Friday, June 23, 2006

Popular. I'll help you be popular.

At my writers' workshop last night, one of the attendees had a question about promotion. Someone had written to him, offering to promote his book, for the modest sum of $20,000. With no guarantees that anything would come of it. And he wanted to know if I felt that was a reasonable deal.

Good grief, no! That is the deal of someone trying to sucker money out of the dreams and hopes of independently published authors. (Presumably, since one of their services is to redesign your book cover, they are marketing to independents.)

So here, for those of you unfamiliar with the basics of promotion, is some help identifying a reasonable deal.

Writer Beware offers a list of common scam services (pre-publication publicity???), as well as what questions to ask to determine if someone offering one of the other services is legitimate.

There are a number of very good publicists who specialize in promoting fiction novels. Two I know of personally, because I know authors who have hired them and been highly satisfied with their work, are Theresa Meyers of Blue Moon Communications (who has lots of do-it-yourself publicity articles for authors on a budget) and Nancy Berland (who used to have great articles about what publicists did on her website, but it appears to be down for a redesign at the moment). Working with a publicist of this caliber, you could expect to drop a few thousand dollars for each effort. Theresa lists her rates by sample project on her site. If I recall correctly from Nancy's former site, she suggested $2,000 for an initial outlay, where the author's brand, image, and message were developed, and a publicity plan created, then up to $10,000 to implement that plan, depending on scope and duration.

There are also pay-for-placement publicists. These vary from the low end, where $60 can get you into a database of radio guests (and you're likely to be doing AM talk radio programs at odd hours, unless you're already famous for some reason), up to the high end like Annie Jennings PR, who routinely gets people placed in national media. If what you want is to be interviewed on national TV, she offers media training to make sure you don't blow your opportunity, then gets you on national TV (no, she can't promise Oprah). She also has a bunch of free, downloadable publicity seminars on her website. Her tips about sound bites helped me when I was preparing my RWA speech last year, and I suspect is one of the reasons I got not one, but two!, clips of my presentation included in the CBS Sunday Morning segment about the conference. So, while you could easily end up spending $20,000 for services like hers, at least you'd be guaranteed results (or you wouldn't owe her any money).

Finally, when making any decision, consider ... if the publicist you're interested in hiring does a good job, their current stable of clients will continue hiring them for all their future publicity needs. They will be taking on very few new clients. If a publicist is actively soliciting business with mass-mailings to authors, that means their former clients are no longer using their services.

Posted by Jennifer Dunne :: Link :: 1:34 PM :: 2 Comments

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