NPR Books Watch — 1/22-1/28

Happy Friday. Anyone who emails me the imprints of all the books listed (or houses if no imprint is available) will win the NPR Books Grid for the prior week that includes, in addition to the information below, interviewer, pub date, imprint, genre, post-interview Amazon ranking, pre-interview ranking (if the book was mentioned on Shelf Awareness and I was able to look up the number before the interview), and interview hyperlink. * indicates the interview is a rebroadcast.

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TOTAL book stories for the past week: 19 (26 last week)

All Things Considered: 3 (7  LW)

Diane Rehm: 1 (3 LW)

Fresh Air: 6 (4 LW)

Morning Edition: 2 (2 1 LW)

NPR.org: 3 (6 LW)

Talk of the Nation: 2 (1 LW)

Tell Me More: 0 (1 LW)

Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me!: 1

Weekend Edition Saturday: 0 (2 LW)

Weekend Edition Sunday: 1 (0 LW)

All Things Considered	Effective Diplomacy	Denis	Antoine
All Things Considered	Bomb Power	Gary	Wills
All Things Considered	Lady in the Tower, The	Alison	Weir
Diane Rehm	Hidden Brain, The	Shankar	Vedantam
Fresh Air	How We Decide	Jonah	Lehrer
Fresh Air	Filibustering	Gregory	Koger
Fresh Air	Bomb Power	Gary	Wills
Fresh Air	Fatal System Error	Joseph	Menn
Fresh Air	Alice I Have Been	Melanie	Benjamin
Fresh Air	Gamble, The	Thomas	Ricks
Morning Edition	Power of Many, The	Meg	Whitman
Morning Edition	Hidden Brain, The	Shankar	Vedantam
NPR.org	Just Kids	Patti	Smith
NPR.org	Leftist Historian Howard Zinn Dies At 87
NPR.org	Unfinished Desires	Gail	Godwin
Talk of the Nation	Denialism	Michael	Specter
Talk of the Nation	Last Train from Hiroshima	Charles	Pellegrino
Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me!	Game Change	John	Heilemann
Weekend Edition Sunday	Girl with the Glass Feet	Ali	Shaw

Digital Book World: Get Noticed! How to Earn Attention for Every Book

Mere hours after the iUnicorn announcement yesterday, I spoke on the “Get Noticed!  How to Earn Attention for Every Book” Panel at Digital Book World together with online marketing / promotion pros @chapmanchapman, @debbiestier and @PeterCostanzo.  @katerados did a terrific job moderating.  At first I thought I’d try to summarize the panel, but then I realized this post would be more like a book.  (And besides, you can see the recap at #dwbpr.)

So I thought I’d  pick a couple questions that came up in the Q&A session after the panel that are pretty applicable to most of us, whether you’re a book publicist, an author, a literary agent or anyone else in the publishing industry.  (The following is an amalgam of what we all said plus some commentary from yours truly.)

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How do you drive traffic to author websites and social networking profiles?

If you’re going to take the time to set up these sites, you want to make darn well sure that you’re going to get the eyeballs.  Traffic to an author website is comprised (mostly) of two components:

1) searchability

2) linkability

Searchability: How do you find most websites?  How did you find this blog?  Probably via a search engine.   If you Google the term “book publicity,” for example, what do you find (in the number 1 spot, I might add)?  Why, moi!  So by dint of The Book Publicity Blog coming up in the top spot of a search of “book publicity,” I’m getting traffic.  Now, getting to the top spot isn’t so easy — those of you who know about SEO / Search Engine Optimization will know why I’m gloating — but one really easy way to improve the searchability of a site is to make sure that the book’s title and author name appear in text on the home page and also throughout the site.  (By “in text” I mean not in a picture file like a JPEG or PDF — or, God forbid, flash — because search engines are not able to “pick out” the words and therefore have no reason to list the site in a search of the author’s name or the book title.)

Linkability: The other way many people find websites is because another site they follow linked to it.  Getting those incoming links is also tricky (and involves a lot of research, communication and networking), but again, one easy way to try to increase incoming links is by making sure a site includes permalinks.  A permalink is a unique URL for a page, so this post, for example, has a different URL from the home page which has a different URL from the Contact page, etc.  Bloggers want to be able to link to one specific page; they don’t want to send readers to a home page and leave them trawling through a site for additional information.

Traffic to a Facebook or Twitter profile, on the other hand, is all about the friend / fan / follower list since obviously the more people who see your status updates / Tweets, the more people will potentially click through to your profile.  Just keep in mind that quality matters as much as quantity — if an influential person, i.e., someone with a lot of followers, links to / retweets you, your traffic will spike.

How do you make something go viral?

Sure, “viral” has a nice ring to it (as long as pigs aren’t involved), but how exactly do we go about getting something to spread like wildfire?  While the following factors are not mandatory, they sure give you a leg up.

1) great content

2) an author platform

3) relationships with online big mouths

4) access

Great content: Pretty self explanatory (but if it’s not, take a look at this book trailer, “The Amputee Rap.”  I know a lot of folks have cooled on book trailers, but I defy you to not laugh at this one.)

Author platform: How connected is the author, both online and in real life?  Does an author have a following online on Facebook?  Goodreads?  Twitter?  Do they write a popular blog?  Send out a newletter?  Have a highly trafficked website?  Do they have a recognizable name?

Relationships: It helps if the author or publicist has good relationships with people with a lot of influence online and can get them to link to / blog about / retweet information.

Access: Think about how we stop a virus from spreading, by washing our hands, for example.  Passwords / logins are the online equivalent of hand washing.  So think dirty.

***

I didn’t have time to attend other panels — I really wish I had because I know I missed out on a lot — but Digital Book World has compiled coverage of their panels.  I didn’t see links there to some of my favorite blogs (probably because the bloggers were speaking on panels and haven’t yet had a chance to post), so in the coming days, I’ll also be keeping a close eye on Booksquare, Follow the Reader, Richard Nash and The New Sleekness.

Did you attend DBW (IRL or virtually)?  What caught your eye?

NPR Books Watch — 1/15-1/21

Happy Friday.  Anyone who emails me the imprints of all the books listed (or houses if no imprint is available) will win the NPR Books Grid for the prior week that includes, in addition to the information below, interviewer, pub date, imprint, genre, post-interview Amazon ranking, pre-interview ranking (if the book was mentioned on Shelf Awareness and I was able to look up the number before the interview), and interview hyperlink.

* indicates the interview is a rebroadcast.

***

TOTAL book stories for the past week: 26 (22 last week)

All Things Considered: 7 (1 LW)

Diane Rehm: 3 (3 LW)

Fresh Air: 4 (2  LW)

Morning Edition: 2 ( 1 LW)

NPR.org: 6 (5 LW)

Talk of the Nation: 1( 3 LW)

Tell Me More: 1 (2 LW)

Weekend Edition Saturday: 2 (2 LW)

Weekend Edition Sunday: 0 (0 LW)

All Things Considered	Just Kids	Patti	Smith
All Things Considered	Free Fall	Joseph	Stiglitz
All Things Considered	After the Ice	Alun	Anderson
All Things Considered	Hell to Pay	D.M.	Giancreco
All Things Considered	Right Here on the Stage Tonight	Gerald	Nachman
All Things Considered	After the Dance	Edwidge	Danticat
All Things Considered	Dark Days, Bright Nights	Peniel	Joseph
Diane Rehm	Cost of Living, The	Mavis	Gallant
Diane Rehm	Satchel*	Larry	Tye
Diane Rehm	Summertime	Joseph	Coetzee
Fresh Air	Marketplace of Ideas	Louis	Menand
Fresh Air	Just Kids	Patti	Smith
Fresh Air	Crisis and Command	John	Yoo
Fresh Air	Crime Fiction World Mourns Robert B. Parker
Morning Edition	Remembering Erich Segal, Novelist And Sower Of Sorry-Saying Boomer Angst
Morning Edition	Talking About Detective Fiction	P.D.	James
NPR.org	Remembering Authors Robert Parker, Erich Segal
NPR.org	What We’re Reading, Jan. 20-26, 2010
NPR.org	36 Reasons For the Existence of God	Rebecca Newberger	Goldstein
NPR.org	Wench	Dolen Perkins	Valdez
NPR.org	We Two	Gillian	Gill
NPR.org	Small Wars	Sadie	Jones
Talk of the Nation	Creation	Randal	Keynes
Tell Me More	Free Fall	Joseph	Stiglitz
Weekend Edition Saturday	Passing Strange	Martha	Sandweiss
Weekend Edition Saturday	Remarkable Creatures	Tracy	Chevalier

Aging publicity practices to jettison for the new decade

Book publicity has changed a lot in the 10+ years I’ve been doing it.  Here are some things I try to stay away from these days:

Blind copying pitches.  In an ideal world, all pitches would be personalized.  But there are few (if any) book publicists who have the time to personalize every single pitch.  (Realistically, most of us do some of both.)  Still, nothing screams mass email like a blind carbon copy.  With the mail merge options available today, using the Bcc function seems crude (and doesn’t even save that much time).

Being wedded to one application for all author itineraries.  For years I used Word for author itineraries (and I still do use it for those authors who prefer it), but about a year ago, an author requested I use Google Calendar for her tour schedule and it turned out to be a life saver (given that she and two co-authors were all traveling at the same time, but not always to the same place).  These days, with more and more authors using calendar applications like Outlook or Google Calendar for their appointments, it saves them time if I provide their interview /event information in a format that doesn’t require retyping — and double checking — time that could better be spent networking online, or writing guest blog posts, or just getting some extra shut eye.

“Static” data.  Generally speaking, anything stored offline is static (my word — those of you who are more technologically savvy feel free to correct my terminology), while data stored online (on the Web or on a company’s intranet) is live.  In book publicity, we need to transmit data frequently — schedules to authors, publicity hits to editorial and sales, etc. — and we need to make sure the information is accurate and up-to-date.  Sending this information via email (or a Word attachment in an email) is quick, but it’s not long before this static information “degrades” and we’re no longer sure if it’s accurate.

The solution is to maintain a “live” source of data.  Larger publishing houses generally have network applications that allow publicists to input interview / events and other publicity information (that then generate schedules and reports and that can be accessed by others in the company).  But even publicists who do not have access to those applications can make use of free (or cheap) file-sharing applications like Google Docs and others that allow multiple concurrent users to view real-time information.

You may be wondering what that means.  It means that more than one person can access an author schedule without being locked out of a Word document because someone else is using it.  It also means there’s no ambiguity about what information has been added (or taken out of) a tour itinerary.  It means you don’t get confused about whether this version of a press release is an early version or a revised one.  (The key to file sharing, though, is that you, well, share files.  Resist the urge to download information and then save it to your hard drive — you’ve just broken the chain. )

***

How have your publicity practices changed over the years?

NPR Books Watch — 1/8-1/14

Happy Friday.  Anyone who emails me the imprints of all the books listed (or houses if no imprint is available) will win the NPR Books Grid for the prior week that includes, in addition to the information below, interviewer, pub date, imprint, genre, post-interview Amazon ranking, pre-interview ranking (if the book was mentioned on Shelf Awareness and I was able to look up the number before the interview), and interview hyperlink.

* indicates the interview is a rebroadcast.

***

TOTAL book stories for the past week: 22 (27 last week)

All Things Considered: 1 (6 LW)

Diane Rehm: 3 (3 LW)

Fresh Air: 2 (1 LW)

Morning Edition: 1 (3 LW)

NPR.org: 5 (5 LW)

Talk of the Nation: 3 (4 LW)

Tell Me More: 2 (0 LW)

Weekend Edition Saturday: 2 (0 LW)

Weekend Edition Sunday: 0 (0 LW)

All Things Considered	My Guilty Pleasure / Motley Crue	Neil	Strauss
Diane Rehm	Committed*	Elizabeth	Gilbert
Diane Rehm	Sonic Boom	Gregg	Easterbrook
Diane Rehm	Remarkable Creatures	Tracy	Chevalier
Fresh Air	Blood Money	T. Christian	Miller
Fresh Air	Sick	Jonathan	Cohn
Morning Edition	Comeback America	David	Walker
NPR.org	Farmer’s Daughter, The	Jim	Harrison
NPR.org	La’s Orchestra Saves the World	Alexander McCall	Smith
NPR.org	What We’re Reading, Jan. 12 – 18
NPR.org	Noah’s Compass	Anne	Tyler
NPR.org	Fun with Problems	Robert	Stone
Talk of the Nation	Crazy Like Us	Ethan	Watters
Talk of the Nation	Power to Prosper	Michelle	Singletary
Talk of the Nation	Game Change	John	Heilemann
Tell Me More	Divine Nine, The	Lawrence	Ross
Tell Me More	All Things at Once	Mika	Brzezinski
Weekend Edition Saturday	Swan Thieves, The	Elizabeth	Kostova
Weekend Edition Saturday	Committed	Elizabeth	Gilbert

Why authors shouldn’t contact journalists directly

Given that this is, after all, The Book Publicity Blog, every so often an author will write in asking for contact information for a show.  It may surprise you (if you’re an author — not so much if you’re a book publicist) that it’s really not a good idea for authors to be in touch directly with reporters and producers.

As an author, you’re probably thinking, “What’s the big deal?”  Book publicity isn’t exactly, say, rocket science.  In fact, you would be correct about this.  However, we do learn who to contact, how to go about it, when to do it.  We think and consider and strategize.  We research and meet and talk with journalists.  So while I’ve covered a lot of book publicity issues in this blog like how to utilize social networks or what an author website should contain, I’ve never posted about how to publicize a book because one post (or even a series of posts) will never cover that.

So book publicity is not rocket science, but there still are reasons to leave publicity to the publicists:

• As publicists, we spend careers developing relationships with journalists.  We meet with them, talk to them, alert them to interesting upcoming books.  Our contact with many journalists doesn’t consist of one message pitching one book one time.  It’s an ongoing process.
• We follow up with any combination of mail, email and phone, depending on the contact.  We want to make sure journalists are aware of a book, but we don’t want to overwhelm them.  (At least we really try not to.)
• We’re familiar with the lead times of various television and radio shows as well as with those of newspapers and magazines which vary from the next few minutes to six months and more.
• We can distinguish the book editor from the economy correspondent from the news assignment manager.  There’s very rarely only one right contact at a show or newspaper or magazine (or even some blogs).  We can find reporters who cover cruise ships.  Or Salem Radio Network affiliates in the top 20 markets.  Journalists based in Eastern Europe.  Newspapers for the Armenian community.  And a lot more.
• We’re accustomed to hearing “no.”  We’re also accustomed to not hearing anything at all most of the time.  The reality is that there are hundreds of publicists pitching hundreds of thousands of books to hundreds of newspapers and magazines and radio shows (and only dozens of national ones).  You don’t need to be a numbers genius to see that means there are a heck of a lot more of us than them.

Some exceptions:

• If you’re an author and know the journalist (and by “know” I mean you were at dinner at their house last night, not you handed them a business card at a conference), by all means: chat up your buddy (and call in a favor while you’re at it).
• Many bloggers don’t mind being contacted by authors, particularly if said authors regularly follow and comment on their blog.  Also, there’s no centralized blogger database (in part because blogs change so frequently) so anyone — like an author — who’s willing to do the leg work of digging up appropriate blogs is welcome to.

Lest you think I’m simply raining on the publicity parade, here are some suggestions for what authors should do:

• Communicate with your publicist.  Your publicist should contact you starting four-six month’s before a book’s publication.  Make sure to ask questions so you understand the publicity process and timeline.  Ask what you can do to help.  (And of course, you can also read this blog for general tips.)
• Trust your publicist.  It may be hard to believe that the publicist has so few responses from the media.  But you can see the numbers above.  Journalists can either do their jobs or their can spend their days answering our queries about books we’ve sent and authors we’re offering for interviews.  They can’t do a lot of both, which, unfortunately for us publicists, means that we don’t hear back from journalists nearly as much as we’d like to.
• Keep your contacts in a database.  Assuming you use anything that doesn’t involve a pen and paper (like Outlook or Gmail), you probably already do.  In advance of a book’s publication, publicists will ask authors for their media contacts (if any).  Rather than sending along the contact information in an email or a Word document, export the information into Excel so it can be quickly imported into publicity databases or mail merged into labels.  (Think of it like this: entering data like names and addresses in Word makes about as much sense as submitting a manuscript in Excel.)  If your publicist doesn’t provide you with a template, you can use one like this.  (And to make sure you don’t inadvertently drop leading zeros from zip codes, make sure to select the column, then select “Format” from the top menu bar, then “Cells.”  In the “Number” tab, make sure “Text” is selected.

And lastly, if you really feel that you need to supplement the publishing house’s publicity efforts, rather than diving in on your own, consider hiring a freelance book publicist.

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Questions?  Comments?  Do share.

NPR Books Watch — 1/1-1/7

Happy Friday.

Anyone who emails me the imprints of all the books listed (or houses if no imprint is available) will win the NPR Books Grid for the prior week that includes, in addition to the information below, interviewer, pub date, imprint, genre, post-interview Amazon ranking, pre-interview ranking (if the book was mentioned on Shelf Awareness and I was able to look up the number before the interview), and interview hyperlink. Happy New Year to everyone!

* indicates the interview is a rebroadcast.

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TOTAL book stories for the past week: 22 (27 last week)

All Things Considered: 6 (7 LW)

Diane Rehm: 3 (4 LW)

Fresh Air: 1 (3 LW)

Morning Edition: 3 (5 LW)

NPR.org: 5 (1 LW)

Talk of the Nation: 4 (4 LW)

Tell Me More: 0 (1 LW)

Weekend Edition Saturday: 0 (1 LW)

Weekend Edition Sunday: 0 (1 LW)

All Things Considered	Man Who Loved Books Too Much, The	Allison Hoover	Bartlett
All Things Considered	Notes from the Cracked Ceiling	Anne	Kornblut
All Things Considered	Remarkable Creatures	Tracy	Chevalier
All Things Considered	Water	Steven	Solomon
All Things Considered	Nothing to Envy	Barbara	Demick
All Things Considered	Lives of the Trees	Diana	Wells
Diane Rehm	China’s Megatrends	John and Doris	Naisbitt
Diane Rehm	Committed	Elizabeth	Gilbert
Diane Rehm	Checklist Manifesto, The	Atul	Gawande
Fresh Air	Stop Getting Ripped Off	Bob	Sullivan
Morning Edition	Year of the Flood, The	Margaret	Atwood
Morning Edition	Case for God	Karen	Armstrong
Morning Edition	Checklist Manifesto, The	Atul	Gawande
NPR.org	Committed	Elizabeth	Gilbert
NPR.org	What We’re Reading, Jan. 6-12, 2010
NPR.org	2009: The Graphic Novels That, Um … Grabbed?
NPR.org	Blio: Maybe the Future of Books?
NPR.org	ALEC	Eddie	Campbell
Talk of the Nation	Priceless	William	Poundstone
Talk of the Nation	Department of Mad Scientists	Michael	Belfiore
Talk of the Nation	Drive	Daniel	Pink
Talk of the Nation	Diabetes Rising	Dan	Hurley

Just say no

Holiday spirit notwithstanding, I’m going to go for the curmudgeonly and say that one of my New Year’s resolutions is to say “no” more.  This post was partly inspired by a reader who suggested the topic a while back, so I’m clearly not the only one with the problem.  The average person (which includes me and I’m assuming most other people) wants to helpful and courteous and that means it’s hard for us to say no.  But the reality is that we can’t do everything for everyone and it’s better to be realistic — and up front — rather than string along people with endless platitudes.  So here are some suggestions (and, as always, feel free to add your own in the Comments section).

Authors: if you’re approached by a journalist for an interview and know that you probably won’t / can’t / don’t want to do the interview, do *not* say, “Sure, I’d be happy to do the interview — you can schedule it with my publicist,” and then leave the book publicist to sort out this mess.  (Yes — it is a mess.  When an author has agreed to do an interview, the  journalist assumes the publicist is stonewalling when the interview is not scheduled.)  Instead, a polite way for you to respond to an interview query if you’re an author is to ask for more information, but remain noncommittal with, “Thanks for your interest.  I’ll have to check my schedule, but I or my publicist will get back to you.”  We’re fine with  being the ones to say “no.”  But we’d prefer not to have to do it after you’ve lied — albeit with good intentions — and expressly said yes.

Publicists: We’ve all heard the saying “all publicity is good publicity.”  Somehow, this doesn’t always quite work out.  In theory, the best way for a book publicist to turn down an interview request for an author (whether because s/he is incredibly busy, fussy or otherwise unavailable)  is to be as honest as possible as quickly  as possible (but I realize situations sometimes require a little, shall we say, finesse).

Certainly, an exception to the “all publicity is good publicity” rule is when it comes to doling out review copies — they may be free for the recipient, but the publishing house has to foot the bill.  So before sending out books far and wide, we do need to consider whether the cost of the book (and shipping) is worth the potential exposure and let’s face it: sometimes it’s not (whether because the book has been out for months — or years — because the site has virtually no traffic or because reviews are written like my second-grade book reports).

First off, it’s important for both journalists and publicists to understand that publishing houses are never required to provide review copies of books.  We do so because we think the potential exposure (“potential” because a reviewer should always have the right to not cover a book they’ve received) could help our books and authors — and ultimately, readers.  In other words, we don’t need to provide books for free … if we’re willing to forgo the potential publicity.  The reality is that this is a decision that needs to be made.

It helps if the publishing house’s website says something along the lines of “Review copies of books are provided at our discretion” or something like that, but I’ll say much the same thing if I need to turn down a review copy request.  If the person is requesting an older title (“old” for us being more than a few months since that’s when books tend to disappear from bookstore shelves), I’ll say review copies are no longer available.  With people who constantly ask for a slew of titles they clearly won’t have time to review, I simply don’t respond.  A publishing house is not a gift shop — yes, we’re wise to that game.

Media: When book publicists hear back from the media (which, admittedly, is not quite as frequently as we would like), we often are told that the outlet is passing because the schedule is full at this time or because it’s not appropriate for the publication / show.  If you’re a journalist, it’s in your best interest to be as honest as possible.  For example, if you say, “We’re booked Tuesday,” when you really mean “There’s no way in all heck my host would ever cover that book,” you may get a publicist responding with, “What Monday or Wednesday?”  It really is helpful for us to hear why you’re passing on a book / author and all good publicists will file away that information for future reference.

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How do you say no?  (Or don’t when you need to?)