I was asked / offered to do PR for a friend’s book. Have I done PR for books before? No. Have I promoted shows, organizations and projects I believe in? Yes! Wait, I can totally do this. It was an arduous process, but I did a good job and am proud of myself. Look, I’m acknowledging an accomplishment. My new years resolution has not yet been forgotten!
How did I do it? There is a great website for researching on the internet; think of it as google and a bag of chips. It’s called http://buzzsumo.com/. I typed in a book comparable to the one I was promoting and got over 60 websites that wrote up articles or blog posts about this original book. I then made an excel spreadsheet and researched every listing, marking down who wrote the article, finding their contact information, their twitter, facebook, notes, etc… Once I inputted all the information into an excel spreadsheet, I then sent a form letter to each reporter/blogger. The pitch was, since you wrote about X book you might be interested in writing about Y book. The trick was making the form letter seem as personalized as possible! I got a 5-10% response rate which was expected. The most exciting response was from a reporter who writes for a top tier newspaper asked for a copy of the book to be mailed to her for review. She wanted a hard copy. None of that PDF stuff. If she actually writes the review, whether it’s positive or negative that could be a big tipping point for the book to get even more publicity. Fingers crossed and pat on the back. #IWouldTotallyDoPRForMoney