Thanks for joining me on my book promotion series of videos. There’s four in this series and they’re entitled four keys to successfully launching your book. These are part of my three-in-one bestseller boot camp bite size training sessions where I share three tips of value to people who are looking to become authors.
The first tip in my series is get yourself a professional press pack.
When it comes to promoting your book, journalists are your quickest way to market, so help journalists. They’re busy people.
They have their own lives to lead.
They’ve got lots of competing stories and deadlines and lots of things swirling around in their head that they need to deal with.
By having a professional quality press pack, journalists can just lift sections of the information you’ve put together for them and put it straight into their publications.
They can use it to inspire them as they write. They can take snippets or hints and tips from your books that you added to your press pack, and put it straight into their article, which gets people interested in your advice and the results you can get them.
Do help journalists because you will get more coverage. You’ll be able to control that coverage a lot more by giving them the building blocks you want them to use to promote you.
Always make sure you add in any contact details in the press pack so people can get in touch with you.
As always, I recommend you include as many contact methods as you possibly can whether that’s
- Skype
- phone
- face-to-face meetings
give people lots of different ways.
A contact us page on your website, for example, is a place where you can list lots of different ways for people to contact you so it’s as convenient for them as possible.
When you make it convenient for journalists to contact you, they can get in touch with you easily, find out more about you, then do their utmost to promote you.
Make your press pack downloadable.
Just because you’ve created a magnificent professional press pack, it doesn’t give you the right to send it out randomly to people with a scatter-gun approach.
You can only send it to journalists and promoters who have requested the information. Otherwise it’s a bit like spamming – and we all know that nothing kills professional standing and credibility like spam. Spam is the bottom end of marketing and the bottom end of communication. As a speaker, as a communicator, you don’t want to be associated with that, so you only offer the press pack out when it’s requested.
That said, there’s nothing stopping you putting it on your website and making it downloadable.
There’s two benefits to that.
Firstly, people might stumble across it anyway and decide to download it.
Secondly if a journalist is using their mobile phone phone somewhere and they’re trying to access their emails via mobile data, they really don’t want big attachments whizzing across the internet slowing them down as they try to do something.
Also you want to make sure you don’t hit email size/quota restrictions and things like that. It’s much better to email a link to enable people to download your press pack and access it in the most convenient way, rather their tipping their inbox into meltdown.
This approach creates a much better feel for the person who will be promoting you.
