As publicity budgets shrink, authors are struggling to manage their own book tours and media outreach.
Today’s guest on the Morning Media Menu was Kevin Smokler, the CEO of BookTour.com. Smokler unveiled his company’s new PressFinder tool, a directory for writers looking to contact literary journalists. He also shared advice for how to run a book tour.
Press play below to listen.
Here is an excerpt: “Our primary advice is find out who you want to cover your book. Start with as local and specific media as possible. Everybody wants to be covered by their major daily newspaper or NPR–but not everybody can. Often, those bookings come from momentum from being covered elsewhere. So start local, start small. In a pitch to these local media outlets be brief, be succinct, and illustrate a knowledge of that particular media outlet… Be polite if someone does not indicate an interest, and move on quickly.”
Smokler concluded: “For authors looking to start events, the advice we give for reaching out to venues is, again, have a knowledge of that specific venue. Know the kind of authors they like to have come by. If it is a bookstore and you live nearby, make sure you are a customer of that bookstore. Bookstores and other venues say over and over [that writers] betray no knowledge of the particular place… pitch your self within the context of that [bookstore’s] programming.”