SHALLA CHATS with Publicist Theresa Meyers
“Publicize Your Fiction! How-to’s”
by Shalla DeGuzman
First of all, who’s Theresa?
I’m a lot of things, a publicist, a busy mom of two under age 8, and an American Title II finalist, but what you really want to know about is the publicist.
Before launching Blue Moon Communications in 2001, I spent over ten years working in public relations at both agencies, in the corporate work and with publishers garnering millions of dollars in media coverage for my clients on national television and in daily newspapers.
I graduated with a BA in Mass Communications and believed I was going to do public relations for my career. Along the way I switched tracks and became a journalist and magazine columnist. I never had any intention of promoting books, because writing fiction was my personal passion.
I only began promoting fiction because of my good friend Cherry Adair, who asked for help with her book Hide and Seek and ended up telling everyone what I was doing. From there the line had been crossed and I began to mix everything I’d learned in the corporate and agency side of PR with everything I learned as a writer myself and formulated new ways of promoting fiction.
My agency, Blue Moon Communications is probably best know for getting two of our clients, Carly Phillips and Vicki Lewis Thompson selected as picks for Kelly Ripa’s Book Club on LIVE! With Regis and Kelly.
We’ve also gotten clients in national magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Complete Woman and Publishers Weekly and on radio nationwide.
I work with New York Times bestsellers, new authors and many of the largest fiction publishers in New York including St. Martins Press, Warner Books, MIRA Books (Harlequin), NAL, Dorchester and others. You can find out more about the agency online at www.bluemooncommunications.com where there are lots of free articles, or if you’re curious about my alter ego as a writer, you can also go to www.theresameyers.com.
Shalla: Hi Theresa, I’m glad you can tell us more about the world of public relations.
Theresa: Thanks for inviting me! I’m always happy to share.
Shalla: Well, to start, what exactly do publicists do?
Theresa: That’s a really good question. Let me start by saying that not all publicists do the same thing the same way. For example some publicists will only do mailings and call that publicity. They’ll mail copies of your book (Advance Reader Copies or galleys) or a teaser letter about your book to bookstores, your fan database, reader’s groups and reviewers. That’s not what I was trained to do.
We still do mailings for our clients, but I was trained to focus on packaging, management of a client’s multiple “publics”, and getting media hits. So my responsibilities change based on the client’s needs.
In a quick overview here are some of the activities various clients have had us handle: media training to help them learn to leverage interviews into sales, author branding to help them develop and package what they say, how they say it and what everything they do looks like, contest management, newsletter and article writing, mailings to fans, bookstores, reviewers and reader’s groups, writing and submitting speaking proposals for conferences to get them selected as speakers, writing or editing workshops they plan to give, developing and managing complete book tours, as large as 26 cities, getting print, radio and television interviews for clients, crisis management, and image consultation.
For the most part, I spend a lot of time on the phone and by email communicating with clients, the media and others in the industry.
The hardest part of being a publicist is all the follow up calls you have to make to media (sometimes as many as 20 to get one interview) and managing multiple projects on an hourly basis. The upshot is things are always changing!
Shalla: What is brand development?
Theresa: Wow, I actually give an entire month long workshop on that, but we don’t have space for that!
Basically I apply everything I learned working in the corporate world pitching consumer products and tweak it to authors’ books.
We work on building a complete package that includes not only what the author’s core is about in all their work regardless of genre, but then how to express that core in what they say in interviews and workshops, on their website and the taglines that they put on their goodies and in advertising; how everything they do looks, including their website, their goodies, and how they dress or act in public; and finally teaching them tools to get others to embrace the brand.
Basically, let me say this:
The book is not the brand. The author is the brand.
When people go into a bookstore to buy the latest novel by Nora Roberts, they don’t say “Hey do you have Red Lily?”, they walk in and say “Hey do you have the latest Nora book?” The author’s name gives us an instant connection. If I say King or Patterson, you know exactly who I’m talking about and what they write. You already have a concept in your head.
If you really want to grow an author brand, you have to focus on the development of the image associated with the name of an author so they eventually go in and start asking for your book by your name.
The process relies on three factors, 1) building an emotional connection or Velcro with your readers, 2) a perception of higher quality (which can be achieved in a lot of different ways, but awards and good reviews are some of the easiest methods) and 3) something unique or different about the brand (which every author automatically has thanks to his or her unique author voice).
Shalla: What are the best and/or easiest way to create an emotional connection with people?
Theresa: Write a book where the characters walk off the page and grab people. Seriously. That’s the first emotional connection they make to you. Now how do you get them to try that?
There is no easy way. It’s just work plain and simple, because it’s about bumping up the number of impressions they see about you. In our information-saturated society, it takes almost 20 impressions (with the exact same message each time) to get people to try something.
This is how it works: You sit down in front of the television and see a commercial for a new laundry soap. What good is it going to do if you see a commercial about a brand new soap that you've never heard of? There's very little chance you’re going to go race out and buy it especially if you like your old soap just fine, thank you very much.
Now rewind yourself to before sitting down and seeing that commercial. What if you've heard about it from some of your friends? What if you'd just seen the name of the soap in an article in a women's magazine about great new products for 2006? What if you got a sample in the mail and liked the smell?
Now imagine that you see that commercial again for the first time with all of this experience behind you. You are far more motivated to find out what all the fuss is about and possible take a chance on the new soap even if you’re still attached to your old soap.
Beyond getting them to read the book that first time, you need to make yourself seem available to readers.
They want to feel like they know you, even when they haven’t met you.
This is where things like newsletters, websites, booksignings and such make an impact. It gives them access and a feeling of connection to the author and builds that bond between them.
Shalla: Do writers really need media training?
Theresa: Only if they want to leverage the interviews into greater sales.
At this point I have to say I don’t do media training the same way a lot of publicists do either.
I take my experience as a journalist, my training with a former radio drive time host of the top station in LA, and my background in working with CEOs at multibillion dollar companies on how to get out of saying things in an interview you don’t want to, and wind it all up together and do an intensive process of 4-6 hours.
This includes messaging, how to manipulate interviews back to your message points and still maintain a sympathetic audience, how to soften up a journalist for a better interview and techniques to make authors sound and look like they have been on television or riding the air waves forever.
We do mock interviews,
I teach them the secrets that helped a little elderly lady with a life-after-death-experience book survive the Howard Stern show.
Shalla: How did you help get books in the "Kelly Ripa Book Club" on LIVE! with Regis and Kelly? Did a great pitch letter do it?
Theresa: Persistence.
The original idea to approach them came from Carly Phillips, who was a complete Kelly Ripa fanatic. She watches the show daily and saw one day when they were joking about starting their own book club because Oprah had stopped her’s. She wanted to send the book right then, but we needed more information. I got on the phone and called the show to see if they were indeed going to do a book club. No. It was only a joke.
I called back two weeks later. They were considering it but didn’t have a producer. I called every week for a month to see if they had a producer yet, and when they did, I sent two packages, one to the producer that was just what they had asked for, and a second to Kelly Ripa directly.
The one for Kelly included a cookie basket of lips, just like on the cover of the book, each one with a different phrase that described the main characters and one with a reviewer quote written in icing on the lips and a copy of the book. I kept calling, once every two weeks to see where it was in the process. It was different enough to get their attention, but the writing in the book and the design of the cover really is what got it ultimately selected.
For Vicki Lewis Thompson I already had a working relationship with the producer of the book club and had called once a month to see what they were looking for now and had anything changed.
I knew precisely what kind of book and the “look” they were going for and I didn’t send them anything that wasn’t a good fit (that’s how you show respect to a producer who spends time letting you know what they want).
When I read Vicki’s book, Nerd in Shining Armor. I knew it was a dead on fit for the producer. But we still packaged it differently.
We sent in the regular package to the producer with pitch letter, press kit, etc. and a second package, again directly to Kelly, that was a combo Hawaiian floral/spa basket with a copy of the book.
She had just returned to the show after maternity leave with her third child so on the card I put a congratulations on the baby, welcome back to the show and here’s a little something to help you relax type of note. (That way they had to give it to her since it was personal…) I kept calling and checking in to see where the book was and when it was selected the producer gave me a call.
Unfortunately Vicki’s was the last book selected by the club and there aren’t currently any plans to revive it. Kelly’s shooting schedule with Hope and Faith is taking up any extra time and they just can’t devote any more to keeping the club going since Kelly was reading all the final entries.
Shalla: Is television open to getting news about unknown authors? How about radio?
Theresa: Honestly, the general media doesn’t care that you’ve written a book. It’s fiction, therefore it’s not real, so why should they care?
If you want to get on television or radio you need to be a social commentator. You are not an author. You are an X (business owner, mother of five, former assistant to the attorney general, expert in nuclear fission, whatever), who happens to have written a book
If you can pitch and package yourself right,
there’s no reason why you can’t get on television and radio,
even if this is your first book,
or you haven’t even published yet.
There are three things you can do to capture an editor or producer’s attention: 1) point to an opportunity, 2) offer a solution, or 3) explode a myth. Of these romance and women’s fiction writers have the easiest time with explode a myth because they are rampant. How about the myth that every writer just dashes off a book in a weekend, sends it in and gets a six-figure advance (don’t groan, the media really think this!)? Or how about only frustrated housewives write fiction for women? There are lots of myths you can explode!
You also have a better chance of getting on if you tie into a holiday. If it’s Fourth of July, talk patriotism, if it’s Valentine’s talk about relationships, if it’s Labor Day talk about back to school and how its time to hit the books (for mom) again.
Authors also need to know that there are important differences in radio and television.
In radio, it ’s all about controversy.
They don’t want light (truth), they want heat (controversy).
Make the switchboard light up with people jacked up and wanting to talk about the interview or give their opinion and you’re gold to that radio producer.
It’s all vocal, so how you sound is incredibly important. If you’re writing erotic romance you better sound like a vixen on a 1-900 number rather than a mother of four.
For television, it’s pure entertainment. You need to think about the favorite talk shows you watch and how that give and take works between the journalist and the person being interviewed. What looks, mannerisms drew you in or turned you off?
Television is all about the visual so every movement, the way you look, counts for 93% of the message.
Shalla: If our publisher already provides us with an in-house publicist, should we still hire one on our own and make sure all the bases are covered?
Theresa: You have to remember one thing, as amazing as your in-house publicist is, she has one job: promote the book. Not your author brand.
She also has between 15-25 books a month to work on. Time and money are limited. Your outside publicist is focused on promoting your brand and as an extension, the book. It’s a different set of priorities.
Now not every author needs an outside publicist. But there are some ways to tell if you do. If you are spending more than 30% of your productive writing time working on promotion or obsessing over it, you need to get someone else to work on it. Only you can produce the books.
Other people can stuff envelopes, make telephone calls and update press kits. If you are planning a big push or a shift in your branding, then you probably want an outside publicist who can coordinate that. Your in-house and personal publicists should work in tandem so they aren’t duplicating any efforts with reviewers, booksignings and the like.
Shalla: What are press kits?
Theresa: Press kits are a basic tool for a publicist. You pick up the phone, pitch and author for a television appearance and they’ll ask you for a book and a kit before they’ll ever decide if they are interested. Most press kits contain the following in a glossy folder:
• A one-page Biography about the author that is snappy and contains some interesting facts as well as the basics
• A Title page that lists your past books, ISBNs, publishing date, etc.
• A Book page that shows the cover of the book (if you don’t have a cover flat to include) and the back cover blurb along with ISBN, publisher, release date and cost.
• An Awards page that shows whatever titles you’ve racked up in contests, bestseller lists, etc.
• A photo, preferably 5 x 7 with an inset caption that has your name, website and name of the book, release date, etc.
• A pitch letter
• Optional to include are supporting documents such as other article clips, RWA stats on the industry, etc.
Shalla: For our press kit, what kind of photos are best for authors? Would something gimmicky work?
Ie. If we write horror, should we wear a gothic velvet dress with a brocade? Or a picture with similar thematic and color schemes as our book?
Theresa: The best photos are the ones that support your brand image.
Want to be a NYT bestseller?
Then look like it!
You can do gimmick photos if you want, but stick with colors rather than props.
If you don’t know what you think you should do, go around to the author websites of the top people who write in your genre and look at their photos. Check on the back of books or inside the back cover to see what publisher’s are using to promote authors.
Shalla: What should we look for in a photographer? Style? Price?
Theresa: Ideally, look for someone who knows how to do a great head shot and does them for actors. They’ll be able to make you look great.
Prices are going to vary. You don’t need to spend thousands, but don’t have your hubby snap away on your digital in the back yard either (unless of course he’s a professional photographer, then use it!).
You want to work with someone who can do touch up to the photos too. Ask a lot of questions before you set up a shoot and then bring in photos you really like with you to give them an idea of what you like AND what you don’t like. That way you’ll get a better product.
Also make sure to ask if you have copyright to the photos to use for promotion or if there is a fee associated with use of the photo. Those cheap photos might cost you a lot more if you have to pay to use them every time!
Shalla: Where can we find good photographers?
Theresa: Ask around. Author loops are great places to get recommendations (and warnings!) about all kinds of services. Check on websites and you can generally find in the content section something about who the photos were taken by.
You can also look around your local area for someone who does headshots. When you call explain to them that you need an author photo for a book cover and they’ll be able to tell you if they can do that sort of thing. Some photographers also show up at writer’s conferences and do great work.
Shalla: Is it advisable to post our press kits on our website? Why? Or why not?
Theresa: You’ll want online versions of your press kit pages available on your website since a lot of the journalists will Google the author while they’re being pitched on the phone, or they’ll ask you for the website and go there directly. In this instant information access society, they don’t want to wait for it.
Also, as great as paper press kits are, they do get lost on the desks of journalists. I’ve had many tell me to resend, and they are happy when I tell them it’s online. Less paper in their office.
Also, consider getting them turned into pdf files that can be read on Acrobat Reader. That way it doesn’t matter what computer system the journalist has, they can download and read the material in your press kit.
Shalla: Is any publicity good publicity?
Theresa: LOL. I wish. The truth is that it takes 10 positive impressions to turn a single negative impression back to neutral and 10 more positive impressions to turn a neutral opinion to positive.
Bad publicity does hurt. That’s why there’s really no room for public displays of unprofessional behavior online or in public. You just can’t imagine the wildfire that can turn an author’s career into cinders with a few bad rumors or actions.
That’s part of the reason more authors need a crisis management plan as they grow into more well known brands. There’s this weird psychology out there that causes people to stir up things to fulfill a need to be somehow associated with the “rich and famous”. It’s the only reason the tabloids are in business!
There are ways to make a potential bad publicity situation into a beneficial plan, but it takes a lot of strategy and experience to know how to handle that. Just look at how Tylenol turned the cyanide incident in the 80s that nearly killed the brand to their advantage and are now the most trusted brand in the market.
The most important thing to know is in a bad situation, get your message out before the other guy does.
The first impression
always sticks hardest.
Shalla: Well, thanks so much Theresa, best to you and Blue Moon Communications.
For more on Theresa Meyers and Blue Moon Communications, please visit www.bluemooncommunications.com
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