Book Publicity Case Study
by Marcia Yudkin
Most authors I know understand the
importance of publicity when they release a book.
They write or hire someone to write them a news
release. They enclose the release with review
copies of their book sent to media outlets and
reviewers, they distribute it on PRNewswire, PRWeb or
another distribution service and they post it at their
own web site.
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All good moves. But for me,
that's just the beginning. For a typical
nonfiction book, there are a multitude of angles you can
use for publicity. Here's a case study to inspire
you that features easy slicing and dicing that would
apply to just about any book or information product
containing distinct sections. |
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Publicity for Persuading People to Buy
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In August 2010, I created and
distributed nine news releases for my new book Persuading
People to Buy. This book was the first
of five paperback volumes that were to be issued
one a month, so the first two of the nine
releases highlighted the series, while the other
seven used techniques that could be repeated,
with appropriately changed content, for each of
the subsequent volumes in the series. |
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News release #1
[Headline] Bringing Back a
Hundred-Year-Old Tradition, New Marketing Book Series
Available by Subscription
This release announced the first book
in my series with an angle that I knew would be of
interest to the book trade: the fact that I was selling my
series of five books by subscription.
In this release I included more details
about my previous books than in any of the other
releases to increase my credibility for those interested
in the publishing industry. Ditto for the
reference to Mark Twain.
Notice the inclusion here (and in all
the other releases) of the cover of my book.
Images accompanying releases draw the eye, especially
when a majority of competing releases on a page are
all-text. I could have used my author photo here
instead of the cover photo.
News release #2
[Headline] One of the
Longest-Published Marketing Newsletters on the Internet,
The Marketing Minute, Now Available in Book Form
This release took a very different
approach to describing my book series by focusing on the
historical significance of the newsletter from which the
contents of the book series derived. None of the
other releases so much as mentioned the fact that the
chapters came from my Marketing Minute
newsletter, because I designed the books to stand on
their own to non-subscribers as well as to appeal to
subscribers.
You'll see that all the releases
inserted the URL where people can purchase the Marketing
Insight Guides series both in the first and the last
paragraphs. I do this in all my releases and those
I write for clients so no one has to hunt for the click
to the company or product site.
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News release #3
[Headline] "Know Your
Audience" is the Paramount Principle of Marketing
Psychology, Says Author of New Book on the Topic
Here I started concentrating on the
content of Persuading People to Buy. The
book consists of seven parts, so I wrote seven news
releases, each highlighting the theme of one part of the
book. If you're really interested in understanding
my strategy, you can compare the table
of contents of the book to releases #3-9.
I emphasized the topic of
the book in this release (and in the remaining releases)
rather than myself, which is the appropriate strategy
where an author is not a household name and the book
content is something readers search for, apart from
browsing for books.
Underlined phrases in the releases are
those I selected to be hyperlinked, with the links going
to my sales page. These hyperlinks make it more
likely for my material to come up in search engine
searches when people looking for information perform
searches using the terms I've selected.
News releases #4-9
[Headline] Why Should Clients Hire
YOU? New Book Offers Insights into Marketing Psychology
and Customers’ Perception of Value
[Headline] What Motivates Customers
to Buy? New Book Offers Insights on Identifying
Buyers’ Hot Button Reasons for Signing on the Dotted
Line
[Headline] With Knowledge of
Persuasive Principles, You Can Capture Attention and
Sell, According to New Book on Marketing Psychology
[Headline] Beware of Persuasive
Backfire, Warns New Book on Marketing Psychology by
Persuading on Paper Author Marcia Yudkin
[Headline] New Marketing Book
Details Twists and Turns of Pricing Psychology
[Headline] Make New Customers But
Keep the Old: New Book Offers Insights on Retaining and
Upselling Customers
Each of these releases had an
identical structure:
-
headline/subhead
-
opening paragraph that describes a
problem and portrays my book as offering a solution
to it
-
second paragraph with a quote from
me offering commentary or examples
-
third paragraph setting up a
series of bullet points from the book
-
four to six bullet points
-
final paragraph repeating the
title with its ISBN number (a unique number that
identifies books within the publishing trade) and
explaining where to buy the book
(Feel free to use that structure, and
my slice and dice method, for releases about your own
product.)
The bullets in the releases were more
restrained in style than the way I generally write them
in a sales letter because it is paramount for a news
release not to have a sales-y tone.
Even where I repeated almost the same idea from
release to release, as in the last paragraph, I did not
use the same wording. The reason for this is that
a release that too much resembles another that was
picked up in Google News may lose its chance to be
featured there, too.
Getting picked up in Google News is a
major goal of issuing news releases - not only does it
put you in front of journalists and news hounds, it very
much hastens your appearance and improves your rising up
in rank on Google proper.
A Side Benefit of Slicing and Dicing the Books
I'm a big proponent of repurposing as
much work as possible that I've done once, and after I'd
written a few of the last seven releases, I realized
that I could collect the bullet points from those
releases, punch them up to be more tantalizing and
incorporate them into the sales page for the
books. I'll be taking care of that soon.
Further Possibilities
And why stop there? Each of
those news releases could in turn become an article I
could post on EzineArticles.com and other article
banks. I could even write a release about using
the very article you're reading now as a secondary - or
let's see, it would be tertiary - publicity device.
In addition, I posted a copy of this
article in a members-only Internet marketing forum that
I belong to and sent it to the publisher of a newsletter
for the book trade.
Notice also that I've got a
"Tweet Me" button on this page that invites
readers to let others know about this article.
That's as far as I'll take it, though,
because the self-referential corkscrews of publicity
about publicity about publicity are starting to make me
dizzy.
Copyright 2010 Marcia Yudkin. All rights reserved.
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