The Book Publicity Blog

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 for them.)

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 week I’ll be tallying what books have been covered on the national NPR shows (since all good book publicists know that a national NPR interview is almost the Holy Grail of radio publicity).

On Thursday afternoons 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, where applicable) of all the books mentioned (maybe a dozen or so) will win the NPR Books Grid.  What is the NPR Books 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.

Email your answers to bookpublicityblog[at]gmail[dot]com.