5.5.10: Five PR Myths You Must Not Believe By Peg Booth, Booth Media Group
There are many benefits to using public relations to empower your book’s profile both on and off the web. It is up to you as well as your PR firm to collaborate on your media efforts to ensure the best possible messaging and pickup. A good PR firm never employs a one-size-fits- all PR strategy, and it’s very important at the onset that authors at the onset rid themselves of the five PR myths below.
- Myth #1: PR is the same as advertising. Advertising is a bought message; it involves paid placement and a very sales-focused message. PR campaigns are consistently fluid and dynamic, and involve working with news and print media to successfully communicate the best possible information and news hook tie-ins related to the book’s topic.
- Myth #2: To get significant PR coverage, all you need is a press release. Nothing could be further from the truth. The press release is just one part of reaching out to the media. More significant are the follow-up calls and news hook tie-ins that your publicist pitches daily to show producers and editors.
- Myth #3: It’s easy to get booked on major television or radio broadcasts; all my PR firm has to do is pick up the phone and make one call. Getting booked takes hours of pitching and positioning the client as the perfect guest for the show. Media receive literally thousands of pitches every day through email, phone and even fax. The more popular shows receive 500 or more press kits a week.
- Myth #4: PR placements should happen quickly. It’s vital to understand that PR is a process of creating a relevant story pitch the media will want and need to cover. It is a long-term process, not a short pitching effort. It takes several months for pitches to reach their peak efficacy and get a journalist’s attention.
- Myth #5: PR is about pitching the book. It’s about pitching the news hook. Every pitch to producers should have a hook to a news story. A dramatic hook. A game-changing hook. A way of looking at things as never before.
In our fifteen-year history of pitching clients like John Perkins, Greg Palast, Annette Sym, Bernie Siegel, Ken Blanchard and others, we’ve received a couple of other tips directly from producers we’ve worked with:
- TIP 1: Don’t pretend you know the producer. Don’t establish casual familiarity when there is none. Don’t pretend as though the producer knows you personally and will therefore approve your pitch. And don’t take advantage of producer relationships even if you have some that span several years, by pitching everything and the bath water to them.
- TIP 2: Keep your pitches as succinct as possible. Get it down to 30 seconds. Too often people think pitches need to be lengthy and cover every possible aspect of the book or author’s expertise. If you’re one of them, you might be surprised to find that producers think you’re wasting too much of their valuable time. A producer or writer will love it when you get to the point in the first sentence of your call or very first paragraph of your short email.
For more than 30 years, Peg Booth has been working in marketing, sales, and publicity. She started in book PR with the esteemed Arielle Ford and then formed her own PR firm, Booth Media Group in Carlsbad, CA in 1998. Their focus is non-fiction and she’s had the honor of working with new authors in addition to New York Times bestselling authors such as Dr. Deepak Chopra, Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, Ken Blanchard, Dr. Bernie Siegel, John Perkins, and Greg Palast.
