From Juleyka Lantigua at GIANT: We’re looking for top summer fiction and non-fiction books to include in our June/July issue. Our audience is urban/African American/20s-40s. We’d like to review books that will pub between May and August. Please send me your top 3 picks for consideration.
Send books to:
Juleyka Lantigua
Managing Editor
GIANT Magazine
50 East 42nd Street
14th Floor
New York, NY 10017
Every time I attend a marketing meeting I’m always asked the same question: what have the national NPRs said? Often enough, contacting producers is like banging my head against a brick wall. I email, I use the pitch page, I sometimes call (depending on the book / producer) or resend a book with glowing reviews. Still banging head against wall …
Now, I work on some pretty terrific books published by a well-respected imprint, so I know it’s not the books. I also know that of the 100,000+ authors published each year, the national NPR shows interview about 600 of them — (I’m estimating a dozen interviews per week) — which is a whopping .006 percent. In other words, getting on a national NPR show is about 15 times harder than getting into Harvard. (And on the other side of the fence, the national NPR producers are dealing with 15 times more “applications” than the Harvard admissions office. Not pretty.)
So I thought it would be fun — and informative — for all of us book publicists to keep track of how many books are actually covered each week. Every Friday I’ll list all the author interviews on the national NPR shows and will keep a running tally for each show. Unfortunately, the NPR Books pages doesn’t always list imprints for books, so that’s where you come in. Send me the imprints of the books listed and I’ll give you the NPR Books Grid for the week. (Check the NPR Books Watch Contest page on the upper right-hand corner of this blog for details and to see what exactly the Book Grid contains — trust me, you’ll want it.)
Here’s how Week 1 shook down:
TOTAL: 18 interviews
ATC (4): March 8 Christopher S. Stewart / Hunting the Tiger, March 10 Robert Leleux / The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy, March 11 Mireille Giuliano / French Women Don’t Get Fat (You Must Read This column), March 13 Ceridwen Dovey / Blood Kin
Fresh Air (3): March 11 Steven Waldman / Founding Faith, March 12 Robert Schimmel / Cancer on $5 a Day, March 13 Dan Kennedy / Rock On
ME (3): March 10 Jane O’Connor / Fancy Nancy, March 11 Scott Simon / Windy City, March 14 Hillary Jordan / Mudbound
Day to Day (2): March 11 Bejamin Skinner / A Crime so Monstrous, March 13 Ann Harrington / The Cure Within
WESat (2): March 8 Li-Young Lee / Behind My Eyes, Sadie Jones / The Outcast
The Bryant Park Project (1): March 13 Kate Torgovnick / Cheer
ToTN (1): March 12 Stephen King / Dark Tower, Illustrated, March 13 C. Vivian Stringer / Standing Tall
News & Notes (1): March 10 Susan L. Taylor / All About Love
Use the hyperlinks to listen to the shows — learn what hosts like / cover so you can fine tune your pitches (and so you know how to respond the next time you’re asked what the national NPRs said).
The Navigator reports that the AP is adding bodies to its Atlanta bureau: “Brian Carovillano, Lisa Pane and Oscar Dixon will join the Atlanta bureau of the Associated Press in April. Carovillano is currently the news editor for the San Francisco bureau and will become the South editor. Pane will take over as the South deputy editor and now serves as the supervisory editor for the New York office. Dixon will serve as the South sports deputy editor and previously worked as a sports columnist and assignment editor for USA Today. For more information, call 404-522-8971.”
The significance of this is that Atlanta is home base for most reporters who cover any Southern issues (including books about the South/Southern authors).
Media news was a little light this morning (excluding the Spitzer boondoggle stories), but no matter. As I was brushing my teeth last night, I came up with the idea — all my good ideas come up when I’m near running water not that you asked – of tallying what books have been covered on the national NPR shows each week (since all good book publicists know that a national NPR interview is almost the Holy Grail of radio publicity.) Here’s how it’ll work.
Every Friday afternoon I’ll post a roundup of the national NPR book stories of the week. The first person to send me the imprints (not publishing houses but imprints) of all the books mentioned (rarely more than a dozen) will win The Grid. What is “The Grid”? The Grid is an Excel spreadsheet listing the titles, authors, subjects, shows, interviewers and post-interview Amazon rankings of all the book stories for that week. For those of you who know how to use the alphabetize function in Excel, you’ll know that you can then organize the columns to see which shows or interviewers have been covering the most books in what subjects. If tracking down the imprints of these books sounds like a wild goose chase to you, think of it this way — regardless of whether you win The Grid, you will have just familiarized yourself with all the national NPR book stories for that week.
First roundup to be posted later today, so check back soon …
For some time now, I’ve closely followed a lot of very informative sites about media and about the publishing industry. Since I find myself quite voluble at times about issues that pertain to my job, I thought I’d set up a book publicity blog. The purpose of this blog is provide tips, primarily, but also information about publishing / marketing trends that will help book publicists — and hopefully others in media and publishing — do our jobs with greater ease and efficiency.
I encourage you to subscribe to my feed, but I also send out a daily newsletter with content from this blog. To subscribe by email, contact me at bookpublicityblog[at]gmail[dot]com. To unsubscribe, well, you know what to do.
