Divining your publicity plans for the love of a catalog
Divining publicity plans? What?
In this case, “divining” is my code word for stretching truth or pulling ideas out of thin air that may or may not happen in the life of a book.
No need, however, to stretch the truth here as I try to present what the mechanism of publishing is really like.
What I’m talking about is how before we’re really ready, we are forced to prepare somewhat fictitious publicity plans for books that won’t see the light of day on a bookstore shelf for months.
All for the love of the bloody catalog, that is.
If we’re lucky, as in the case of Mary Jo Buttafuoco’s August memoir, “Getting It Through My Thick Skull,” we’ll already have heard from Good Morning America asking to be the first morning show to interview the author.
Sweet.
Remember what I said in my last post about celebrities and bestselling authors. If you’re NOT either of these animals, then media bookings don’t come so easily.
What do we do in the interim? In addition to some of the efforts we know we’ll be making to promote the future lists, we must speculate. Can we really say, “reviews in women’s magazines” when have yet to solicit such publications? Or “Multi-city book tour?” “National tv talk show appearances?”
We can. And, we do.
The only things we can be certain of as the catalog is being put together besides the occasional good fortune as in the GMA case, are promotional tactics that we pay for.
My favorite line repeated over many years in this field is: the only publicity that can be guaranteed to appear WHERE and WHEN you want it is called “advertising,” and it costs a lot of money.
Funny, clients and authors never thought that was funny.
No sense of humor.
You see, everything in publishing is about timing. As if it wasn’t hard enough to maintain the deadlines of our own departments, try being in sync with editorial, production and sales.
Catalogs must be printed way in advance of the books being published so that the sales team can present them to their buyers. Distribution of books and promotions are planned months ahead.
Those buyers need to be carefully courted and wowed by the salesperson and the “facts” on the catalog pages. If you stop and think like a buyer for a moment and you have tremendous competition for very limited shelf space, you want to make sure that you make the right picks so that books sell through to the customer.
If an author of a particular book was already booked for some huge media, you’d certainly want to stock up on it as opposed to a book on a similar topic with little or no media prospects.
As in life, the potential of a book compares not at all with the real thing.
Other factors besides big guns media will help sway a buyer to take a chance on a new author but nothing spells sure fire sales like Oprah. If authors present as people who are very active in the promotion of their book, say, touring a lot of cities, making appearances at bookstores, appearing in public on a frequent basis, this will contribute to the impression made on a buyer.
So, we do the little fibbing dance twice a year for our two celebrated book seasons and our two trade catalogs. For fall we’re writing our fantasy pr points at the new year. Spring catalogs are put together during the previous fall.
And, on and on the circle of publishing life goes.
Best guessing is the rule of of the day. We get pretty good at it.
What you might glean from this if you are an author is, the more you cultivate in the way of relationships with key media people, the better it will be for you going forward with your book. The two magic words that salespeople love to hear, and then share with their blessed buyers are “committed booking.”
Again, not so easy to get, but perhaps the difference between good distribution of your book and not.
It’s a good idea to think about the prospects you may already have or newly develop.
I hear that Oprah owns a bunch of houses.
Maybe consider becoming her next door neighbor.
If that doesn’t work, you might check out Diane Sawyer’s ‘hood.
Comments (1)1 Comment »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
We are presently putting together a proposal pitching our book, workbook, workshops, products, and marketing presentation for an agent in Vancouver.
Your article on ‘Divining your publicity plans’ was timely and important.
thanks,
g