RSSWriting Promotional Materials To Wrap Your Brain Around Your Book
Mar 02
A Writer's Blog Authors, Writers, Writing Comments Off
You wrote a book. The first draft is complete, resting like a quality steak, waiting for you to devour it in the editing process. Here’s some advice: This is a good time to write your promotional materials.
At some point before the publication of your book, a news release, perhaps a press interview, and other publicity documents are going to be written, printed and distributed to advertise your book. If you are a well-respected, established author, you might even have a team of industry professionals to do the publicity for you (or hire a team for a one-time effort). If you are a new author, or self-publishing, you might want to do the work yourself.
But that is the future, after the book has been edited and rewritten. Right now, the purpose of this exercise is not to finalize a news release and press interview. The purpose is to formalize the process of thinking about your book as a whole, and look at the overarching themes and give you a broad foundation of thought with which to then go and edit your draft.
In other words, it is a good way to think about your book now that the first draft is done. In your actual publicity campaign, you may rely on a lot of different written materials (including a well designed website) to promote your book. But for this exercise, we can focus on the news release and the press interview. Attempting to write out those two pieces will give a deeper understanding of your novel and help you sort out ideas of what your book is about.
Don’t worry about the format for this pieces, just write them out. You will polish them later on in the publication process.
The News Release
The news release needs to include the who, what, where, why and when of your book. All of those details should be in the first paragraph. The basic information is you, the author, your credentials (have you written another book? Are you an expert at something?), the book title, date of release, and at least one sentence that states why this book is important.
The news release should be around a page long, and the middle section should be a statement about the book. What’s the book about? Why would people want to read it? What makes you an expert on the subject? (If it’s fiction, that makes it a little harder to answer that last question, but believe me, whether you realize it or not, you are an expert).
When you write the body of your news release, you need to try and sell your book by pointing out what makes it unique. Why is this book the one book that your audience should read this year?
The second to last paragraph should be a short biography, and you can restate your credentials. The last paragraph of the news release will include all the ordering details if someone wanted to buy the book. Obviously, these two components would go in the real news release, but it’s okay if you don’t know all the details right now.
The Press Interview
Imagine interviewing yourself about the book. What would you want to say in an interview?
The easiest way to approach this document is to write out questions that you want the “interviewer” to ask, and then answer them in one or two paragraphs per question. Some of the information during your interview should be the same as the news release. But whereas the news release is typically limited to one or two pages, the press interview should be as long as you need it to be.
Here are some very basic questions that you can answer:
What inspired you to write the book?
Who is your favorite character?
Who is your target audience?
When and why did you begin writing?
What is the central theme of your book?
Who are you favorite authors? What do you love about their writing?
What is your book about?
After you have drafted a news release and a press interview, you should have a good idea what your book is about, and a better understanding of your characters and the central themes of your story. Remember, the purpose is to give you a sharp lens to use when you begin to edit your first draft.
