Book Promotion Campaign Elements

By Rick Frishman - Jan 23 , 2009

Not every element that follows may work for every book or platform, but the ones listed below are good cornerstones.

Media List

Your media list includes the names of those who will receive a copy of the sale version of the book. It will include those who received review copies of your book plus national media outlets and local media in your area, the areas you plan to visit, and those where you have special contacts.

To find sources, go to the library and leaf through Cision’s publications, such as Cision’s MediaSource. Although you can pay for the same information on the Internet, at libraries, it’s free. However, the information may be dated because media people move frequently. Your best bet is to do your initial research at the library and collect a bunch of names and contact information. Then call or check websites to verify what you found and to get the most current information.

Also check the Harrison guides, Radio-TV Interview Report for national broadcast media information. Call media outlets and ask who you should send your material to. Try to get an actual person’s name, not simply an e-mail address to “info@.”

Internet Marketing

When people hear about you or your book, they go to the Internet to get more information. They Google you, read about you, and visit your Web site; they look for your book on Amazon.com. So, as an author, it’s essential to have a strong Internet presence.

1. The first step in your Internet marketing plan is to put up a memorable website, a site that people love to visit and will tell others about. You website must be great-looking and reflective of the impression you want to convey. For example, you may want it to appear authoritative, lighthearted, elegant, colorful, hip, scholarly, or goofy. Or it could have a theme related to your book or your area of expertise. Your site must also be up-to-date and easy and intuitive to use, and all links must work.
2. Register your site with all the major search engines under your name, your book’s name, and every conceivable variation of them. That way, when people misspell your name and don’t get your book’s title exactly right, they will still get to your site.
3. Include in your website everything that’s in your media kit. Your site should allow visitors to read a sample chapter, order your book, enter into exchanges with you, and view your upcoming events and appearances. It should link to other complementary sites and to your strategic partners. Your site must have a press room with the latest articles on you and your book.
4. In addition to your site, you can start your own blog, newsletter, or e-zine.

Numerous firms such as FSBAssociates.com (Fauzia Burke) and PromoteABookmedia.com can be hired to handle your Internet book-marketing campaigns. These firms can be invaluable because they know all the components that can be included in your campaign. They can create an Internet campaign that may include creating a website for the book, sending your book to relevant websites, and sending it to blogs. These firms have lists of Internet book reviewers; will syndicate your content on the Web; or will set up chats, downloads, newsgroups, and mailing lists.

In cyberspace, podcasting seems to be the next frontier. Podcasting is making material from your book available on iPods. Audiobooks can now be downloaded onto iPods and soon, experts predict, so will interviews, articles, and excerpts of your book. From your website, people could download a chapter of your book and then buy the rest if they like it. In the process, you’re capturing their name and e-mail address, which you can use in the future.

A subspecies of Internet marketing is the Internet blast or Amazon blast. Essentially, Internet blasts are when you send targeted e-mail to everyone on your list, and to everyone on your friends’ and associates’ lists, and to lists you buy. In the e-mail, you ask the recipients to buy your book on a certain date and even at a specified time on that date. You also can offer them incentives to buy your book at the specified time.

Internet booksellers such as Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com track their online sales on an hourly basis. Therefore, when they make a large number of online sales on a given day or hour, it can make the book a bestseller on their list. Even if a book is a bestseller for only an hour, it is a legitimate bestseller and authors and publishers can truthfully and forever refer to the book as a bestseller. Bestseller status increases the author’s profile and can generate more publicity, which usually translates into higher book sales.

Newspaper and Radio Releases

You can write feature articles, or articles can be written under your byline, that will be sent to over 10,000 newspapers across the nation. Similarly, radio features also can be written and sent to hundreds of radio stations nationwide.

Services including North American Precis Syndicate (NAPS) and News USA will write, produce, and distribute these features. They can put the cover of your book on them, link them to your website, and distribute them to news outlets. Feature articles can be produced as professional-looking two-column articles that newspapers will pick up and use without change.

Similarly, radio features can be produced and sent to radio stations throughout North America. They can write scripts and record an interview that will be sent to hundreds of stations. Through these services, your message about your book can be delivered widely without your constantly having to give interviews.

Although independent companies specialize in producing and distributing radio features, those of us who are book publicists, as a part of our jobs, supervise and work closely with these firms. We know from long experience the companies that we can trust to deliver the best results. We also review the content of articles and scripts, provide editorial input, and make sure that services cover all essential points. Then we coordinate their release and distribution with the rest of your book campaign. Since we work with these services so often, we get a special price, which we pass on to our clients. So, it’s usually cheaper for you to go through us than to deal directly with radio feature distribution services.

Newspaper and radio feature services also give PR firms that specialize in publicizing books discount prices, which many pass on to their clients. So it is often more cost effective and efficient for authors to go through their publicists than to do all the work involved to write and distribute these features.

Media Training

Many of us are petrified of publicly speaking or being interviewed. We wish that we could speak as smoothly, effortlessly, and articulately as all those people we see on television.

Well, surprise, surprise—all those accomplished speakers you see and hear are either trained actors or they have gone through extensive media training. If you hope to publicize your book, media training is essential. Good publicists won’t allow their clients to appear before the media until they’ve had media training.