Solving the Riddle of Book Publicity

Public Relations’ expert Penny Sanservieri talks about the facts and fiction which surrounds the PR Industry. What is publicity? What is Public Relations? What does this all have to do with the self-publisher? Is Oprah for everyone? Does publicity pay for itself? Find out the answer to these as well as other questions concerning this confusing part of the publishing process. The following is the transcript of a Publishing Basics Radio interview aired earlier this year. If you would rather listen to this interview, you can find it listed under Past Shows at www.WBJBRadio.com.
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Ron Pramschufer: Now, let’s start with a real simple question here. What is publicity?

Penny: Publicity is when you’re dealing with the media, so you’re publicizing a book, through either print or broadcast media. Book marketing can be anything in between, and we can define that further on during the interview, but publicity deals exclusively with dealing with the media.

Ron Pramschufer: Dealing with the media?

Penny: There’s a whole fuzzy area because people call publicity everything.

Ron Pramschufer: Yeah, I think that’s the problem I’ve got. I mean, I think I’m one of those people.

Penny: I am a publicist, but I’m also a book marketing specialist, but one of the reasons that I delineate that; I separate the two, is because they really are two separate issues. I have books that really don’t have a place in print or broadcast media that are better served in other avenues, and so it’s important to separate the two because, a lot of times, the author ends up buying into something that they don’t really need.

Ron Pramschufer: Okay, so now, the definition – you said you were a publicist, so what exactly is a publicist?

Penny: Well, a publicist deals with the media. A publicist defines the story, creates the story, if necessary, sells the story, sends the story out to the media, and in more cases, especially in our current environment, are actually sort of cooking onto an existing story in media, which is a lot easier. It’s much easier to get publicity that way than creating something new and trying to get the media interested.

Ron Pramschufer: Okay, so now, I just published a book, and let’s just say it’s a non-fiction book, and I’m qualified to write the book. Should I hire a publicist?

Penny: Well, that’s really gonna depend on your audience, and you know, one of the biggest mistakes, I think, that authors make is they think that, well, okay, now I have a book, and I’m gonna need a publicist, and really, what you need for the book is going to depend on the audience, and it’s really gonna depend on the reader.

As an example, a few years ago, we had a book that was about busy moms. It’s finding time in your day, busy moms; you know, that whole conversation about that, and the author came to us and said, “Oh, you know what? I’ve been doing all this radio and I’ve been doing all this radio, and I haven’t really been selling any books.” She’s been doing all this morning drive time and some pretty major stations, and I said, “Well, it’s probably because your reader isn’t listening to radio in the morning.

They’re driving their kids to school, then maybe they have something else, maybe a CD. Your reader is probably going to maybe peruse a magazine at a pediatrician’s office or a doctor’s office or something like that,” so you really need to take a look at where your reader is because a lot of times, what happens is the author goes out and says, “Okay, gee whiz, I really want to be on Oprah,” but you know what? If your reader isn’t watching Oprah, it doesn’t make any sense to get on the show, nor will they put you on the show.

So one of the biggest things is defining who your reader is, and we do something in our company called profiling or we profile, and what it does is it defines the reader, just like you would define a character in a novel, and you go through the steps of re profiling who your reader is and where they shop; what are their hobbies; what do they do; if they watch television, what do they watch? Are they reading magazines or are they spending more time in associations? Is that really where you wanna market to?

And what that does is it helps to cut away all the extraneous stuff that authors can spend, quite frankly, a lot of money on. That’s one of the first things they do.

Ron Pramschufer: Okay, now does part of this readership survey include; there’s not a person on this earth that’s gonna read this book? I mean, one of the big problems we got out there is like 50,000 new books published every year and probably 49,000 of them don’t have a market beyond the person-to-person’s family and friends and neighbors or whatever.

Penny: Exactly, and you know, Ron, that’s a really good question because people need to be really honest. When you write a book, one of the first things that you need to look at is; you know, what are my goals for this book? If you have written a wonderful book that’s gonna be sold; that you’re going to give away at your family reunion and that’s the end of it, then you need to be realistic about that. You need to not be spending thousand and thousands of dollars sending this book out to markets that aren’t going to be interested in that, so you really need to decide what your goals are early on.

Figure out exactly what you want for this book and be really realistic. Sit down with somebody, who can be objective for you. Don’t sit down with your mom because mom loves everything you do.

Ron Pramschufer: Okay, now if I sit down with you; okay, I send this off. Penny, I just heard you on the radio here; I think I want you to help me. How does that whole process start?

Penny: Well, one of the first things that I’ll do is I’ll take a look at the book and I’ll take a look at the marketability of it and how saturated or not the market looks. What other books are out there on this topic; how well have they done, and then, truthfully, one of the things I do with the books that I get in is I read everything that I get, and I don’t take anything that I don’t absolutely love.

So I’m not tied to one particular market over another, and I know that a lot of book market people pick a niche, which we don’t, and then I’ll have a call with the author and I’ll say, “Listen, here is where I think we can go with this,” and that could be anything from, as I was saying, going out to maybe associations, doing a broader publicity campaign, where we’re going out with a six-month national media campaign, doing something that we’ve been doing a lot of and quite successfully, which is a virtual author’s world, where the only place that the book is out to is on the Internet because they have to really be aware the audience looks at that book.

Ron Pramschufer: Okay, so now, I just wrote my book on, I land on Iwo Jima or something; I’m one of the military types. Where do we get down to what you’re gonna do for me and what’s it gonna cost me?

Penny: Well, once we decide exactly what the markets are and what you can do with the author because some authors have day jobs, and they say, “Listen, I can’t really tour the country; I can’t do a whole lot of stuff,” then we start to break it down, and we say - okay, there’s certain things that you really want to do for every book.

First off, one of the things that I very much believe in are book reviews, even though the book review window is shrinking, and anybody that’s out there knows this; I mean, how many times have you gone out and bought a book or not bought a book or gone to see a movie based on a review?

Ron Pramschufer: Oh, absolutely.

Penny: So then book reviews are really important, but don’t just have an eye for Publishers Weekly or the New York Times. Take a look at some really focused markets; like, let’s say, for example, let’s go back to the military market. You know, you’ve got all kinds of military magazines that go unpacked. That’s one of the first things that I would do is I would break this down, and sometimes, the author comes to me and says, “Listen, you know what? I’ve already done the book reviews. What else can I possibly do?”

If we’re doing publicity; if we’re gonna go out and do some meeting of relations, I will try to position this on a date; now, we’re right in the middle of a number of 60th anniversary, WWII dates, and I’ve got a WWII book that we’ve been working with, but I mean, I position books on December and things like that because, again, it’s much easier to get someone interested in your topic if they’re already talking about it, so if we’re coming up on a holiday, let’s start to position the book with that holiday, whether it’s print or broadcast; whatever it is that you’re going after.

Ron Pramschufer: Okay, but how do you get paid? Not you in particular; I guess you in particular or publicists in general; I mean, is that all paid by the hour; paid by the show that I get on?

Penny: It depends. We don’t do the pay per play. I know that some publicists out there do the pay per play. We work by the hour and by the project. We break it down into packages, so it’s not just, okay, we’re gonna do the broad walk of promotion across the country. Again, if it’s not right for the book, well, we’re not gonna push it on the author. We can do just a book review. We can do just radio if the book is right for radio. We can do just television; we can do just print; we can do just the Internet promotion, and one of the reasons I broke it down that way is that I felt that it made more sense to the author. I mean, I’m an author, so when I structured my business, I wanted to have something that was really appealing to an author, where they didn’t have to get everything if they didn’t need everything.

Ron Pramschufer: Okay, because most of them; there’s money in them. I mean, I see big retainers, $500.00, $5,000.00, $10,000.00 a month and six-month contracts and all; These are people that are pitching book people, but they aren’t the book people that I generally run into, so with a service like what you do, could I realistically, for a couple thousand dollars, expect to get something other than a canceled check?

Penny: Yeah, absolutely; I mean, we have projects that start out at $625.00 just for a project. That’s not for a retainer, and then they go up from there. Retainers will run anywhere from maybe $1,200.00, $1,500.00 on up. Again, it depends on how aggressive the campaign is; where the author wants to go and all of that, but the retainers are really reasonable – I know that a lot of publicists will not work for anything less than six months, which I really understand because it’s very difficult; I would rarely see an immediate turnaround unless the book is already out there; we’re kicking in at the latter part of the campaign. I would really see a turnaround or something comes back in the first 90 days, and it’s because it takes a while for this tree to start bearing fruit, and that’s where authors get hung up.

We did a study, actually, in our company when we found that authors would typically promote themselves for 90 days. On the 91st day, they give up because they don’t really – nobody’s really sat them down and said, “You shouldn’t expect miracles in 90 days. This is the time when you need to just really use some muscle and do some hard work and expect the results to come later.”

So really; I mean, they really do have to stick with it. Now, we have a minimum of 90 days on a retainer.

Ron Pramschufer: Okay, so that’s minimum, but what you’re saying though; you’re kind of setting yourself up for disappointment if you’re only thinking of 90 days.

Penny: Yes, but we – and we have that talk with out authors, and we say, “Okay, we’re gonna commit to 90 days. Here’s what you can realistically expect.” This is not the conversation we have with all of our authors because, again, if you’re coming to me, and, let’s say, Ron, you’ve got your book, and your book is already out there and you’re looking at doing a 90-day promotion around, let’s say, a major holiday, you’re gonna have a whole different line of results than the author who is coming to us in a pre-publication date type of a thing.

So that is typically what we’ll do, but usually, we see authors six to eight months.

Ron Pramschufer: You know, me as an author, coming to you; with a publicist or PR firm, how do you measure the value – you know, the idea is to keep more people happy than unhappy. How do you do that?

Penny: Well, I think that for all realistically, and every PR person knows this; I mean, you get back about 5 percent – you know, whatever you pay, 5 percent of it comes back to you; media saying that we want to interview you, so you’re always out there, and you’re always grinding, and no publicist can or should give guarantees to an author, but if an author’s out there and shopping for a publicist and if they give you a guarantee, then you should run the other way because nobody can expect that for sure.

Ron Pramschufer: Okay but I’m thinking – I’ve been a commission salesman most of my life. I’ve had months in my life where I made a lot of money, and I made the employer happy but it was real simple; I mean, he didn’t pay me if I didn’t sell anything. How about would you even consider taking on something, say, on a commission of the number of books sold as a result of your publicity?

Penny: Typically, publicists will not accept a commission on books, and I have been asked this many, many times. Once of the reasons is because a lot of the work that I do tends to be the results of this work and to be out in the future. As an example, I had a book that I took to a book club that it took them two years to pick up. It would have been tough to track two years after the fact, so that’s one of the reasons specifically that publicists will not work on commission.

It’s can be a very challenging industry because there are no guarantees for promotion, which is one of the reasons that when you’re shopping for a publicist, find a nice – find someone, who’s gonna give you a nice mixture of marketing. As an example, we talked earlier about the virtual author tours, and we’ve been doing so much of – you know, you want to combine – I mean, those are things – you know, I gotta tell you – with all the web sites that have been popping up on the Internet every day, they’re starved for content. They are starved for people, and with people blogging and everything else; I mean, it is so much. Those authors really tend for results, and when you blend it with something like publicity, now you’re getting a campaign that’s really showing results, but if you’re putting all your eggs in one basket, you may not have that kind of luck, and now you’re dealing in – now, you’re in situations where, “Well, listen, I hired somebody for six months, and I haven’t had any results,” and because your PR campaign is too bland, so one way to offset that is make sure and blend it with something.

Ron Pramschufer: Okay, and then I got one last question here. Now, we’ve been talking about the – you’re selling a service, so I’m the customer; you’re the vendor.

Penny: Right.

Ron Pramschufer: It’s a two-way street. How would you describe the ideal author?

Penny: I think the ideal author is really someone who is as engaged in their promotion as you are, who really understands that there is no such thing as an overnight success, and who is really willing to dig in and do the work and stay with it because most of the time, I think that authors – you know, and I understand this. You spend however many years writing a book; it’s finally done. Now, you’re ready to sort of kick back and enjoy the rewards from it, and really, that’s when the work starts, so an author that really understands that – and let’s be very realistic about the media market. I think media can be very deceptive in a way. Sometimes, authors feel, well, I’ve done a radio interview, and I’m gonna now sell 1,000 books, which isn’t the case, so you wanna be realistic. One radio interview is not gonna sell you a lot of books. Ten radio interviews may not sell you any either, but continual – anything done on a continuous basis is really what it takes, and an author who really gets that and understands that and is realistic not only helps me as a publicist that helps them sell because the last thing you want to do is spend ten years of your life writing a publishing a book, only to have it sort of dwindle when it doesn’t meet your expectations, and that comes back to you; one of the goals of your book.

Ron Pramschufer: Penny, well, thanks very much for talking to me today.

Penny: All righty.

Ron Pramschufer: Okay, bye, bye. Have fun.

Penny: Bye.

Ron Pramschufer: For Publishing Basics Radio, this is Ron Pramschufer. See you next week.

[End of Audio]

Last 5 posts by Penny Sansevieri

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• Super Savvy Internet Promotion - February 1st, 2006