The idea of working to generate publicity for your book may seem a little old-fashioned, maybe even irrelevant. After all, publicity isn’t an exact science, and doesn’t come with a tracking link or the concrete numbers offered by digital advertising. But what can’t be easily measured can still make an impact, as long as it’s attempted with creativity and care. In this post, I’ll discuss how publicity can benefit your author platform, then walk you through how to research relevant media outlets and craft pitches that illuminate the most interesting aspects of your work.
Is book publicity worth it?
When I asked Ricardo Fayet, Reedsy cofounder and the author of How to Market a Book, for his thoughts on the value of book publicity, he suggested it’s shifted in the past two decades, especially in terms of the power of reviews:
While previously, getting a great review in an established publication may have been enough to drive a significant amount of sales, it’s rarely the case today. However, a great review from an established source can be a powerful catalyst for your marketing efforts. You can include it in your blurb, in your editorial reviews, in your ads, and amplify their effectiveness.
Publicity, in other words, still acts as a marker of authority and credibility. Combined with paid marketing efforts, it is actually very far from powerless or irrelevant. The reason is that publicity isn’t something you can pay for, unlike advertising — a media source has to decide that you or your book are worth their attention, and in sharing your work with their audience, they put trust in your book and your abilities.
In turn, that can bolster your short-term marketing efforts, sow longer-term seeds for your writing career by boosting your author platform, and lead to name recognition that can benefit your sales.
How do you get started publicizing your book? Take it from Rebecca van Laer, author of the novella How to Adjust to the Dark: “The key to getting publicity is asking: Unless you take intentional action to make it happen, you can’t expect outlets to discover your work in advance of its release.”
But how do you ask, and who do you pitch your book to? Let’s go through the process one step at a time.
1. Write down key themes and keywords for your book
Depending on whether you’ve written a fiction or nonfiction book, your first step should be to take a step back from the complexities of the plot or the contents and remind yourself how you’d present it to someone who has no idea what it is about.
Think in terms of a one-line pitch:
- “A lesbian young adult rom-com about two adoptees who meet in a therapist’s waiting room”
- “A humorous how-to book teaching craftspeople how to turn their hobby into a business”
- “A medical memoir from a doctor’s perspective sharing insights about life from the terminal patient ward”
- “A cozy mystery set in Kingston, Jamaica, where an amateur grandmother-granddaughter sleuth duo investigates the disappearance of a schoolteacher”
If you’ve already crafted your description copy for your book pages on retailer sites, you’ll know keywords are often emphasized as helping retailers’ algorithms categorize your book correctly and making it more discoverable in searches online. This sounds complicated, but choosing keywords is a simple task at its core: By listing out all the terms you could use to instinctively describe your book, you can foresee the type of search you’d like your book to appear in and increase your chances of reaching your audience.
Pitching a book to the media begins from a similar place, where you must remind yourself of your book’s broader topics and what spheres of reader interests you could tap into. To take my first example above, the topics and subtopics you could associate with that hypothetical book would be: young adult romance, rom-coms, humor, lesbian fiction, LGBTQ+ fiction, adoption, adoption in romantic relationships, questions of identity, meet-cute, and mental health.
More broadly, consider the form of your work: is it a novel, novella, short story or poetry collection, memoir, nonfiction book, or experimental hybrid? Few outlets are interested in everything, so you’ll need to bear this in mind when you narrow down relevant places to contact.
Once you arrive at a list like the one above, you’ve gathered several avenues you can approach your work from in terms of publicity. Your next step is to make sure you’re acquainted with the formats publicity can take.
2. Know the formats used by media outlets
When you know what kind of results your efforts can lead to, you’ll be better equipped to visualize where exactly your book can fit and with what angle. For that reason, it’s worth pausing to look at the types of publicity you can earn for your book.
The majority of public attention for authors comes in written form: newspaper or magazine articles, online or in print. It makes sense, since people who like to read are naturally the most relevant audience for books. But there are many ways to “generate publicity” for your book beyond the classic method of getting reader reviews. Below, I’ve listed a variety of article formats, along with some examples you can check out:
- Book lists, e.g. 9 Books About the Reality of Life on the Internet, a list I wrote for Electric Literature.
- Author interviews, e.g. this interview with Molly McGhee in BOMB.
- Personal essays, e.g. this Slate essay about releasing a novel with a publisher whose employees are striking by Dan Kois.
- Features or opinion pieces, e.g. this Guardian article on why we find cuteness irresistible by Joshua Paul Dale, author of Irresistible: How Cuteness Wired Our Brains and Conquered the World.
- Book excerpts, e.g. this excerpt from Banana Yashimoto’s novel The Premonitions, published in Literary Hub.
Beyond online and print publications, you can also generate publicity through audio and video, via podcast, radio, YouTube, or TV appearances. Some examples of that in action:
- TV, e.g. this appearance of Mark Dawson on BBC Breakfast
- YouTube, e.g. this interview with Pierce Brown on the YouTube channel Mike’s Book Reviews
- Podcast, e.g. this interview with Kate Sawyer on the Two Lit Chicks podcast
- Radio, e.g. this interview with Paul Holes on NPR
It’s worth noting there is no one superior format — each one has its advantages, and a lot depends on the reach of each outlet, as well as how niche their audience is and how good a match they are to your book. TV may reach a lot of people, for example, but no one guarantees they’re people who read books.
At this point, it’s time to open up your notebook or spreadsheet and write down any outlets you can envision your book mentioned in. Including major TV channels or prestigious publications is fine, but make sure to balance them out with smaller, more niche magazines or websites that are more likely to champion unknown or debut writers.
To build up this list, you can turn to some case studies in your genre, as we’ll discuss in the next step.
3. Study how authors similar to you have publicized their work
Good news: You’re not the first person to publish a book in your genre, which means you can use Google to study the publicity efforts of your peers. This is extra handy if you’re doing this solo, without the assistance of a publicist, because by studying the publicity another author in your genre managed to get, you can get a good sense of where your book may also fit.
Where are they doing interviews, where have they published articles? What works for them? You can find most of the information you need online, but if you know authors working in the same genre personally, you can also ask them directly.
Rebecca van Laer was generous enough to talk to me about her approach to publicizing her own work as a useful case study — she began by putting together a mini press kit in the form of a Google Drive folder that contained the cover of How to Adjust to the Dark, a digital ARC, and a press release from her publisher.
Then came the research:
Next, I made a spreadsheet of contacts. How to Adjust to the Dark is hybrid literary fiction blending poetry and prose. With that in mind, I made a list of literary magazines that feature hybrid work and independent press titles, as well as individual reviewers who’d covered comparable authors like Anne Boyer and Amy Berkowitz. I also contacted friends and acquaintances who regularly interview authors. I reached out to all of them with a brief email showing my familiarity with their work and explaining why I thought my book would interest them.
Whenever someone did express interest, Rebecca offered to send them physical ARCs. Rebecca’s outreach resulted in an interview with Longleaf Review, which features hybrid work; a playlist on Largehearted Boy, which regularly covers indie press titles; appearances on “most anticipated” lists from The Millions and Nylon; and close to a dozen other pieces of coverage within six months of publication. What’s more, this coverage set some word-of-mouth recommendations in motion — “I’m convinced that earned publicity also laid the groundwork for some organic traction in the form of one particular TikTok that definitely boosted my book sales!”
@brittanyvwilder Maybe my favorite read of the year so for. If you are a poet/love poems, it’s a must read.
Depending on the nature of your book, your list should include websites, magazines, and any publications where your book may be relevant. Once that’s ready, it’s time to get in touch with them.
4. Craft individualized pitches for each outlet
Now that you know broadly what your book can be pitched in relation to, what form this can take, and which publications will consider it relevant, you can begin to craft individualized pitches. You’re doing two things here: pitching your book as an interesting and worthy subject, and in most cases, offering an angle from which the publication can approach it.
Here’s where you draw from your list of related topics. Electric Literature, to give you an example, often publishes thematic book lists written by authors who include their own books in the list, too. If your book aligns with Electric Literature’s focus on literary fiction, you could pitch them a list of books in your niche, e.g. “7 Books About Queer Adoptees.” In your pitch, you’d mention you are an author, briefly pitch your book, and say you’d like to include it in the list. If you’re wondering what a pitch can look like, this free library of example pitches created by Journo Resources is incredibly helpful.
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Just like a good query letter to an agent, a strong pitch will be personalized to each outlet you contact. You can do that by naming existing articles of theirs your proposed piece would complement, or point out a gap your story would fill. Bonus points if you can tie your pitch to a current event or issue: The Joshua Paul Dale piece from The Guardian I linked to earlier, for example, uses the Barbie movie as a jumping-off point from which to discuss the central issues of his book.
Of course, your pitch will be strengthened if you spend some time studying the formats the publication publishes, following any pitching guidelines they provide, and adjusting your ideas accordingly. Keep in mind you’ll need to show your target publication the value you can bring to their readers, not just the value that publicity can bring to you.
When reaching out to offer your book for review, try not to overthink your pitch. According to Tom Bromley (former publisher, ghostwriter, and currently the instructor of Reedsy’s novel-writing course), the key is clarity: “Pitches are going to pass through so many hands and get mangled down the line that the clearer the pitch, the more the central message will hold. Finding little hooks or memorable phrases always helps.” Keep it concise and focused.
With your list of publications and individual pitch ideas at hand, you’re ready to start pitching your book — but it’s also good to keep your efforts organized and get a second opinion whenever possible.
5. Bring your ideas to your publicist, publisher, or a spreadsheet
If you’re traditionally published and have a publicist you can collaborate with, they will do some brainstorming of their own, and will have outlets and contacts to suggest. That doesn’t mean you should do nothing, though — your collaboration will be a lot more effective and efficient if you show up having done your homework, and bring your own ideas to the table. After all, you know your book best.
It’s also crucial to provide your personal contacts to your publicist — to quote Tom Bromley, “Anyone and everyone whose contact details authors can pass on to the publicist is potential gold dust.” Spend some time thinking about your contacts so you don’t have to come up with names on the spot in your first meeting with a publicist.
If you’re published with a small or indie press that can’t pair you with a full-time publicist, or you’re self-published, it’s still worth discussing your plans with any fellow writers willing to listen. They may have additional ideas for outlets you can contact or insights into the kinds of pitches each publication is looking for.
With or without a publicist’s contribution, keep your publicity efforts organized by tracking all of your ideas, pitches, and updates in a single spreadsheet. Record an email address for each entry — you’ll find these listed on “Contact Us” pages on outlet websites, or sometimes on Twitter/X, when individual editors put out calls for pitches relating to their section. As a general rule, if you can get a hold of a particular editor’s email, you have a better chance of hearing back than if you contact a generic “info@[outletname].com” address — but if individual emails aren’t listed, it’s still worth the attempt. When you send out a pitch, make a note of the date so you have a sense of how long you’ve been waiting for a response, and when to follow up.
Rejection is part of the process, so don’t let a handful of rejections put you off contacting any more people. Like querying agents or submitting stories to literary magazines, this is very much a numbers game, where patience and perseverance pay off.
Remember publicity works best when combined with classic marketing methods: running price promotions, advertising, alerting your mailing list about a new release, organizing giveaways, and so on. Successful book promotion depends on both, with publicity adding weight to all the paid efforts you make.
The views and opinions expressed in this guest post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of BookBub.
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