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.