Etiquette of PR: Make It Easy for Them

If you want someone, a blogger, a reviewer, a radio host, anyone, to help you get the word out about your work, there is one cardinal rule of etiquette -- make it easy for them.

I help folks maarket their work, whether novels or music files, in a number of ways.

1. I have a sort of catalog site called medieval-novels.com .
2. I invite authors to spotlight their work with excerpts on Today in Medieval History .
3. I invite smsll unsigned Celtic musicians to send me their mp3s to air on my online station, and will publish information on them on the related blog on MySpace.

And I am sure I do other things I just don't remember right at the moment.

One thing I can tell you, on behalf of all folks like me who like to network with and for other creative people, is that you should make it as easy on me as possible if you want my best effort.

Here are some suggestions:

Don't send me to a web site to download anything or to read about you. I'm plenty happy to help you out, but I am busy doing my own thing, including hellping others out, and the less wandering about the Internet I have to do the more likely I am to get to your request in a timely manner and the more generous I will be.

Don't send me excerpts or other material as part of an email. An attached file is fine. An excerpt, for example, in an email will wind up requiring that I fiddle with the formatting which with my lousy vision is even more time consuming than you might think.

In general, you want to eliminate any extra steps for someone you want to have help you get the word out about your book or music. That goes for everything and everyone. If you want a radio station or other media to help you, call them back when they call you.. immediately. Otherwise they will lose interest and go on to something and someone else.

If you want a web site to focus on your recent release, make sure you include everything they might want to use" images, text, ordering information, an excerpt, reviews, important details.

I am writing this because it is not uncommon for folks to take me up on an offer to help, but too often I have to follow up with one or more requests for information. A musician whom I asked for information for a blog entry about his group told me where to find it online. Wrong. It was his job, as the recipient of the publicity, to send it to me. An author sent me an excerpt of her novel in the body of an email. Wrong. A plain text file is what I needed. Another author asked me to choose a section of her novel to spotlight. Wrong. She needs to take that time, not me.

In my case, there is another step people need to take, and that is to send me digital files and not send me a print item. I will have to go through several steps to make print into an accessible format as I am severely visually impaired. I have always noticed that many accommodations for disability make life easier for everyone, so why not offer the digital copy to every person you ask to write a review or do an interview with you, etc.?

Why do I do the favors I do? I believe in what you are all doing, writing novels and making music. And I just like to hellp people. Sometimes, like with medieval-novels.com, I get a small referral fee. In another case, Radio De Dánaan, I actually pay Live365 to be allowed to broadcast. It balances out, but in the end, I think I come out ahead because I am doing what I love.

If you can make that love run smootly for me, I will appreciate you all the more.