A good press release informs the media of an upcoming event, or of a reaction to something that’s already happened. The press release isn’t a finished article: but if it’s good enough it will be used as the basis of several articles, written by the journalists who receive it, and it might just get you on the telly too.
So, what should a press release contain? It must make clear what the news story is, and who should be contacted for more information: years ago, when I had to write a few week, I would top-and-tail each one with this information.
Between those two things I would write a short paragraph about what was happening, and why it was significant. New books are published every day so on its own a new publication is not particularly interesting: you need a hook to hang it on. When Mary Wesley’s first novel was published much was made of her advanced age (she was 70); little attention was given to the fact that she had already had a long and relatively-illustrious career writing for children; and there was a tremendous fuss when Erin Pizzey made her big career change from running a women’s refuge to writing commercial fiction. Similarly, you need to work out what makes you and your book so very special, and explain it clearly.
Make sure that you include information on why this thing is so significant: link to other events in the news where relevant, or to similar research. And take care to include several quotes which can be used in context by the journalists as they write up their pieces—if you supply just one, and four different publications use it, the coverage will end up seeming overly-familiar, and readers will get bored: if you supply three or four quotes of various degrees of seriousness and quirkiness, then that’s likely to be reflected in the articles which result.
Finally, remember that while a book’s launch provides a good opportunity to send out a press release, that should not be the end of your book’s life in the press. Try to see everything as a potential press opportunity, and learn to write witty and compelling press releases, and your press coverage is bound to increase.
Showing posts with label PR. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PR. Show all posts
Friday, 27 March 2009
Friday, 27 February 2009
Snowbooks On Marketing
Snowbooks is one of the UK’s publishing’s success stories. It’s a thriving independent publisher with a solid reputation for publishing strong titles and selling them in high numbers (the covers are beautiful, too). It's got a great blog, too. Here Emma Barnes, Snowbooks’ co-founder, discusses her very effective approach to marketing and promotion.
One of the interesting things about being a small publisher is that we can see the direct effect of every piece of marketing activity that we do. In larger companies, where there’s a medium-sized budget for a title, there might be a series of interviews and signing sessions, an online ad campaign, an SMS campaign, a series of ads in women’s magazines, a print run of in-store posters, a fund for co-op promotional spend, and a run of pre-publication proofs for endorsers, reviewers, reading groups and prize-winners to enjoy. If the book does well, who’s to say which bit of marketing worked? For our titles, most pieces of marketing activity are usually standalone. If something works, we can usually tell so easily, without the noise of other activities to confuse matters.
So, for instance, when we took out a £600 ad in a popular publication for The London Scene, a collection of Virginia Woolf essays featuring a never-before-seen sketch, it was easy to see that it had had no effect whatsoever when sales remained at a steady rate. When an extract from that self-same book scored a double-page spread in the Guardian’s G2 section, and sales remained static, we could divine the value of that, too. However, when the book subsequently featured in a high street retailer’s promotion, and shifted 4000 copies in a six month period, we knew that we were on to something.
Since then we’ve often experimented with ads and review coverage, because the received wisdom is that PR, reviews and coverage sell books. Maybe it’s just us, but we have yet to find much empirical evidence to support that proposition. Last summer, for instance, we were lucky enough to receive, as part of a deal we’d done, a free full page of ad space in a leading men’s magazine, worth £50,000 if you look at the rate card. I designed a perfectly lovely advert for a book perfectly tailored to that market. Sales didn’t budge at all. When that book got a core stock rating in a leading high street retailer, however, we sold 150 copies in one week.
My point? Retailers sell books, not marketing. Am I right? I’m right as far as Snowbooks is concerned – I have the data to prove it. There is, however, something in the idea that spending a sufficient amount of money will certainly get people’s attention. A Tube ad campaign, for instance, would have to be very poor if it didn’t sell some books. My question would be whether enough books are sold as a result of the marketing activity to pay for the activity in question. There’s also a strange phenomenon about having to spend money on consumer marketing in order to persuade retailers that you are serious so that they promote your title, although I’ve never come across the need for such complicated manoeuvrings myself. And even when PR does sell some books, the costs and time of hiring the PR agency or lunching contacts on a regular basis are often much greater than the promotional charges levied by retailers to achieve the same result.
By the way, when I make comments like these, the first response is always ‘but I buy books based on reviews and so on’. Yes, but look what you’re doing. You’re reading a blog about how publishing works. You are an interested party; someone with an above-average interest in books and the business of selling them. Your behaviour is not representative of the book-buying public as a whole.
If the findings for Snowbooks held true for the whole industry, what would that mean? It would mean budgets should be realigned away from ads and towards retailer activity. It means relationships with retailers should be seen as the most important part of the publishing process. It means the acknowledgement by agents, authors and publishers of the role of the retailer as gatekeeper to the reader. Who knows how differently we’d all behave if we took a fresh look at what retailers achieve.
One of the interesting things about being a small publisher is that we can see the direct effect of every piece of marketing activity that we do. In larger companies, where there’s a medium-sized budget for a title, there might be a series of interviews and signing sessions, an online ad campaign, an SMS campaign, a series of ads in women’s magazines, a print run of in-store posters, a fund for co-op promotional spend, and a run of pre-publication proofs for endorsers, reviewers, reading groups and prize-winners to enjoy. If the book does well, who’s to say which bit of marketing worked? For our titles, most pieces of marketing activity are usually standalone. If something works, we can usually tell so easily, without the noise of other activities to confuse matters.
So, for instance, when we took out a £600 ad in a popular publication for The London Scene, a collection of Virginia Woolf essays featuring a never-before-seen sketch, it was easy to see that it had had no effect whatsoever when sales remained at a steady rate. When an extract from that self-same book scored a double-page spread in the Guardian’s G2 section, and sales remained static, we could divine the value of that, too. However, when the book subsequently featured in a high street retailer’s promotion, and shifted 4000 copies in a six month period, we knew that we were on to something.
Since then we’ve often experimented with ads and review coverage, because the received wisdom is that PR, reviews and coverage sell books. Maybe it’s just us, but we have yet to find much empirical evidence to support that proposition. Last summer, for instance, we were lucky enough to receive, as part of a deal we’d done, a free full page of ad space in a leading men’s magazine, worth £50,000 if you look at the rate card. I designed a perfectly lovely advert for a book perfectly tailored to that market. Sales didn’t budge at all. When that book got a core stock rating in a leading high street retailer, however, we sold 150 copies in one week.
My point? Retailers sell books, not marketing. Am I right? I’m right as far as Snowbooks is concerned – I have the data to prove it. There is, however, something in the idea that spending a sufficient amount of money will certainly get people’s attention. A Tube ad campaign, for instance, would have to be very poor if it didn’t sell some books. My question would be whether enough books are sold as a result of the marketing activity to pay for the activity in question. There’s also a strange phenomenon about having to spend money on consumer marketing in order to persuade retailers that you are serious so that they promote your title, although I’ve never come across the need for such complicated manoeuvrings myself. And even when PR does sell some books, the costs and time of hiring the PR agency or lunching contacts on a regular basis are often much greater than the promotional charges levied by retailers to achieve the same result.
By the way, when I make comments like these, the first response is always ‘but I buy books based on reviews and so on’. Yes, but look what you’re doing. You’re reading a blog about how publishing works. You are an interested party; someone with an above-average interest in books and the business of selling them. Your behaviour is not representative of the book-buying public as a whole.
If the findings for Snowbooks held true for the whole industry, what would that mean? It would mean budgets should be realigned away from ads and towards retailer activity. It means relationships with retailers should be seen as the most important part of the publishing process. It means the acknowledgement by agents, authors and publishers of the role of the retailer as gatekeeper to the reader. Who knows how differently we’d all behave if we took a fresh look at what retailers achieve.
Tuesday, 13 January 2009
Query Blasting: The Scattergun Approach
There are all sorts of organisations out there which will, for a fee, send your query to agents or editors, or your press release to newspapers, TV stations and the like. They usually do what they promise, and e-mail your information out to all the names on their mailing lists—and those lists can be vast, with tens of thousands of names on them. But what is the usual outcome of such a scattergun approach?
Well, first, you pay for their services. Then they send out your information (and if they've written your press release or query letter for you, they'll have charged you extra for this and will probably have written a formulaic, template-based piece which will have a very limited effect); and then—nothing.
You're unlikely to see good results, or to even make back the money that you paid them. Because the queries that they send out on your behalf will be generic, one-size-fits-all; they're not going to be personalised, addressed to individual people, or even targeted to appropriate agents or editors who represent your genre; and the press releases will go out to all their media contacts regardless of whether you're promoting a book about train-spotting in 1920s Sweden or a contemporary romance novel with an S&M twist.
Let me remind you: each time you send anything out, you have to target the right people. If you had a problem with your phone bill, you wouldn't just write to every person in every phone company you could find, would you? Regardless of what country you, or they, are in? No. You'd write to the customer services department of your phone provider, and tell them exactly what the problem is. It's the same with queries, submissions, media packs, press releases, and review copies. You must send them to the right people, otherwise the whole exercise is a pointless waste of everyone's time and money.
Well, first, you pay for their services. Then they send out your information (and if they've written your press release or query letter for you, they'll have charged you extra for this and will probably have written a formulaic, template-based piece which will have a very limited effect); and then—nothing.
You're unlikely to see good results, or to even make back the money that you paid them. Because the queries that they send out on your behalf will be generic, one-size-fits-all; they're not going to be personalised, addressed to individual people, or even targeted to appropriate agents or editors who represent your genre; and the press releases will go out to all their media contacts regardless of whether you're promoting a book about train-spotting in 1920s Sweden or a contemporary romance novel with an S&M twist.
Let me remind you: each time you send anything out, you have to target the right people. If you had a problem with your phone bill, you wouldn't just write to every person in every phone company you could find, would you? Regardless of what country you, or they, are in? No. You'd write to the customer services department of your phone provider, and tell them exactly what the problem is. It's the same with queries, submissions, media packs, press releases, and review copies. You must send them to the right people, otherwise the whole exercise is a pointless waste of everyone's time and money.
Monday, 1 December 2008
Bumping Up Your Sales
Suppose you’ve done everything right for your self-published book but your sales have fallen flat. How can you spark things off again and rejuvenate your order-book?
You could get yourself a mainstream publishing contract—although you’re unlikely to manage this unless you’ve sold a high number of copies already, in which case you’re not likely to need one.
You could marry George Clooney.
Or you could send out a press release, or another appropriate pitch, whenever you see an opportunity. You could offer to give talks, write articles, or run workshops; and news stories which bear some relation to your book provide all sorts of promotional opportunities. You can try just about anything, so long as you’re qualified, able and confident.
It’s unlikely that anyone would self-publish if they had a mainstream publishing contract on offer, and Miss Snark has assumed first dibs on Mr Clooney: but the third option is something that anyone could do.
You could get yourself a mainstream publishing contract—although you’re unlikely to manage this unless you’ve sold a high number of copies already, in which case you’re not likely to need one.
You could marry George Clooney.
Or you could send out a press release, or another appropriate pitch, whenever you see an opportunity. You could offer to give talks, write articles, or run workshops; and news stories which bear some relation to your book provide all sorts of promotional opportunities. You can try just about anything, so long as you’re qualified, able and confident.
It’s unlikely that anyone would self-publish if they had a mainstream publishing contract on offer, and Miss Snark has assumed first dibs on Mr Clooney: but the third option is something that anyone could do.
Wednesday, 19 November 2008
The Levels of Promotion
Promotion can be carried out on several levels, and it’s well worth considering which of those levels is going to be the most effective when you have a book to promote.
If you meet someone in a supermarket queue and get chatting, there’s a chance they might ask you what you do for a living. If you tell them you’re a writer, there's then the chance that they might subsequently buy your book. There’s also a chance that you will irritate them quite wholeheartedly if you are too pushy: I read an account a few weeks ago of a vanity-published writer who was thrown out of a restaurant for attempting to sell copies of his book from table to table between courses.
If you give talks, there’s a good chance that you’ll be able to sell copies of your book at the end of the event—just remember that if your talk isn’t particularly informative or amusing then you’re unlikely to sell many copies as your audience will assume that it is as dull as you are.
The very best form of promotion, though, is when you recruit people to act as your books advocate. How? By finding groups of people who have some connection with you, or your book’s theme; by giving them a witty, empathetic, and informative talk and engaging them in conversation in some way, so that they feel involved in the event and connected directly to you; and by making them realise how grateful you offer the opportunity they’ve given you.
If you meet someone in a supermarket queue and get chatting, there’s a chance they might ask you what you do for a living. If you tell them you’re a writer, there's then the chance that they might subsequently buy your book. There’s also a chance that you will irritate them quite wholeheartedly if you are too pushy: I read an account a few weeks ago of a vanity-published writer who was thrown out of a restaurant for attempting to sell copies of his book from table to table between courses.
If you give talks, there’s a good chance that you’ll be able to sell copies of your book at the end of the event—just remember that if your talk isn’t particularly informative or amusing then you’re unlikely to sell many copies as your audience will assume that it is as dull as you are.
The very best form of promotion, though, is when you recruit people to act as your books advocate. How? By finding groups of people who have some connection with you, or your book’s theme; by giving them a witty, empathetic, and informative talk and engaging them in conversation in some way, so that they feel involved in the event and connected directly to you; and by making them realise how grateful you offer the opportunity they’ve given you.
Monday, 17 November 2008
Marketing Your Book: An Author's Guide
In an ideal world, every publisher would hand a copy of Alison Baverstock's Marketing Your Book to every single one of their authors. It's written from the assumption that your book has been published by mainstream house: and this is its great strength. While most books on the subject are aimed at the self-published and ignore or try to discredit the techniques used by mainstream publishers, Alison Baverstock’s book shows exactly how the mainstream publishers promote their works and achieve sales figures that most self-published writers can only dream of.
This book gives clear, detailed advice on everything that writers can do to publicise their own books, and gives a lot of advice on what to avoid. Alison Baverstock has worked for years in book marketing and promotion, and it shows. If you've got a book to promote then you need to buy this one, no matter how you're published.
Sunday, 16 November 2008
Marketing, Publicity, PR And Promotion
There’s a lot of confusion about what these terms mean. This is how I’ve always separated them, but others’ opinions may (and do!) differ.
Marketing is the paid-for stuff: the catalogues, magazine ads and trade ads which position a product in the market with the aim of telling trade buyers and end-users that the product exists and what it is.
Publicity encourages debate: it gets a product (in this case, a book or its author) written about in articles, discussed or interviewed on TV or radio, or otherwise talked about through user-groups like book clubs.
PR (public relations) centres around improving and enhancing the target group’s perception of a person, a business or a corporation. The target group whose perception is being enhanced is sometimes the general public but it will more often consist of a far more specific group such as a company’s shareholders before an AGM, or parents when a new baby milk or disposable nappy is launched.
Promotion usually involves more legwork than the other three: for a writer, it involves book signings, giving interviews, and giving talks to interested groups. It tends to be focused on smaller groups (unless you’re JK Rowling).
These categories all depend on each other to work their best: you can’t hope to maximise your sales if you neglect any one area. An author can’t carry out a book signing (promotion) without the bookshop knowing about the book (marketing), knowing that the author is available for a signing (publicity), and caring enough about her to consider inviting her in (PR).
Marketing is the paid-for stuff: the catalogues, magazine ads and trade ads which position a product in the market with the aim of telling trade buyers and end-users that the product exists and what it is.
Publicity encourages debate: it gets a product (in this case, a book or its author) written about in articles, discussed or interviewed on TV or radio, or otherwise talked about through user-groups like book clubs.
PR (public relations) centres around improving and enhancing the target group’s perception of a person, a business or a corporation. The target group whose perception is being enhanced is sometimes the general public but it will more often consist of a far more specific group such as a company’s shareholders before an AGM, or parents when a new baby milk or disposable nappy is launched.
Promotion usually involves more legwork than the other three: for a writer, it involves book signings, giving interviews, and giving talks to interested groups. It tends to be focused on smaller groups (unless you’re JK Rowling).
These categories all depend on each other to work their best: you can’t hope to maximise your sales if you neglect any one area. An author can’t carry out a book signing (promotion) without the bookshop knowing about the book (marketing), knowing that the author is available for a signing (publicity), and caring enough about her to consider inviting her in (PR).
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