My friend Rusty Shelton at Phenix & Phenix Literary Publicists gave me a heads-up on this post written by one of their authors, Wendy Kays, who recently appeared on Dr. Phil to promote her book, Game Widow.The post is about book publicity and her approach is right on! I am amazed at how many authors treat their publicist exactly opposite of what Kays suggests, that is, like the publicist is the author's assistant. I can tell you, that doesn't work. Kays approach is guaranteed to be much more effective. "You can maximize your investment in book promotion by being a valuable assistant to your publicist," Kays writes. You need to read her entire post, but here are the five points.
1. First, gather local press contact information for your publicist.
2. Next, if you haven’t already done this, create alliances with other people who speak on your topic.
3. Third, create events for your publicist to promote.
4. Fourth, try to do everything your publicist recommends.
5. Fifth and finally, put the onus for your success on yourself…not your publicist. As someone once said, when it comes to breakfast, the chicken was involved, but the pig was committed.
One of my favorite quotes from the piece is, "Helping your publicist in small ways not only builds incredible good will, it also protects you from feeling like an ignoramus three months from now when you learn firsthand how hard it is to push into the news & entertainment cycle… and how good at it your publicist really was."
2 comments:
Thanks for this Paul. We have some really great authors that are FREAKS when it comes to self promotion, but it is really sad to see the way some of our other authors treat their publists. They shoot themselves in the foot when they treat publicists like assistants. Its funny that should be mentioned. I used that exactly language this week to describe what some of our authors do.
Thanks for sharing this, Paul.
Most of the students in my book publicity e-course are uninformed about what the publisher's publicist can and will do for them, so it's hard for them to understand how they might contribute to the process. I usually invest some time in the course explaining what they should and shouldn't expect, and how they can contribute to the process.
I'm going to send them the link to the posting you've linked to so they can see how one smart author does things.
Thanks again!
Sandy Beckwith
www.buildbookbuzz.com
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