How Do I Get Media Attention From My Book?

Mar 03, 2021

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Your Book is Not Newsworthy
How I Did This
How Ryan Holiday Does This
How Cameron Herold Does This

Your Book is Not Newsworthy

It is not a newsworthy event except for your mother. Unless you're J.K. Rowling or Brene Brown or one of these people, nobody cares that you have a book out.

It used to be different. Back when I first got into this, it kind of was newsworthy when people had books out.

But essentially it's quite self-obsessed of us to believe our book is newsworthy to anybody. So you need to give the media a reason to cover you. And since journalists and TV bookers are often overworked and underpaid, coming up with a way to do their work for them is the most effective way to do it.

How I Did This

With my most recent book, I said, "OK, I have written a book about writing and making a messy life into a memoir. What on earth does that have to do with the news?"

I thought about the pandemic and how statistics about depression were rising all the time. And so I corralled a couple of those news stories and studies about that and thought about writing has been very healing for me.

So I came up with a pitch about how writing about what we're going through can help us heal. And then I had a publicist friend pitch that to Good Morning America. And I was able to go on to Good Morning America and talk about how writing helps heal our depression.

That idea is not anywhere in my book. And it didn't matter because they introduced me as New York Times bestselling author of this new book, Make Your Mess Your Memoir. They showed the cover.

How Ryan Holiday Does This

Ryan Holiday talks about something called News Jacking, which was apparently popularized by somebody named David Meermin Scott. And basically, you make the news. When Ryan Holiday sold his first book, he wasn't known as a writer so he wrote the then existing website Gawker and pretended to be someone else, talking about how that guy Ryan Holiday got a book deal.

And then Gawker wrote about it. And then he sent the Gawker piece to someone else. And he really knew how to how to snowball it and make himself the news. So think about your book.

We are publishing at Launch Pad a memoir about somebody with a special needs kid, so we could pitch an outlet on the impact covid has had on parents who are already overburdened.

If you have a self-help book on the importance of meditation and it's near the new year, pitch an outlet, a story about making a New Year's resolution to meditate—basically you come up with the story.

How Cameron Herold Does This

Previous podcast guest Cameron Herold has a book called Free PR and he says go to Twitter, look up hashtags of who's tweeting about your book topic, identify those journalists and if you can't reach them on Twitter, find their email addresses, maybe on a site like Hunter IO.

But journalists are very active on Twitter so you can tweet at them. And what Cameron does is he gets their numbers and he calls them and says, "Hey, do you have two minutes? I think I have a good story for you."

He also talks about looking at how what you are teaching in your book, if you are, in fact, teaching something in your book and how it has helped people wherever they live.

He talked about he has somebody who ranks as the number one service in Cincinnati who loves the content of Cameron's book. So he would contact all the Cincinnati business media about how his book content helped this local company. And I think that that's what's really important: You don't think, "Who cares about local news? I want national news." It's all online and local leads to national.

Cameron also talks about using each media hit to its maximum advantage. So that can mean oftentimes driving paid traffic to that story or really it can just be posting it multiple times. He says that he'll post a podcast interview at least five times on Facebook over the next year, five times on LinkedIn, share it five times on Twitter, link to it on the press page of his website and then have it go out on his newsletter list and ask his team to put it on their social media.

And there are programs and websites where you can do that. Lately, which is about a hundred and fifty dollars a month, uses AI so you can basically put a URL for some interview you did into Lately and it will then come up with 40 different social media posts based on the content that's in that and then schedule them over the next however long period of time.

It's not about getting the media hit and forgetting about it. It is getting the media hit, using that media hit to get bigger media and then sharing it.

HERE'S HOW I CAN HELP YOU WHEN YOU'RE READY: