Submissions

Authors often telephone and email me asking me to publicise their books. In reality I can only work on so many books at any one time and I have to be very selective what I take on. Therefore I thought it might be helpful to outline the process from my point of view.

If you’re thinking about asking me to help you with your book publicity, please read on.

1. In the first instance, send me your manuscript or book. Books I need to see so please send them in the post to me at Red Wave Communications. I love trees too, so manuscripts can be emailed to me.

2. A covering letter or email outlining all the basic book details (what, when, who etc) and whether any publicity has already been undertaken is useful at this stage.

3. If you’re enquiring about general author publicity rather than for a specific book, you don’t need to send me your entire backlist, a recent example of one of your published titles is fine.

3. Don’t stress if you don’t hear anything for a week or two. I promise I look at everything and I will call you. If you’ve not heard anything within 3 weeks chase me by email or telephone as in that case it’s been lost in the post.

4. What I’m looking for is a match between you, me and your book(s). And even then, I can’t take on everyone I’d like to.

5. Do I cost a fortune? No, my rates for authors are transparent and appropriate because I enjoy working with individual books and authors. I work on projects from a few hundred pounds upwards. And don’t forget that publicity is a tax-deductable expense.

6 . Book out in 2008? With publicity, you can never start too early so I’d ideally like to hear from you four-six months prior to publication. The later you leave it, the more publicity opportunites drift out of reach.

Because you’re worth it

Last night I went to an excellent talk by Roger Kondrat about social media and blogging at Creative Herts, a network for creative professionals in Hertfordshire. Roger’s main prediction, and I agree with him, is that blogging is here to stay, and will evolve as the technology evolves.

Many members of Creative Herts group are professional artists, and these creative professionals share many similar challenges when it comes to marketing their work as authors. One visual artist explained to me that he was only able to work mornings because of his RSI and therefore as his output was necessarily limited, he was unsure how to grow his business. We talked about the prices he was setting for his work and I think by the end we both agreed that the obvious way forward was to test some price increases for his work and see if the market would bear it. He said he felt what was holding him back was the idea that his work wasn’t worth it.

In a way, we are lucky as authors that our work can be reproduced for mass distribution and we can leave many of the commercial decisions to our publishers. However, we still have all the challenges of a crowded, busy marketplace in which it can be very difficult to get our work noticed and we too only have so many hours in the day or other constraints on our time and resources.

It can be hard, but if you undersell yourself, the primary person who will lose out is you. You are worth it. So when you are considering what fee to charge for your next public appearance, or for that article you’ve got to write, ask for what the market will bear, rather than relying on your own self-perceptions.