Friday, November 14, 2008

Predicting What the Media Wants

Funny thing happened this afternoon: Fox News called one of our authors wanting him to speak on camera today about the "workplace dynamics" that might come into play if
  1. Barack Obama offered Hillary Clinton a cabinet post.
  2. She accepted.
  3. And an older, more experienced person ended up working for the young superstar.

Our author didn't feel qualified to speak on the subject. Our publicist Selena is out of the office this afternoon, so it fell to me and my boss to try and track down someone else. I've made a few calls. So far, nobody's biting. We might have to let this one go.

The lesson here: Always be on the lookout for a way to peg your book to the latest events in the news. You never know when one of your authors could be tapped for a big media appearance.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ack!!! I had a feeling all week long that something like that would go down on Friday if I took the day off. Thank you for trying to pull something together for such a great opportunity! I wish I could have been able to help out on this one!

Anonymous said...

One lesson to take away is that authors should make their phone numbers easy to find. When I Googled several JIST authors of relevant books, I found numerous links related to the books but often had difficulty finding contact information about the authors. There are ways (often called "Google bombing") to propel one's personal-information page higher in the Google rankings. Another idea is that we could offer to include (but not require) a contact e-mail address or phone number on the author-information page at the JIST site.

Lori Cates Hand said...

Selena--don't feel bad. This was a real stretch and I think any of our authors would have found it difficult to pull off without, in the words of one author, "looking like an idiot."

Laurence--I don't know... many authors would prefer we keep their phone numbers private and have all inquiries go through us. But the e-mail thing is a good idea.