Creating an Online Press Kit

After noodling around on the Internet to see what other authors do to promote their books, I realized before I invest the time to create a book trailer for The Steiny Road to Operadom. I should first assemble an online press kit. See Press Kit for Karren Alenier.

What should be in an online press kit at minimum is:

(1) A press release that shows at-a-glance at the top of the release information about who to contact by phone or email, publication date, ISBN, Library of Congress number, number of pages in the book, the publisher’s name. It’s best to keep these at one page but two if you must. In the text of the press release be sure to define close to the top what kind of book this is and what it contains. Quoting one or two of your book’s cover blurbs can be useful. Ending with how to buy the book is pro forma.

(2) The author’s photo, perhaps in high and low-resolution jpegs. Use headshots and not full body snapshots.

(3) A narrative biography, possibly two—one that is a paragraph or two and another that is a full page. Start with publication credentials and end with education, other pursuits that are not literary, and family.

Other items that are useful:

(4) Your book cover image in jpeg format.

(5) A sample book chapter.

(6) Comments made by appropriately expert people that could include your cover blurbs and excerpts from a published review.

(7) Interviews of you published on the Internet.

Make this press kit one web page on a site that you have access to or that belong to you. Book blogs are important, but I am not sure if you can create other pages on the blog website. Does anyone know about this?

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Book Trailers on The Steiny Road to Publication

One of my favorite websites that lists links to other websites focused on Gertrude Stein is maintained by Duane Simolke at
http://www.geocities.com:0080/WestHollywood/Heights/7439/Stein.html.

So I tracked him down through AuthorsDen.com and asked him if he could list The Steiny Road publishing blog. He did and called the link The Steiny Road to Publication, which put a smile on my face, given how hard this publication process has been.

He also pointed out his blog http://tagnews.blogspot.com/ where he is promoting a book uniting writers against cancer. Simolke is asking for help in creating a book trailer for The Acorn Gathering: Writers Uniting Against Cancer .

So what is a book trailer? According to Kevin Lucia (Simolke has a link to an article written by Lucia on his post) a "’book trailer’ is like a movie trailer before a feature presentation, a video that acts as a ‘teaser.’" The idea is to attract attention on your web page with moving images and text. Book trailers are hot on myspace.com. OMG, now I really need to get going learning how to use all the new software I have on my IMac.

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The Author’s Book Promotion Strategy

Given that The Steiny Road to Operadom is now published in a limited release and not yet in bookstores, the publisher is encouraging the author to decide what strategies to use in promoting the book. Beyond the obvious strategy of announcing the publication to individuals known by the author is identifying groups of people who are interested in the subject matter of the book. Such groups might include speaking opportunities in an educational setting. For example, I spoke to a college class studying women’s literature recently. Visit professor Joanna Howard's blog to see her assignment to the students who heard me speak. Although this is a satisfying experience and one that ripples out into the future as your book is usually purchased for the college library, one has to do a lot of work for this kind of book promotion and realistically few books are sold.

What seems like a better idea is to find Internet List Servers where you can manage to let subscribers know about you and your new publication. Since most List Servers have rules of etiquette, one has to be cautious about promoting new books. Each List Server culture has accepted ways of letting others know but you have spend time finding out how to do this. Books with multiple subject areas, which by the way are hard to get published by big publishing houses, lend themselves well to Internet promotion. In the case The Steiny Road to Operadom, subjects include opera, classical music, Gertrude Stein, feminist literature, poetry

Another idea is to get someone to help you promote your work to reviewers. Most authors cannot afford to pay a publicist but that is the kind of help that is needed. One professional in this field told me that this kind of work is hard to monitor and so you are better off devising your own plan for promoting your book and getting a friend to help you do it. Sounds like a Catch-22!