If You Want Good Book Promotion, Start Early and Practice, says PR Maven Carrie Bachman
If You Want Good Book Promotion, Start Early and Practice, says PR Maven Carrie Bachman
Use small and local venues to rehearse, she says, and work your way up to national press
Got a book coming out soon? Or maybe you’d love to know what goes into cookbook promotion? I’ve got some insider information for you that will make you think more deeply about the process.
This month’s interviewee, Carrie Bachman, has more than 30 years of culinary and lifestyle public relations experience. She is currently president of Carrie Bachman Public Relations, her boutique firm that specializes in cookbook and gourmet product publicity.
Carrie has long, deep experience. From 1996-2006, she was the director of publicity for cookbooks and lifestyle at HarperCollins/William Morrow, where she publicized hundreds of cookbooks written by top-selling authors.
She has also been a publicist at Hunter Public Relations, where she represented premier brands including Kraft Foods, Mcllhenny Company (Tabasco) and Häagen-Dazs. It was her first job out of college. She started working with cookbook writers who were doing spokesperson work for her clients, and she continues this work today.
Here’s Carrie’s insider advice about launching your cookbook and getting media attention:
Q. Who were the first authors you worked with?
A. Emeril (Legasse) and Julia Child. I also worked with Paul Prudhomme, Madeline Kamman, and Marcella Hazan. It was thrilling!
Q. Do you take on anyone who wants to hire you?
A. I can be selective. I try to take on books where I can learn something new about a cuisine, or authors from other countries, or a new twist on a traditional cookbook. If I’m already doing a dessert book for fall, I won’t do another one.
Q. What do authors get wrong about book promotion?
A. Authors say ‘I don’t want to do the podcasts or regional media, I just want to be on the Today Show or Good Morning America.’ But they don’t realize that publicity is cumulative. People hear about the book in random ways.
Q. When does book promotion start?
A. Ideally, we start a year ahead of the publication date, just to get the word out. If you want a big profile, some national magazines shoot in the winter for the following winter. Some will shoot a barbecuing story in summer and run it next summer. A year to 10 months gives me the benefit of pitching when print media are doing stories 12 to 18 months out.
Also, if you need media training, there is time. I send people to The Ekus Group, and then they’re ready to hit the road.
If you start early, you have time to practice and put it out there. You can hone in and work on your stories. Authors have to be salespeople about what makes their books different from other books out there. They need to rehearse.
Here is an extremely large grass roots book tour I worked on for Anne Byrn. We started working a year out on the long-lead book tour and events: