Preparing Your Publicity Materials

By Rick Frishman - Jan 02 , 2009

Create a list of all the elements that will be involved in your campaign and then start working on those that will take longest to achieve. Keep in mind that everything will take longer than you initially expect, especially those items that will require you to rely on others or be out of your control. When people don’t deliver when promised, promptly follow up and give them a gentle nudge.

Major items for which you should prepare include:

Endorsements

Publishers need the endorsements for your book early so that they can include them in your book and their promotional materials. They will give you deadlines for endorsement submissions. Usually, they want them at least three or four months before the book’s publication date.

Begin working on endorsements early because they rarely arrive when promised; something always seems to pop up to slow down or derail the process, especially when you have to deal with celebrities and go through their handlers. With endorsements, always try to:

• Get endorsements from the most well-known and accomplished people you can reach. If you’re a professional, seek out the top people in your professional organizations. If you’re a businessperson, approach the leaders in your industry. If you’re a novelist, try to get endorsements from the most popular novelists.
• Ask your agent, editor, and publisher to help you get endorsements from their authors.
• If anyone ever offered to help you, this is the time to call in that chit. Ask them for endorsements.

Author 101 Advice

When you request endorsements, make the endorsers’ lives easier by providing samples that they can adapt and e-mail back to you. Find endorsements in other books, copy your favorites, adapt them, and send them as samples to potential endorsers. Write testimonials of your own that include points you would like stressed. For example, “Rick Frishman is a book-promotion giant” or “Robyn Freedman Spizman is always ten steps ahead of the pack.”

Make the endorsements truthful and decide if you want them to endorse you or your book. If you receive endorsements after the deadline, hang on to them because they could be squeezed in, especially if they’re from big names, or you could use them for promotional materials, subsequent books, or future editions of your book.

Press Kit Materials

Assembling the pieces of a press kit early is often advantageous because you can use all or various pieces with different promotions. For instance, when you send reviewers galleys of your book, which usually occurs about four months before the publication date, you can send the entire press kit or just parts you select, such as your press release, Q&As, your biography, and your photo.

If you create your press kit early, you may want to rewrite some pieces from time to time. Since news stories are constantly breaking, you might be able to link your book to some of them. Over time, materials and authors grow stale: writing about new slants can recharge and enliven you. Review your press release and Q&As frequently to keep them fresh and newsworthy.

If you look good, take advantage of it. Send your photo with your promotional materials to show the media what you look like. Better yet, scan a professionally taken photo on all your promotional materials, but don’t let it dominate the page. If you have an interesting photo that relates to your book, such as monuments described in your book, soldiers during battle, or the dog that saved your life, be sure to include that also.

Press Releases

The number one mistake that authors make in getting publicity for their books is that they wait too long, according to Paul Hartunian, the nation’s leading authority on showing business owners and entrepreneurs how to get publicity:

They wait until their book is either just about to come out or has already been released before they start getting publicity. If a book on repairing cars is coming out in October, authors usually wait until September or October to start getting publicity. Unless they send press releases, the media won’t know who they are.

Instead, they should start regularly sending press releases in January and send a different release on something about car repairs every week or so, even though the book doesn’t exist, to build name recognition. They must give the media the opportunity to find out who they are.

Then, when the book comes out in October, the media will recognize the author’s name and know that he or she has great advice on car repairs. So, it will read the press release and may try to find out more about the book and/or the author.

If you think you want to write a book, if you have a dream of writing a book, even if it’s just something you casually mention to your family one day, start sending press releases to begin getting publicity on that topic. Establish yourself as an authority, if not the authority, in that field.

To build name recognition and perception of you as an expert, send press releases weekly, but at the least, every other week. Don’t worry about having enough to say. Think of the problems that readers have and answer them. If you find that you truly don’t have enough to say, reconsider whether you can write an entire book.