How to assemble an author press kit (and why)

Authors sabotage their books in two very common ways, both of which are symptoms of the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

Monkey wrench #1

Not knowing how much work goes into producing a good book (therefore, failing to do the work)

Monkey wrench #2

Trying to generate publicity for a book without a press kit/media kit, even if it’s only one page

 

It’s easy to be irritated by or make fun of the authors who simply don’t know what they don’t know. Our annoyance comes from assuming they could know if they tried. In reality, some writers aren’t capable of recognizing that what they’re doing differs somehow from the efforts of successful authors. We can’t rescue the blissfully ignorant from failure. The best we can do is politely ignore them.

The upside, if you’re an author, is that you can remove monkey wrench #2 in one weekend with a reasonable amount of effort. If you’re super busy, you can hire someone to do it for you.

You can become much more attractive as an interviewee or event participant when your press kit can be downloaded by anyone who takes an interest. If it’s not available online, then at the very least, your press kit should be assembled and ready to send by courier whenever it’s requested by a reporter, producer, blogger, or book reviewer.

Make it easy for people who need to know more about you and your book. Show them you’re professional, and you’ll avoid being politely ignored.

Exhibit the Dunning-Kruger Effect by reading no further

If you recognize that being discoverable, approachable, and professional will help you draw more attention to your book and yourself, then continue reading.

Press kit primer

Be sure to have your press kit compiled before you need it.

Your press kit must be downloadable, or forwarded immediately upon request, so the person inquiring can read your book, learn something about you, and prepare interview questions or schedule an event.

Step 1: Assemble a press sheet

If you really like your publisher’s information sheet (sell-sheet) for your book, then ask permission to include it in your press kit. If you prefer, you can create your own press sheet using these guidelines:

Social Media News Release Template, Version 1.5
Todd Defren, Shift Communications

Advance Information Sheets (AIs)
Welsh Book Trade Info

A one-page press sheet includes brief biographical information about you, the author. You might be lucky enough to enjoy the assistance of a publicist when writing your bio, or you can refer to these tips:

‎How to Create an Engaging and Effective Bio Page
Georgiana Cohen, Work Awesome

Don’t forget to include on your one-page press sheet:

• Book cover image
• Book title
• Your name and city
• Page count
• Genre
• Synopsis
• URL for your book’s page on your publisher’s site
• URLs for your book’s page on your favorite bookseller sites
• ISBN
• Name of publisher, publication date, and territory
• Prizes/awards for this title (only if it was the grand-prize winner)
• Stupendous blurbs and/or awesome review excerpts
• Your bio and maybe your headshot
• Your blog or website URL
• When and how far you’ll travel for interviews, book club meetings, events
• Contact information (your publicist’s or yours)

Step 2: Assemble a press kit

Follow the links below to find out what else you’ll need or want to add to your press kit. There’s more, but you’ll need to leave this page to discover it.

What on Earth Do I Put in My Media Kit?
L. Diane Wolfe, Spunk on a Stick

Book Marketing: Your Online Press Kit
Joel Friedlander, The Book Designer

Is Your Author Website Ready to Meet the Press?
Chris Robley, BookBaby Blog

I like the idea of including a sheet of sample questions and answers. Writing them is an effective way to prepare yourself for an interview, regardless of whether the questions are ever used.

Step 3: Use your press kit

The individual to whom your press kit is being sent will choose the format: digital or hard copy. Ask which format the person prefers. Be prepared to send either version. Don’t just provide the URL, but do make a version of your press kit/media kit available to download from your website or blog.

A version of your press kit should be on your website, because not everyone will go to the trouble of contacting you for information. It’s simpler and faster to pay attention to authors whose websites are comprehensive. Reporters and producers with deadlines have no time to waste, and there’s never a shortage of authors seeking media attention.

After you’ve finished putting together an attractive press kit and you’ve posted a version on your website, then sit back and smile, knowing you’ve removed one of the biggest obstacles that might have prevented other people from helping you to promote your book.

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If you’d like to share your press sheet or press kit as an example, feel free to post a link to it in the comments section of this post. You might have noticed people talking about this one a while ago.

Authors, are you using Goodreads?

Goodreads isn’t the only social network devoted to library cataloging and discussions about books, but it’s the one I use and appreciate. I’d like to know why Goodreads and sites like it, including Shelfari, LibraryThing, Revish, and aNobii, aren’t very well utilized by authors and publishers. After all, the members of these communities are book buyers or borrowers. Not only that, they’re gathered in one place and identified by the books they’ve tagged as owned, already read, to read, in the process of being read, and favorites. On other types of social networks, not all of the users are book lovers.

Authors seem to discover and congregate in author communities online, which is fine, but relatively few authors seem to know much about Goodreads. For the moment, it’s an uncrowded platform. As an author seeking readers, you’d be wise to jump on the Goodreads stage in 2012, before your competitors discover it in 2013. And if you’re not thinking of other authors as friendly rivals, then you’re not reading this post anyway—and, heck, you might not even own a computer.

To assess the potential of Goodreads, explore the site until you’re comfortable with its features and navigation.

You can install apps that link Goodreads with your social networks. You can join a few Goodreads groups to see how they function and whether they’re active. You can add books to your Goodreads bookshelves, and then the site will recommend other books you might like based on what you’ve shelved. But that’s not all.

After you’re familiar with the Goodreads site, and you’ve seen how others are taking advantage of it, you’ll be better able to imagine how the Goodreads Author Program can be used to promote your own books. Best of all, it’s free.

Goodreads: How to Use the Goodreads Author Program

Jane Friedman: 2 Ways to Make the Most of Goodreads

Patrick Brown: Goodreads Stats Show Which Media Outlets Really Sell Books

Goodreads: Goodreads Author Feedback Group

Jason Boog: How to Add Goodreads to Your Facebook Timeline

Sarah Pinneo: An Author’s Guide to Surviving Goodreads

Perhaps Sarah Pinneo’s survival guide answers my question. Authors don’t use Goodreads if they fear they’ll make targets of themselves, or worse than being targeted, they’ll go unnoticed. Meanwhile, the authors who take risks get all the attention.

Writing a book is risky. Why stop there?

Are you engaging in conversations with the people who care about your writing?

I don’t like the idea of lumping engagement together with self-promotion, because engagement entails caring about other people, while self-promotion involves concern for oneself and one’s work. However, authors who engage appreciatively with their readers and fans will benefit by cultivating goodwill. The act of engagement then becomes one aspect of self-promotion.

There’s no need to explain the benefits of engagement to most extroverts, who already understand cause and effect and use it to their advantage. Most authors, I imagine, are not extroverts, so it can be difficult for them to see the correlation between a particular author’s popularity with readers and the amount of effort that author puts into making and maintaining connections.

Today’s authors almost always promote themselves and their books four ways: online, in person, with video or audio recordings, and in print-on-paper media. Aside from personal appearances, online is where identifying readers who have an interest in a writer’s work is easiest.

Unfortunately, too many writers assume that attracting readers and fans, and their comments, will be a passive process online. They’ll write something, they’ll publish it, and fans will accumulate while the writer is occupied elsewhere. In reality, followers will gather where they find an author behaving graciously—or, failing that, at least brazenly—and with an awareness of the fans’ presence.

Authors who are not ‘net natives might have a difficult time discerning who is taking an interest in them online, unless they learn something about web analytics, which I encourage writers to do. In addition, there’s a simple way to locate people who are writing online about an author or a book. Authors who care about their readership should set up several Google Alerts in order to be notified via email when and where conversations in which they’re being mentioned are occurring. Then, they can engage with the people who care enough to write about them.

There will be occasions when it’s better for an author to avoid engagement. If a conversation is extremely critical of the writer, then joining the discussion can require more tact than most people possess. Consulting with a neutral third party who is an especially diplomatic communicator, before deciding what to do or say, can be helpful.

In many, if not most, instances the comments about the author will be neutral or favorable, in which case it’s a shame if the writer neglects the opportunity to express appreciation.

Learn more about this topic:

Chris Brogan advises authors how to find and join online discussions

Chris Brogan: An insider’s guide to social media etiquette

Mary Tod: How self-publishing changes the bond between readers and writers

Jane Friedman: How to meaningfully grow traffic to your site/blog

Best blogs for advice on book marketing and publicity

Every author—this is an enormous blind spot for people—underestimates the amount of work involved in a book’s publicity campaign. Good publicity is the element of a book’s success that more writers overlook than any other aspect of publishing.

I’d go as far as saying that the lack of understanding about how to promote a book is the single most influential reason for the popularity of self-publishing. People simply don’t know what they don’t know about things they’ve never done before. Creating a book has become inexpensive enough that hundreds of thousands of people each year will learn firsthand, and often to their dismay, what it will take to sell a book.

Writers who are more strategic and methodical soon recognize the tactical advantage to be gained if they learn about self-promotion and put marketing and publicity strategies in place before their books are published. There are two steps: knowing and doing. Few authors will proceed to knowing, and an infinitely smaller group will take a crack at doing.

There you have it—the secret that most authors will never know, at least not until it’s too late.

Some writers work harder than others.

Authors can start knowing more about book marketing and publicity by studying the advice offered by the following bloggers. Serious writers will put the effort into doing what these bloggers recommend.

The Book Publicity Blog by Yen Cheong, enterprise community and collaboration specialist at Pearson

Chris Brogan, Human Business Works

Jane Friedman, asst. professor of e-media, University of Cincinnati

Meghan Ward’s Writerland

Paula Margulies, Paula Margulies Communications

A few years ago I posted A list of FREE ebooks about book marketing.

You know of bloggers who cover this topic with intelligence and humor. Please feel free to share your recommendations by leaving a comment.

Want publicity? Be discoverable.

The following tweet appeared in my LinkedIn updates today:

Bluestalking:
Authors (esp. Chicago area), if you don’t have website I can’t easily contact you for library program & will often just give up.

 

@Bluestalking is the Twitter ID for Lisa Guidarini. On LinkedIn, she lists the following as her current occupations:

• Book Reviewer/IPPY Award Judge at Independent Publisher
• Book Reviewer/Author Event Reporter at Patch.com – Algonquin, IL
• Book Reviewer at Bookbrowse.com
• Book Reviewer at Booklist
• Book Reviewer at Library Journal
• Book reviewer/critic at National Book Critics Circle
• Adult Program Coordinator at Algonquin Area Public Library

If you’re a new author, particularly one located in the Chicago area, Lisa Guidarini is someone you’d probably like to know. She can take you places. But if you’re stuck in the 20th century, perched behind a security wall on Facebook, or otherwise hiding out like a fugitive, then you are defeating yourself. Readers can’t find you, and neither can people who are willing to make the effort to connect you with readers.

Want publicity? Be discoverable.

1. Have a website or blog that lists your books, your contact information, and your publicist’s name and contact information.
2. Check your email and voicemail daily.
3. Respond to professional inquiries within 24 hours. (That’s 24 hours from the time the inquiry was sent, not 24 hours from the time you received it.)
4. Be prepared to send a press/media kit and a copy of your book without delay.

How to get your book reviewed

Brilliant and generous publicists and authors have provided step-by-step instructions for getting critics and bloggers to review new books. Their advice isn’t difficult to locate online. Find helpful links to a few of them below.

Do authors need to know how to get reviews of their books? Don’t publishers assume all responsibility for book publicity?

In the real world, a book publisher establishes a finite publicity budget for each new title. The budget limits the number of ARCs the publisher will send to review outlets—anywhere from a handful to hundreds of advanced review copies. When those ARCs are gone, typically that’s the end of it.

In other words, entrepreneurial authors who coordinate their own publicity efforts with their publishers’ campaigns are doing the smart thing.

Publishers routinely ask their authors to suggest where to send ARCs for review.

Authors are presumed to have an awareness of their readership or potential readership, and they’re also expected to have some good ideas for sources of publicity. Writers shouldn’t be surprised by this request. They should do the research far ahead of time, before being asked, in order to be prepared with the answers.

If a book publisher doesn’t ask for the author’s input, the author or the author’s freelance publicist should contact the publisher to discuss the plan for garnering book reviews and publicity. Waiting, hoping, wondering, and procrastinating until it’s too late only guarantees failure, because some important media outlets publish reviews only prior to or at the precise time of a book’s launch.

After a publisher gives the go-ahead, an author can learn from the tutorials in the following list before impetuously rushing in. Resorting to a mass email blasted to a list of book reviewers, aside from being diabolical, is an ineffective strategy. The most influential reviewers can read only a tiny fraction of the advance copies they receive. Why do they pick certain books to review? By answering the question before it’s asked, an author will be much more likely to get good results.

7 Simple Steps to Getting Your Book Reviewed
by Paula Krapf, Author Marketing Experts, Inc.

Advanced Review Copies of a Book Being Published
by Rick Frishman, Planned Television Arts

How To Get Your Book Reviewed
Marketing Tips for Authors

After learning the professional, common-sense method of requesting a book review, an author will need contact details for appropriate publications and bloggers. A list of all types of book reviewers can be found on the Book Reviewers page of my blog. A discerning writer will contact only the reviewers who are most likely to be interested in the book.

Q&A with Brian Feinblum on the Book Marketing Buzz Blog

The exuberant Brian Feinblum posted a Q&A with me over on his Book Marketing Buzz Blog today.

Brian’s been in the book business for twenty years and is also an author. Check out his great blog for lots of new interviews with book publishers, acquiring editors, marketing professionals, publicists, literary agents, media consultants, and other authors. Or you can find him on Twitter @ThePRexpert, where he already has quite a following.

Penny Sansevieri’s must-read for self-published authors (includes good advice for all authors)

Author and book marketing expert Penny Sansevieri’s guest post on the BookBuzzr blog is too important to miss. If you haven’t seen Penny’s “hard look at the realities of self-defeating behavior and some of the things authors might buy into that will sabotage their careers,” then go take a look.