This is Part 2 of Book Publicity 101. Part 1 was posted yesterday.
How do you find the best help with publicity possible?
- Consider what you need and how much time you can put into it. Your budget may not accommodate a full-service publicist. You may not have the time to fully participate with all of those services.
- If that’s the case, consider people who will work with you piecemeal like BookinSync. You may need an online book tour. I like Denise Cassino's book launch service. Contact her at dencassino@gmail.com . It shouldn’t be too expensive to get help when you do it in bits and pieces. And when you work with others, many of the contacts you get from your service will become contacts for the life of your writing career. Or you may need help writing your first release so you can do it yourself. That kind of help is available, too, from people like Mindy Philips Lawence, mplcreative1@aol.com .
- Before you hire anyone consider their Rolodex. I'm talking about a file of contacts that are real
personal, working relationships with editors, radio hosts, etc. Ask what kind of publicity have they gotten for their other clients? Consider whether those contacts are people who might have an interest in a project like yours. A book publicist who has had mostly experience with mystery writers, deals mostly with books stores that dedicate themselves to stories about crime, and has a huge file of names of reviewers interested in psycho/thrillers probably won't be able to do you much good if yours is a literary novel. And vice versa.
As you have already guessed, you want someone who has clients similar to you. Check that out, but also check with the clients. Were they satisfied? If not, why not. Their expectations may have been different than yours. Further, if there were some gaps that you consider important, you may be able to negotiate with your newfound partner to include those services in the publicity package you are contracting for.
Am I speaking from experience? You betcha. And lukewarm results were not the fault of my publicist. She did a great job with what she had. She just didn't have what I needed! If you do your homework, you’ll be happier with your publicity campaign and your publicist will be able to help you reach your goals more quickly…and they’ll be happier with you.
