s arrival in stores. Although the amount of books published has increased over time, the actual publishing of them has mellowed. Publishers don’t have the money for big shindigs every month, and for some titles it is possible to get media attention beyond the first few months of publication. The basics of timing for publication can be determined with some parameters.
Here’s a trade secret: no one, not even the big publishers, know exactly when to publish a book. Yes, there are some givens, like making sure you are able to get into holiday and other specialty promotions like Christmas, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, etc. Then there are books by authors that consumers are trained to buy in a certain month based on its availability. I’m talking about Michael Connelly, James Patterson, and others who write at least one book per year. Publishers also consider the competition for shelf space and marketing and publicity opportunities. I should also mention the reason a book is usually published on a certain date is because of marketing and publicity reasons. We try to get books out there when they will be featured most prominently and when the media are […]
Read MoreSeeing your book on the silver screen: it’s a universal dream, one that nearly every novelist I’ve worked with has confided that they harbor. Barely a day goes by when an author does not ask me whether I have any Hollywood connections who could help them get a foot in the door.
Sure, I have some loose contacts in “The Industry.” A screenplay writer here, a director there, a financial VP. But that doesn’t mean I can slip someone a manuscript and open doors. Far from it. In fact, how and why certain books get made into movies is a complete mystery to me — as it is to so many others.
Which is why, when I recently met the co-founder and president of production and acquisitions at an L.A. production company associated with Showtime Networks, CBS Films and Netflix over a conversation about a book he was considering making into a movie, I asked if he’d talk me through the process of how, exactly, novels are discovered by the film industry.
I’m delighted that he’s agreed to do so “on the air” here at Writer Unboxed. A warm welcome to Brett Tomberlin of Imagination Design Works (IDW).
Q: In general, where do the ideas for the movies you decide to produce come from?
BT: In most cases scripts come to us though attorneys or agents. Since there are so many lawsuits, you have to be super careful in Hollywood to only take material from an attorney, a manager or an agent with all the legal bases in place.
Sometimes people come in without a script but with a concept. These are usually people we know and have worked with. We know their track record and their capabilities, so we’ll talk to them.
And we do get people coming to us with books. As long as the book is published – whether traditionally or self-published – we can look at it because its publication is a time stamp showing it’s been released out into the public. Legally, this works for us.
Q: About how many of the ideas you get come from books?
Read More
Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody.
Wow, you’ve been asked to read a piece of your writing! In PUBLIC! This is a great opportunity to connect with new readers and your fellow authors, to say nothing of stroking your fragile ego and emotional neediness. Here’s how you can wow your audience and win new readers and maybe even get laid.
Before the Reading
Take the Stage
Deep down inside we writers know that those pie-in-the-sky dreams we all harbor of getting our books reviewed by the New York Times, or featured in Oprah Magazine or on NPR’s Fresh Air are, for the most part, just that: pie-in-the-sky-dreams. A few years back here on Writer Unboxed I gave a glimpse of why.
But let’s fess up: somewhere even deeper down inside, right next to the ache in our heart we’ve been trying to assuage throughout years of solitary drafting, querying and facing the sting of rejection over and over again, is a dense nugget of hope that those pie-in-the-sky dreams will come true. After all, the the New York Times does review a good handful of books. We tell ourselves silently, “one of them could – and should – be mine.”
In my work with authors, I hear this wish articulated over and over again. And I want nothing more than for that wish to come true. When it does — whether we’ve landed a story for one of our authors in The Washington Post or a feature on BuzzFeed, or firmed up an interview with NPR or MSNBC — my team and I text each other in excitement. We stop everything to watch or listen to the interview live. In part, our excitement reflects the fact that this type of high level coverage is painfully rare.
You might think that if you don’t make it to that level of coverage, you’ve failed. That your publisher or publicist has failed. As Kathy Sherbrooke, author of the exquisite debut Fill the Sky recently said to me, “We tend to associate success with what we see “regularly,” i.e., in the major press outlets that we frequent: major newspaper reviews, coverage in significant trade publications and TV interviews.”
Read More
Image – iStockphoto: Celafon
Suiting Up for the Attention Economy
From time to time–many journalists know this moment—it feels as if several stories or trends you’ve been covering (or trying to dodge) start locking into place in some sort of shape or design or purpose. Call it “news relationship syndrome.”
This happened for me at the beginning of the month, and it brought together:
In Berlin, Michael Tamblyn of Kobo had introduced the idea of a “fifth wave” in book retail, and this is something that Jane Friedman and I wrote about in the May 3 edition of The Hot Sheet, our newsletter for authors. Tamblyn was concerned that industry players today might be breathing a sigh of relief and thinking that the digital scare has passed, that they can just “get back to publishing and making books without having to worry about the industry remaking itself.”
Tamblyn describe four historical “waves” of publishing retail:
And then he dropped his bombshell: “The fifth wave,” he said, “isn’t a format shift. And it isn’t a change in where books are sold or distributed. It isn’t subscription vs. single-title sale. It isn’t about how much a book gets sold for at all. Instead, it is the commodification and commercialization of attention.”
Welcome to the wars of attention.
And as we trundle out onto this unholy, “unpresidented” battlefield, I want you to think about this brilliant phrase that Tamblyn lobbed at us like a mic-drop: “It is an arms race of monetized attention.”
The mechanized (algorithmic) warfare around you is being waged by Netflix, Amazon Studios, HBO, Hulu, Showtime, everything on your Roku. Have you heard any of your fellow author-soldiers talk of wanting to get into the miniseries content armies? I have: at London Book Fair, when I spoke on a panel in the Author HQ program in March, the writers in the audience wanted to know about Hollywood. And Hollywood is trying to capture your reader’s attention as a prisoner of war.
“It is about the fight for time,” Tamblyn said. And it’s too easy, he said, to shrug and say that books have always “jockeyed with TV and movies and magazines and newspapers for people’s time.
“Now we live in an attention economy,” he said, in which thousands of companies “have a very clear sense of what people’s time is worth.” In other words, what they can charge for your attention, “what they would like […]
Read More
Photo by Tormod Ulsberg, Flickr’s CC
Please welcome Deanna Cabinian as our guest today. Deanna is a marketing director who lives in the Midwest, but dreams of living by the ocean. When she isn’t working or writing she enjoys traveling and spending time with her husband and their Havanese dog, Cuba. One Night, her debut YA novel, is out now.
Giving author talks is important not only in terms of promoting books, but also good life experience to have. As an author I figure any experience that pushes me out of my comfort zone a bit is potentially good fodder for my novels.
Connect with Deanna on her blog, on Facebook, and on Twitter.
How to Prepare for a TED-style Author Talk in Less Than 10 days
When an event organizer contacted me to fill in for a last-minute cancellation who was supposed to give a TED-style author talk as part of a weeklong writing festival at a local high school I panicked. There was no way I could pull off a talk like that in less than 10 days. That was the sort of thing that took months to prepare for, possibly a year. I was worried because this would be the largest crowd I’d ever addressed. There would be at least 200 people in attendance but there could be up to 500. Plus I had to be onstage for 35-40 minutes. Since the crowd would be made up of high school students the odds were good that I’d connect with some of my target audience there: teens who love John Green novels. Even though the thought of this speaking opportunity scared me, I knew in my heart that I had to do it. What I did to pull it off and how you can, too:
Watch other TED talks for inspiration. Understand your talk probably won’t leave people with as big of a “wow” feeling due to the time crunch you’re under, however, make a note of which talks capture your attention and why. Try to bring some of that X factor to your own presentation. The talks I gravitated toward included some very personal stories so I knew I had to include some in my own talk.
Make a quick list of all the possible story lines you can tell about yourself as a writer. Keep each story to one sentence/phrase. My ideas were:
I decided to go with a combination of the last two ideas because they were the most upbeat and inspirational. It also had a natural narrative arc.
Read More
Sometimes the shortest things can unexpectedly be the hardest to write. And that’s the case with author biographies, or bios for short. Bios aren’t like CVs. They’re not as formal. They are more like mini-stories. They give a flavour of the person behind them. And like query letters and blurbs, they function as ‘hooks.’
Over the course of a writing career, you’ll discover you need more than one bio. In fact, you might find that you need quite a few. Each of them will be written for particular purposes, whether that be pitching for genre-specific projects, for festivals and conferences, or for book proposals and blurbs. Each of them will have a slightly different angle, though they encapsulate the same basic biographical and bibliographical information. And though they may fall into ‘types’ of bios—ie, for publication, presentation or industry purposes—each bio is also slightly different, even within each type.
The Case of Valerie May
For a bit of fun, let’s take the (imaginary) case of Valerie May, author of romantic suspense novels who also writes the occasional non-fiction authorship book. Here are a couple of her pitch bios, one for a non-fiction book called Roses have Thorns, a practical guide to maintaining a writing career, and the other for her new novel, The Jade Peacock.
Bio A: Valerie May is the award-winning author of fifteen novels, including the internationally bestselling The Black Rose. She is the founder of Delicious Shivers, a popular blog specialising in the romantic suspense genre, and with fellow author Jenna Sims initiated the first Delicious Shivers seminar, now an annual event. Over the course of her career, Valerie May has been a bookseller, served on several literary industry committees, and been a popular speaker at conferences and festivals.
Bio B: Born in London of an Irish father and French-Vietnamese mother, Valerie May was brought up between languages and cultures and now lives in Sydney, Australia, with her family. The award-winning author of fifteen novels of romantic suspense, including the bestseller The Black Rose and its popular sequel, By Any Other Name, as well as three works of non-fiction, she also blogs regularly, and features as a speaker at literary events. Her Vietnamese grandmother’s dramatic story was the inspiration for The Jade Peacock.
These two bios have a similar structure, but a different emphasis, with each aimed at establishing Valerie’s credentials in a particular context . For Roses have Thorns, the emphasis is on Valerie’s professional experience in the book industry; but for The Jade Peacock, the bio takes in not only her track record as a writer, but also a great deal more personal information, including her cultural background which is relevant in this case. In both, the fact that she is a successful professional author is front and centre, but in the novel bio, there is a more private angle as well, allowing the reader to relate to the author as a person. Meanwhile, for the non-fiction book, her experience of the industry from different professional points of view–author, blogger and bookseller–is highlighted, and more personal information is omitted.
By the way, it’s my opinion that it’s best to write bios in third person, and to stay away from quirky bios.
Read More
by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Please welcome Kate Brandes as our guest today! An environmental scientist with over 20 years of experience, Kate is also a watercolor painter and a writer of women’s fiction with an environmental bent. Her short stories have been published in The Binnacle, Wilderness House Literary Review, and Grey Sparrow Journal. Kate is a member of the Arts Community of Easton (ACE), the Lehigh Art Alliance, Artsbridge, the Pennwriters, and the Women’s Fiction Writers Association. Kate lives in a small town along the Delaware River with her husband, David, and their two sons. When she’s not working, she’s outside on the river or chasing wildflowers. The Promise of Pierson Orchard is her first novel and debuts today!
Connect with Kate on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
A Community of Debut Authors Unite to Help Each Other
I’ve spent most of career, not as a writer but as an environmental scientist. Sometime in my mid-thirties I decided I wanted to try writing creatively. There was one problem. I’d never written fiction, nor had I studied creative writing, and I didn’t know anyone who wrote. I quickly sensed how vast an ocean I was learning to navigate and I was without a compass. If I was going to learn to write a decent story in this lifetime, I would need to build a writing community for myself.
I did that over ten years time. And building that community—people who are serious about writing and want to support each other—was probably the single most important step I took toward publication of my first novel, out this year.
Following the first few days of ecstatic bliss after learning my debut novel would be published, I felt a bit like I did a decade ago when I was just learning to write fiction—I had SO much to learn about publication. And this time I didn’t have a decade.
Luckily, shortly after my book deal was listed in Publisher’s Marketplace in early summer 2016, I received an email from a woman named Kellye Garrett, who, along with another writer, Mary Ann Marlowe, was starting a new Facebook group of writers with books coming out in 2017. Kellye asked me to join the group so we could share experiences.
Being a debut author is a bit like driving a newborn home for the first time. There’s so much joy and anticipation (of course), and it’s also a terrifying responsibility you feel ill prepared for. A new author must learn a whole world of marketing and book promotion in a very short time. Most unpublished writers have heard about this phase, but have paid little attention, since all energy has been spent on writing and finding an agent and publisher.
Read More
In a few weeks I’ll be leading a session with independent editor Nicola Kraus at Grub Street’s annual Muse and the Marketplace writers conference, on “Outsourcing for Writers.”
When we first pitched the idea to Grub Street, the conference organizer confessed that the idea “freaked [him] out a bit.” After all, writing is such a solitary endeavor and as writers we like to think we can — and should — do everything ourselves, every step of the way.
Nothing else feels right. And after years of solitary drafting and revising, of silently dreaming and imagining what the pages will look like and what publishing this book will mean for your identity and your future, it’s hard not to feel anxious about getting help.
I get it. But the truth is, it’s becoming fairly standard in these busy, hyper competitive times for authors approaching publication to outsource a variety of tasks. Manuscript consultants and developmental editors like Nicola help get drafts into the best possible shape before submitting to agents. Research assistants check facts or make lists of conferences to attend. Social media pros help build up authors’ quintessential online presence. And with publishers’ resources squeezed, many authors opt to hire independent publicists to help get news and reviews once their book is out.
Still, chances are you’ll lose sleep wondering whether your manuscript consultant was right in suggesting you cut the scene you slaved over for months – and whether you should take his advice or ignore it. Or whether the independent publicist you hired is doing anything at all. So you enter your outsourcing arrangements determined to take what the pros you’ve hired say with a grain of salt and to keep a very close eye on them so they get it right.
As one who now sits on the “outsourced” side of this equation, I have seen that, paradoxically, this reluctance to let go is exactly where real disappointment begins. Because by definition, outsourcing means entrusting a project to somebody else, and letting go. Embedded in “entrusting” is trust. Trusting the person or people you’ve hired empowers them to do their very best. On the flip side, not trusting them will result in immense frustration on all sides. And frustration is not the ideal backdrop for success.
Let’s take website design for example. I am personally guilty of not having let go here, even after hiring an outstanding, reputable firm. Through the building of two separate sites, I proceeded to second guess every graphic and every color the designer chose. Rather than complete the job in three rounds of back-and-forth, the designer needed almost ten rounds to accommodate my changes and directives. Over time he grew frustrated with my onslaught of requests. After a while he stopped trying to convince me of why my choices weren’t working and just did what I asked. The project wound up costing nearly twice the initial estimate, and after barely 18 months of having the site up and running, I see that he was right and wish I could redo it.
As a provider myself, I understand his frustration. Going back and forth with authors in response to questions about why I’m reaching out to one particular reporter instead of […]
Read More
