Author Insights from Publicist Claire McKinney
This year, we’ve asked several of our faculty to answer some key questions to offer more insights to PubSense Summit attendees. Enjoy these answers from publicist Claire McKinney, who is also donating this year’s Registration Contest prize – a full consultation package worth $1,000!
1) You’re part of our Master Class: Increasing Exposure Part II, where we’ll be exploring ways to drive readers to writers. Can you give us a glimpse at one of the coolest ideas you’re going to tell us about?
Claire: Content marketing is key in today’s super branded world. Whether you write fiction or non-fiction, part of developing an audience for yourself is about introducing yourself and your work to readers. In
order to do this you should consider writing one “blog” style entry every two weeks ranging in length from 300 – 700 words, depending on what your subject is.
Plan to post these to your own blog/website and also to share via other social media channels. Ideally you make friends with other blog owners or online magazines that are interested in getting content for their own sites. You can offer your blogs to them exclusively or after you have posted yourself—whatever works best for the both of you.
For fiction think about topics that involve your story or something interesting about a character or plot point. For non-fiction consider writing top 5 or 10 lists that are informative and easy to remember about the subject.
2) We’ve asked you to be a part of our Publicity Matters panel and are so excited to hear all of your wisdom from your over 15 years of experience. What’s your biggest success story with a writer who had limited money to spend?
Claire: There are some authors we have worked with who have only been able to afford a minimum project fee and though we don’t make money on these, when we think we can make an impact given the resources available, we do it.
One of our biggest successes was in helping an author sell 10,000 e-books and exponentially increase her print book sales in the first three months of publication. Our strategy involved very specific outreach to blogs and websites that catered to the genre and getting to as many of them as we possibly could for coverage
Research and relentless follow-up is key because we realize many bloggers have other kinds of day jobs and it’s important to keep the book in the forefront of their minds without being insensitive to the piles of work and books everyone is trying to get reviewed.