What Book Promoters Are Looking For: The Author Press Kit

By Jodie Cain Smith

My first phone conversation with the Director of Public Relations for my local library system surprised me. I introduced myself, told her the title of my novel, and of my interest in scheduling author events with the local libraries. Instead of asking what my book was about, her first question was, “Do you have a press kit?” “Yes,” I told her, then asked, “Would you like me to email it or bring you a printed copy?” She chose the latter and a face-to-face meeting.

That one phone call brought a critical element of book marketing into the spotlight:  In order to sell books, we must sell ourselves. Readers buy into the worlds their favorite authors create, but promoters often use the author’s world to sell books. A press kit does that.

From site to site, author press kits vary, but the best, most interesting ones allow a promoter to see inside the author’s life. Several months ago, after consulting with my agent and scouring my favorite authors’ websites, I created my press kit, which includes:

1.  All current contact information including all social media links. (Duh!)
2.  Media clips and files. This may be a video or audio reading, an interview or author chat, a book trailer, links to online or PDF articles regarding you and your work, and/or any other media that brings you and your work to life.
3. Photos. Include family photos, current and past project research photos, cover art, and photos that inspire you.
4.  A look behind the curtain. Don’t just cut and paste the same bio you send to every publisher and media outlet in your universe. Include those interesting tidbits that make you unique. On my friend’s Shaun McCoy’s website, I learned that along with being a writer, he is a damn good chess player, a former Mixed Martial Arts fighter, and a professional pianist. Now, there is a complex individual who would surely bring something interesting to the fictitious conference I’m promoting.

Also, don’t forget to:
1. Prominently display your press kit on your website with a button labeled PRESS KIT.
2. Keep your press kit updated. Check contact information, bio, and links to ensure accuracy.
3. Maintain easy access to your website or Webmaster in order to make updates.

So, with my shiny press kit and two copies of my novel, I sat across the table from Ms. Public Relations and began my pitch. The meeting was a success. Events should be scheduled soon and my novel is being added to the library collection.

For most of us, the small press, indie, and self-published authors of the world, this is what success looks like:  Selling yourself and your work to one library, one bookstore, one media outlet at a time. A press kit will make the sale easier. And because no author actively promoting herself or her books has time to reinvent the wheel, check out mine at www.jodiecainsmith.com. Use it as a template. Now, go forth and rule the literary world.

From Idea to Novel

By Mike Long

A lot of people have asked why a stockbroker in South Carolina would chose to write fiction about Texans in the Civil War. Well, OK, two people asked, and only one of them really cared, but it still forced me to think about the question.

The catalyst for my novel, No Good Like It Is, was an article on Terry’s Texas Rangers in Blackpowder Annual Magazine from Dixie Gun Works. Doing more research, I learned that the Rangers performed both the first and the final cavalry charges of the Army of Tennessee, and tried to stop the slaughter of Negro prisoners at Fort Pillow. I was hooked.

The story came together quickly. I put a couple of fictional characters into the Eighth Texas Cavalry, took them through the war in Book One, and followed their trip home in Book Two. Sort of like Butch and Sundance enroute to Cold Mountain.

The draft took about six months to finish. It drove me. Made my wife and office partners crazy. I’d wake up at 2 AM and have to get up and write; next day, made everyone listen to what I wrote. I don’t type; I hired a medical transcription service to get my scribbling from my legal pads into the computer.

In the two years after that I polished it and tried to get it published, or at least agented. I did everything backwards. I wrote the novel, then bought “How-to” books and joined our workshop, but I might have never finished it had I done it the other way around.

I’ve had almost no luck with agents or publishers. As a novice, you find that agents send you form-letter rejections (unless you’ve already published something), and publishers don’t even respond unless you have an agent (and have published something). Most traditional publishers won’t even accept a query except from an agent. They’re swamped. What a great system.

The exception for me was an acquisition editor at Oklahoma University Press who read the whole manuscript. He explained why he couldn’t accept it, and then encouraged me to try several other publishers by name, even gave me some contacts, and said he thought the work should be published. Nicest rejection I’ve ever received.

If you ever wake up and want to be a writer of Western fiction, roll over and go back to sleep. If that doesn’t work, add a heavy dose of history and change your genre to Historical Fiction. Or join the Western Writers Association and network through them. You can also sell your un-published book through Kindle. Trust me – the folks in Manhattan have never heard of Lonesome Dove, Open Range, 3:10 To Yuma, Last Stand At Saber River, Appaloosa, Broken Trail, Hondo, Valdez Is Coming, Hombre, Will Penny, The Missouri Breaks. They might know the authors.

So, read, write for fun, enter contests, join a writers’ group, get an editor, go to book festivals, research, keep your day job. Forget about Manhattan. It’s a figment of our imagination.

SELF-PROCLAIMED WRITER

by Bonnie Stanard

Only in the last several years have I thought of myself as a writer. Somehow it always seemed pretentious to admit to writing, especially in the fields of fiction and poetry. In the past when working with newspapers or magazines (albeit small, regional ones), I could own up to being an editor—after all, my name was printed on the masthead. But as a writer, I’ve yet to see a book with my name as author.

FROM A DIARY, LONG AGO AND NOT SO FAR AWAY

For several years, I’ve been working on my third manuscript for a novel. My fascination with the Old South and Civil War began, I suppose, with the family legend of my father’s grandfather. A photo shows him to be a distinguished, white haired man with a vibrant mustache and a missing arm. The tale goes that in returning home after losing his arm in the Civil War, he was on a train robbed by the James gang. The robbers stole everybody’s valuables, except those of the Confederate soldiers.

Apart from that, years ago I read Tombee, the diary of Thomas Chaplin, who inherited a plantation on St. Helena Island in the 1840s. He described the crops he planted, his slaves and their work, talked of disputes with his sickly wife, castigated himself for drinking too much, and grieved over the death of his young daughter to marsh fever. The tone and detail make it apparent that he wrote the diary for himself. Theodore Rosengarten, who edited Tombee, provides an introduction that goes into the nooks and crannies of Chaplin’s life.

About five years ago, I reread Tombee. More recently, I went to Beaufort and found the plantation house, now privately owned. Looking on it and the landscape that was once Chaplin’s fields where his slaves tilled the soil was a near religious experience. Thomas Chaplin wasn’t a literary man and was undistinguished in his day. Yet he lives on in his house. His day-to-day existence persists in his diary. That it survived the War and was saved from oblivion seems more than serendipity. Maybe it was fate. I can’t seem to escape the notion that his fate and mine are connected some way. So I’m writing a story about a plantation owner on St. Helena Island, one who would have known Thomas Chaplin.

Who Am I to Write Fiction?

By Mike Long
Columbia II Writers Workshop

I don't think I've ever felt that just anyone could write fiction. It seemed to me (still does) that a writer should have impeccable credentials to be taken seriously, either through training or experience. Therefore, an English professor running a creative writing course has a shot, but so does an ex-detective, even if he isn't as polished or articulate as the academician, and especially if he'd been involved in a few sensational cases.

Likewise, survivors of multiple marriages, shipwrecks, combat, and mind-altering drugs might be able to write well about love, hopelessness, fear and science fiction--not necessarily in that order. A twenty-five year old certified public accountant from East Bayonne, N.J., however, is probably going to struggle doing a bi-racial love triangle in Savannah in the 1870s, especially if he flunked U.S. history and never traveled. The same CPA easily could have a runaway hit on growing up on the fringe of The Mob. The lesson seems to be that drawing on one's own experiences is a step in the right direction.

That being the case, what the heck is a South Carolina stockbroker doing writing about Confederate soldiers going home to Texas? I'm not sure. Sometimes I feel like that CPA, and wonder if I will be taken seriously. On the other hand, I don't feel that I ever had much choice about writing this. You see, I'm a history buff, a gun collector, and I spent a couple of years in Vietnam. This started when I began to fantasize about what weapons I'd have carried if I'd lived in the 1860s, and then wondered what would have caused me to upgrade as the technology changed, and then figured how I could have afforded the upgrades. As possibilities presented themselves at all the wrong times, I found myself jotting down notes while driving, or at two in the morning, or, more often, at six a.m. on Saturdays and Sundays. As it became more than a gun book, it really "cooked," and I finished it, 400 pages double-spaced, in about six months.

Afterward, I bought books on writing fiction, joined the South Carolina Writers Workshop, and have spent the last year polishing it and reading form reject letters from agents. One of the "How To" books suggested paying for a formal editorial review, so I contracted with an editor in Charleston, S.C. For about one penny per word, the editor allegedly cleans up your grammar/spelling and points up your manuscript's strengths and weaknesses. My review isn't finished, but in the meantime my editor has been hired as the acquisitions editor for a small publisher in Charleston. She's asked if she can "submit" my manuscript to the publisher for possible publication in 2009, and of course I agreed.

More recently, she said the publisher "loved the premise" but has not read the manuscript, and that if it's accepted, I'll need an agent (the publisher will help with that), and I'll have to agree to a book-signing tour.

So, I still don't know if I'm being taken seriously. That line, "loved the premise," appears in several form letter rejection notices.

Guess I'll keep my day job.

MAKE MISTAKES FASTER

By Janie Kronk
Columbia II Writers Workshop

It was the first time walking into a library ever made me feel afraid. The feeling was incongruous with the stillness, the patterned order of the shelves, the delicious book-smell. Still, my heart pounded. It wasn’t nerves exactly. There was another fear at work as I walked into the room where the writers’ group met and asked, “Can I just observe?”

See, I was not a writer, and I was certain I would be found out.

Although I wrote frequently, the bulk of this writing consisted of opening paragraphs of abandoned stories. Each time I started a piece, I quickly became disgusted with my flat characters, childish tone, eventless plots. I’d look at the paragraph, think, “Can’t I write better?” and lay it aside. I was afraid of the mess I would make if I continued.

I’d forgotten my writing professor, who always gave as his first assignment: “Write a crappy story.” i.e., Get over yourself and just write, or you’ll never get better. I also ignored such advice as, “Don’t be afraid to make mistakes—mistakes are how we learn.” Or, if important to learn quickly, “Make mistakes faster.”

The advice was sound, but thinking of joining a writers’ group and revealing my literary shortcomings gave me the willies. My concern was a grown up version of, “But what if the other kids are mean to me?” I expected frowns at my presence, and jeers at my audacity in wasting their time. In one of my nightmarish speculations, someone actually threw a tomato.

Fortunately, none of this occurred. At the meeting, I relaxed upon finding a group of talented, welcoming individuals. They didn’t seem to mind my coming. No one threw anything.

The next time I went, I would have to read. I assumed there were only so many times I could show up without any writing before my intentions were questioned. Spy from another workshop? Literary voyeur? Not wanting to appear suspicious, I compiled a pastiche of story-beginnings found on my hard drive. I hoped their juxtaposition would evoke some meaning, like images in a surrealist film.

This tactic proved unsuccessful. “It seems like a couple different stories,” someone said. “It’s interesting, but I’m wondering—where is it going?”

It took several more pastiches with similar feedback before it clicked: these weren’t problems with the pieces, but with my writing in general. I analyzed other things I had written. In all instances, my compositional structure was inexplicable, my plot lines often absent. Aha! How had I not seen the obvious? While I’d known the pieces were riddled with mistakes, the mistakes had been like shadows to me, impossible to pinpoint and wrestle with. With the groups’ feedback, I could suddenly see the bodies these shadows indicated. I had a goal.

Sharing work is intimidating, but also fulfilling when there are people interested in listening, and helping. It’s also necessary at times, getting us past current mistakes and on to the next—and the next, and the next. The good news about the process is twofold: we get better, and no tomatoes get thrown.