Every new title is allocated to a publicist once the copyedit has been completed. They will cast an eye over your cover suggestions for suitability for market. The publicist will also write the back cover copy at this point. The publicist may be in touch with you to discuss these items if necessary.
In this first round the publicist may not contact you directly.
The publicists we work with use different approaches, often depending on the nature of the book and the market – how much to use “traditional” approaches like print reviews and interviews, or working more closely with you on social media approaches.
- Please supply us with an A4 page of quotes from your book in Word. 1-2 sentences that are thought provoking or enticing. Please upload this item to the Marketing page under Publicity – Articles.
- We will send a summary of what they intend to do to “Promotional Plan,” two to three months before publication.
- Their initial work is based around a Title Newsletter/Press Release, sent in the body of an email which sums up your title, provides links to your book online and hooks the recipient. This is a targeted approach matching the contact to the book, and sending a personalised email. We do not blanket email contacts as this is seen as spam.
- The publicist then handles the responses, and the office supplies review copies (electronic PDF or hard-copy format) as requested.
- With signing events, if there are shops interested in hosting it, the follow-up, fixing dates/times etc, needs to be arranged by yourself with the shop. For help/advice, put a query up on the Author Forum under Marketing and Publicity; Events/Signings.
- Organising interviews can take a while, arranging dates and times and supplying author information. Your publicist will organise most of this, but will hand over the contact when the interview is set up. Interviews take commitment from the author to be ready and prepared for their interview.
The publicist spends around a day on this. The aim is to get half a dozen or so activities “completed” in the first round, whether that consists of one or two signing events, published articles, print reviews, blog coverage – whatever the mix. Though articles and interviews have long lead time, often months, and printed reviews can take months/years from the time of submitting the review copy, particularly in academic areas. So “completed” might take a lot longer than you will see in initial results.
It is not, in itself, likely to generate substantial sales. A proper campaign takes months. The purpose is more to get an indication of travel, of directions to follow. Depending on the book, the author, the genre, initial success usually comes through one medium, rarely across all of them together. Though it might well come gradually. The ideal scenario, over months:
- Getting people in our collective social media feeds to talk about and review your book.
- Advance copies/PDFs to fans and bloggers.
- Getting to publications in your niche.
- Reaching the niche leaders.
- Hopefully, the ball starts rolling, PR starts to do your work for you, and then…
- Major newspapers or websites hear about it and are open to reviewing it.
What we hope, of course, is that this initial push will help get this moving. But please take it further forwards yourself.
We review progress after the first clear three months, and you will get a notification on this. The publisher and publicist will sen you comments about how they think the title has done so far. Depending on progress with reviews we will book promotion on sites like BookBub, Ereader News Today or Booksends – there are many – (BookBub for instance generally need to see around 80 positive reviews to consider it).
Each time it sells 500 copies, the publicist will put in more, which could either be more selective, based on the initial feedback, focusing on more labor-intensive activities like events or interviews, or more extensive, widening the list of contacts approached.
Social media postings are also included, with memes, or quotes highlighting your book; we always tag the author involved so that it shows up on your own social media feed and can be shared to widen the possible audience.
We may also consider an ebook promotions, based on the reviews that are received.
If you have any ideas or specific area of PR that you would like us to concentrate on, please contact your publicist.
The work may not be done in the month of the notification, it is dependent on the individual workload of the publicist, but should happen within a couple of months. Any issues or queries should be raised on the Admin Forum.