[Book Marketing Mentors] 20: How to Attract Media Attention for Your Book, Geeta Nadkarni

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• published: 15 Mar 2016
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http://bookmarketingmentors.com For authors who want to attract media attention, join this week’s special guest mentor of the week, publicity expert Geeta Nadkarni, as she shares some of her secret media tips and tricks. A former journalist, Geeta has more than twenty years of experience in producing television, radio, print, and web. She’s been featured on CNN, the New York Times, CBS, CTV, Reader’s Digest and more. Geeta has made it her mission to help experts, authors, speakers, and consultants, do their own PR in a way that makes them irresistible to attract media attention. Her course, Baby Got Booked, has landed her students local, national, international press within weeks, and sometimes even days, of starting. Excerpt from this week’s podcast “How to Attract Media Attention For Your Book:” Q: Geeta, authors crave exposure for their book, but how do they attract media attention? A: The first thing to not do, is to do the number one thing that most people do, which is to send out a press release. This is, one of the biggest mistakes that people make when they want to get a journalist’s attention. “Wait a minute” people always say. If you don’t send out a press release what are you supposed to do? Well, let’s rewind and talk about what a press release actually is and how it came about. A press release basically answers the most common questions, who, what, when, where, why, how, that a journalist requires to see if there’s a story there. The press release came about at a time when there wasn’t this huge explosion of media and multimedia and 24-hour television, 24-hour news channels, the web and so on and so forth. It was invented in a very, very different era where you had full-time journalists, beat journalists, people who’d work a particular job their entire lives and have deep knowledge of a particular subject. They had the time, and certainly they didn’t have the volume of pitches that they now get. When a journalist looks at a press release, typically there’s no story just the facts. Let me tell you, these days, given how media budgets are shrinking, the same journalists who had an entire day to put together one story is having to chop that story up for web, for radio, for television, or put it in a newsletter. They’re having to slice and dice, and create five times the amount of content with half the budget in half the time. They just don’t have time to figure out what the story is. If you don’t hand them the story, pretty much already done, you’re out. I think that’s the big mistake that people make. When it comes to authors, there’s another layer. I know … I’m a wannabe author myself, I’m in the middle of writing a book, and I know how much love and sweat and toil goes into book. But the fact of the matter is, a book is not a story. Too many of us get so attached to our babies, our books, that we expect the press to follow our feelings.