If you’re an author, whether you are working with a publicist or without a publicist, it’s very important to keep in mind that part of your success is being able to answer the who, what, why, when and how for the media and its listener base.
We’re all curious about the latest trend, breaking news, new innovations, interesting and unique people or products, and the media is exactly the same way. Imagine if you can help create a new trend with your book or ideas. Imagine giving the media a brand new angle for coverage of a saturated topic.
Creativity is key to providing the unique news-hook for your book or your platform so that the media wants to feature you. Authors must think about how their book applies to the hot issues of the day – it’s a constant and ever-changing focus. One of the basic questions to ask is, “Is my story relatable? Does my story tap into something that people are worried about or an issue that might be controversial?”
For instance, some very prevalent issues as I write this column are the environment, the economy, the oil spill, the family crisis in terms of parenting and stresses on family, diets and healthful living. Each day a new opportunity presents itself to pitch your story forward in a meaningful and news-hook fashion.
Think how you can be part of the news discussion almost in real-time, as it is happening. Don’t discount your opinion and how it might be valuable to many other associated topic interviews beyond your book.
Whether it’s hard-hitting news interviews or feature pieces, the key for you is to be able to successfully tie-in these larger issues to your book or your platform, and speak effectively on those when you are tapped by the media.
Reporters and media need credible sources, and you are the best possible source for them as long as you’re well-versed in your topic area and you are armed with verifiable facts.
The media is counting on you to be the expert, to elevate the discussion and help everyone progress to a deeper understanding of the topic or subject manner. If you think of several different angles for the story, this will help you in creating something unique from your expert perspective. Asking questions is key to this practice.
Who is important in this story? How will my interview impact the listeners, and why should they absolutely be listening? How can I effect change in their lives through this interview?
The media aims to establish significance of any story for their listener base, and they rely on their guests to help them do that. The more a news story applies to current events and topics, or is relevant to the listener community at large, the more opportunity and success you’ll have to be a featured expert.

- Image via Wikipedia
Check out this NYTimes article on the Google Books settlement – it’s not over!
I’ve been at a really interesting conference about book publishing this weekend. The two days were filled with some excellent insight and I’ll be sharing some of the tips out of the conference with you this week, along with links to the folks who put the event on.
While you’re waiting check out Mark Effinger’s company Rich Content and read his company story. We all know I’m a giant fan of folks using PRWeb so there’s an interesting piece on it too at the site.
Check back on Monday!
10. I’m funny.
9. What’s a query? Can you define it?
8. I have no experience in that subject, but I know I could write an amazing book about it.
7. I don’t need no stinkin’ editorial suggestions.
6. When you say, “That’s not funny,” are you kidding?
5. Couldn’t you just take this book idea because you like me, you really like me?
4. It’s like we’re on a first date, and my Southern accent is overwhelming you.
3. But if you just spent a day with me – you’d know how funny I am.
2. If you don’t take this book I WILL FIND YOU.
1. It’s just like Eat, Pray, Love but less eating, much less praying and bereft of love.
Go on and get your query on.
If you only read one thing today it should be this great insight from BK on how to ensure success on Amazon.
“I wanted instead to write books that were fire and ice, wind sweeping the earth. I wanted to write books that, once experienced, could not be forgotten, books that would be cherished as we cherish the most exquisite light we have ever seen. I had contempt for anything less than this perfect book that I could imagine. This book that lived in my imagination was small and perfect and I wanted it to live in person after person, forever. Even in the darkest of human times, it would live. Even in the life of one person who would sustain it and be sustained by it, it would live. I wanted to write a book that would be read even by one person, but always. For the rest of human time some one person would always know that book, and think it beautiful and fine and true, and then it would be like any tree that grows, or any grain of sand. It would be, and once it was it would never not be.
In my secret longings there was another desire as well, not opposite but different, not the same but as strong. There would be a new social order in which people could live in a new way. There would be this new way of living which I could, on the edges of my mind and in the core of my being, imagine and taste. People would be free, and they would live decent lives, and those lives would not be without pain, but they would be without certain kinds of pain. They would be lives untouched by prisons and killings and hunger and bombs. I imagined that there could be a world without institutionalized murder and systematic cruelty.
I imagined that I could write a book that would make such a world possible.”
–Andrea Dworkin, 1978






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