Positioning Yourself as an Expert to Get More Publicity
With
Dan Janal: Thanks Great! Joan lets start right off. A lot of people make a horrible, horrible mistake when they try to pitch their book to reporters. They say, “Hey, I’ve written a book.” You say that’s like serving hemlock to Socrates. Why is that?
Joan Stewart: Because lots of people write books. I think the year before last, there were 173,000 new titles published. The fact that somebody wrote a book is not news.
At the four newspapers where I worked, we were inundated with unsolicited books from authors. These books would come in the mail. Authors would drop them off at the front counter. There were books we didn’t have time to read, and there were books we didn’t care about.
Like most newspapers, we had a cardboard box back in the library. We would dump all the books that we didn’t want to read into it, because we didn’t want to throw them out. Every couple months, somebody—sometimes it was me—would take this cardboard box to the local nursing home, or the local library, without so much as a mention about the book in our newspaper simply because A.) we weren’t interested in the topic and B.) we certainly didn’t have time to read the hundreds of books that had been piling up.
Dan Janal: So, if you want to save yourself a lot of money, the first thing you should do is never send your book out unsolicited, unless you want your great grandmother to read it, or have it donated to a library.
Joan Stewart: Exactly! If you want to catch attention for your book, do not send the book unsolicited, because that is what everybody else is doing There is a whole protocol for sending books to book reviewers. That’s probably the only time you should be doing it.
Your books are expensive to produce, so I think there are far better ways to get attention for your book, and that’s what we are going to talk about this afternoon.
Dan Janal: Yes, I agree with you completely. There’s push and there’s pull, and if you try to push your book on people, it’s probably going to wind up in the dumpster. But, if you can get reporters to pull, you pull reporters into you then life is so much easier.
I think we both agree that the best way to do that is to become an expert. So why is it so important for people to become experts, and how can they use publicity to do that?
