Fly on the wall: planning a teen memoir campaign
Aren’t they gorgeous?
These are the teen girls who have written the first three memoirs in our Louder Than Words series, launching this September.
The question is: how do we best reach the teen girls that we know are going to love these books.
How it happens here in this scaled down pr department is to first have a picture of how to get the word out there and then ask different pr strategists to present their ideas and help me bring them to fruition. My thought: organize a book series launch by getting the girls to participate in a webcast where they can interact with their audience live on a computer screen near you. Tell a little about their story, take questions from kids via chat boxes, twitter, and Facebook.
Sell books.
Sounds ideally like an entertaining and effective approach, but experts are warning me about how these young women may not take to the live webcast environment as naturally as say, paid actresses! Of course there’ll be none of them involved but in order for this to work, the content must be engaging. As engaging as the Louder Than Words books are, that doesn’t necessarily translate into the same for their authors.
Media training? Well, maybe…we’ll see. I’d hate to rob the young authors of their authenticity by teaching too many tricks at this stage, but, will put this on the list of things to consider.
Then there’s the technical part of the project.
For that, I’ve inquired with a couple of tech-y firms who specialize in these types of things. I listened to one of the sales guys at a webcast/web design company until my eyes glazed over. My aptitude for this medium is gnat-sized. However you slice the webcast pie, it’s expensive. In the many thousands of dollars range. So, the next course of action is to get the IT dept. at HCI to translate and make an assessment.
Sheesh.
We’re at the tip of the iceberg of planning. We know we’re late, but we have a lot of confidence in the books. There’ll be some trade exposure in Publishers Weekly and plenty of book samples at the ALA conference in July where librarians from around the country convene. These books have library written all over them.
For a little background, each girl’s story focuses on an issue: one’s mother died and father was murdered (Chelsey), one suffered from a nervous condition that caused her to pull all her hair out (Marni), and one missed an entire year of school thanks to the Nile virus (Emily).
These are true stories.
We’ve searched for a long time for teen books actually written by teens and I think we hit the jackpot.
I’ll keep you posted as the book campaign unfolds.
p.s. look for a lot of action on MySpace, FB and Twitter in the coming months.
1 Comment »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
The books sound great! Here’s a few “out there” ideas as you have numerous avenues to pursue.
… a connection with psychologists (school and private practice) is one idea.
Can you get Miley Cyrus to read it?
Are any one of the authors open to dating one of the Jonas Brothers?