How Authors Can Win The PR Game
There are two primary reasons for an author to invest in PR:
Exposure
Credibility
Author PR For Exposure
Exposure helps you get more attention for your book(s), more book sales, and more leverage for your book, whether you’re using it to get speaking engagements, consulting gigs, or to otherwise grow your business.
If your PR goal is primarily exposure, then your focus will be on audience intent and traffic.
Audience Intent
In 2013, I landed an opportunity to write a column for Forbes. I got amazing results from my articles, and I wondered if I could duplicate that success with other publications. I got a column with Entrepreneur, but didn’t experience the same type of success.
What was different?
Audience intent.
On Forbes, the right type of people were looking for services my business offered. On Entrepreneur, they weren’t. It’s not that I didn’t get attention on Entrepreneur, I did, but the audience had different intent.
When considering PR for your book, first ask yourself where your idea audience hangs out, but also ask if they hang out there in order to learn about how to hire you or purchase your goods and services.
Traffic
When it comes to getting real results with your PR, the question to ask is not how much traffic or eyeballs a certain publication gets, but what percentage of that traffic is your ideal audience. The New York Times may get a lot of traffic, but an obscure blog that gets a few hundred visits each month may get more of the traffic that will make a difference to your bottom line. Also, don’t forget podcasts and social media influencers. If you wrote a marketing book, for example, then an appearance on Douglas Burdett’s Marketing Book Podcast is a must, even if its monthly downloads aren’t in the millions.
A follow up question when figuring out where the best traffic will come from for your PR objectives is to ask how long the traffic will hold up. Some forms of PR get a lot of attention for a few days, then fade to nothing. Others never make a big splash but continue to generate consistent results for years, perhaps even improving over time.
Author PR For Credibility
The credibility that comes from PR may not directly impact your book objectives, but it may ultimately help you even more than a focus on exposure.
For example, if you were targeting a publication like Mashable for exposure, you would want a feature article on the homepage of the core Mashable.com domain in order to maximize the number of people from your audience who would see that article. The challenge is that’s difficult to get that kind of article unless you’re already famous, and perhaps even then it’s difficult. You could spend tens of thousands of dollars and months on retainer with a PR firm to get this kind of article.
On the other hand, if credibility is the goal, then all you need is to get into any Mashable article, on any of their domains, in order to put the Mashable logo on your website and say “As seen in…” as well as putting the article in the press section of your website. The goal isn’t to draw readers of the article to you (although that may be a nice side benefit) but to show the audience you already have that you’re getting press in notable places. This allows you to target the Netherlands or another version of Mashable, which are a LOT easier and faster to get into. Instead of spending tens of thousands of dollars and several months to get on the homepage, you can spend a few thousand dollars and a few weeks to get one of these articles.
Exposure PR brings you new audience members by exposing people who haven’t heard of you to your work. Credibility PR helps you convert the audience you already have, or who are finding you through other channels by being able to put a section like this on your website:
Exposure PR and credibility PR both have their place for authors. One is not better than the other, they are simply different tools for different purposes.
At Canvas PR, we focus on credibility, although exposure is a side benefit. However, when authors are focused on exposure, we refer them to other PR firms like Smith Publicity, which focuses exclusively on working with authors. They’re heavily focused on long-term strategy, and many of their clients have kept them on retainer for years.
Pros and Cons of Exposure PR vs. Credibility PR
As an author, which PR tool should you use and when?
Speed. Credibility PR, that is, getting media logos on your website quickly and showing up in search engines quickly on a lot of credible media properties, is faster than going for exposure PR. Exposure PR is more strategic and time consuming. If you’re thinking, “I need to get a bunch of media logos on my website in time for my book launch!” then credibility PR is what you want. If you’re telling yourself, “I need a consistent stream of articles over the next few years to help me promote my book,” then that’s where exposure PR is the right fit.
Cost. Exposure PR tends to be more expensive, per article, than credibility PR. Exposure PR will generally come with a retainer arrangement, where you pay a monthly fee without any guaranteed results. It’s a highly-customized process that depends on many factors. Getting credibility PR is more like using a PR vending machine.
Quality. Exposure PR should be highly focused on quality. That’s not to say this is what you’ll always get, but that’s the idea. Credibility PR, at least the way we do it at Canvas, also strives for a high level of quality, but the “quality” we’re focused on is that someone will read it and say, “This is a great article!” whereas with exposure PR a lot more time will be spent on strategy to produce the exact desired result you’re after as an author (e.g. selling more books, etc.).
If you’re an author then of course we’d love to work with you, but if your goal is exposure we’ll tell you that while you may get exposure from our articles, it’s not what we’ll focus on. We will focus on getting you into a lot of high-profile publications quickly, so you can show off those media logos. We do this through full-editorial articles (no advertorials, no paid placement, no “Forbes council” pieces), so you may end up with great exposure as well, but the main reason our clients hire us is to get those media logos quickly and show up in search engines quickly in case their target audience searches for them.
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