Guest blogger Ami Greko is the director of business development for AdaptiveBlue, working with their website and browser add-on GetGlue. She has previously worked as a publicist at Viking Penguin and FSG, marketing director at Folio Literary Management, and digital marketing manager at Macmillan. She is a graduate of the 2004 Columbia Summer Publishing Course.
One of the projects I’m working on now that I’m most excited about is the Publishr ebook project. It’s a fun experiment in digital publishing, a chance try a new way of editing, promoting, and releasing an ebook. You can read all of the details here.
We had our first team meeting over the weekend, and I was thrilled when there was an overwhelmingly warm response from the other team members to my desire to do PR without pitching.
When I say ‘pitch,’ I don’t mean not have a tight, smart summary of what we’re doing. That still needs to exist, and it will–only we’ll probably call it ‘copy,’ since I bet it will live on our webpage, or an ‘elevator pitch,’ since hopefully everyone on the team will be saying it a lot.
What I want to get away from is publicity in the traditional manner: those endless emails sent to journalists you haven’t met before, hoping that lightning will strike and they’ll write about you. I hate this method of PR, and I’m willing to bet most journalists do, too.
Even more, it seems to me that using the endless-email method, even when lightning does strike and you do get coverage, what can sometimes be lacking is a spark. As a reader, I think you can tell when you’re reading an article that has the writer genuinely excited–the enthusiasm for the idea just pours off the page.
So this is my question: is it better to have five pieces of coverage, or one really phenomenal, well-placed piece?
To be honest, I don’t think there’s one blanket answer to that question. It seems to vary depending on what you’re trying to do, and who you’re trying to reach. For Publishr ebook project purposes, while we’re in pre-pub state, I’d like to aim for the latter.
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On my other old blog, which I’ve sold but am still phasing out of, I get hit up with 5 or 6 of those produce/book/service/etc pitches a week. It’s a lucrative industry, but they also little incentive to actually write about it. Some people I know publish the press releases straight when they don’t have anything else to say, but that normally comes off as what it is–uninspired.
Best PR release I got began “Post this:” and was followed by a post. No “Dear Blogger,” no “Dear Editor,” and no attempt to find out my blogging name. The presumption stuck with me, as did the topic…how to pick stocks based on your dreams. Your actual at-night-asleep dreams, not your plans for the future. I nearly posted it because it was so funny.
Full disclosure I’m on the Publishr team, however I wanted to pose a question in answer to Ami’s question here:
is it better to have five pieces of coverage, or one really phenomenal, well-placed piece?
If the “one really phenomenal, well-placed piece” is linked to across social media platforms, well tweeted/retweeted does that actually have the same coverage as the traditional five pieces?
One of the big challenges here is analytics–there isn’t really a good system for showing what sells copies of books. You’ve got ratings numbers for TV shows and radio, and can generally pull pageviews or reach together for online hits, but the magic that shows what translates into moving books across the counter just isn’t there yet.
So in lieu of these numbers, often what bosses and authors are looking for is as long a list as possible of hits. This is a reason for (although NOT an excuse of) the sort of pitches you’re getting, Ruth. Publicists are desperate for another hit.
As @bookgirl said yesterday on Twitter, PR without pitches is “Very hard b/c authors generally view quantity and not quality.”
I would actually argue that there are a lot of great publicists out there who would prefer to grow and water the one really good hit, but who are in no position to do it. And THIS is why I’m so excited to experiment with the Publishr ebook project!!