Quote:
Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan
Thanks for telling me. So, if I wanted to get in touch with those companies, how should I go about it?
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Communicating with a company is a lot like getting a job there. You need to find out who the right person is, get in touch with that person, and give them a reason to think that doing what you want (hiring you, talking about your book, whatever fits a given situation) is in
their best interest.
Let's say you were hoping to have your book reviewed in the "new books" column of a hypothetical SF magazine -- we'll call it
Digital. You could send a press release to someone at
Digital, but they're not likely to read it.
Everyone sends them press releases. There are nearly 1 million ebooks out for the Kindle. If we assume that all ebook writers publish through Amazon (even if they're also elsewhere), if just 10% of those are some form of SF, and if just 10% of those SF writers send out one press release each in a given year, assuming 250 working days per year, they're getting the things at a rate of 40 a day. If it takes 15 minutes to read and respond to each one (whether 'respond' includes replying, excerpting form it to print, or whatever) that's 10 hours a day -- a full-time employee and an assistant --
just dealing with press releases. And they're not paying a full-time employee to read press releases. So if you just send a press release to
Digital, it's unlikely that they'll ever read it, let alone get back to you and request your book for review.
Find out who it is that you need to get in touch with. Research! Send that person a personal letter. People who work at magazines don't like form letters any more than the rest of us. In short, don't be like the other however-many-thousand people who are sending them press releases for them to ignore.
The thing you have to remember: You may be Mrs. Jordan's darling boy, but if you're one in a million, there are a dozen just like you in New York. No matter how good you think you are,
they think you're one of the crowd. Succeeding requires standing out from that crowd.