Fortune and Freedom

Hi, I’m Steve O’Keefe, and I’m helping The Old Guy with his online marketing. I promised Jim Hirshfield I would add a post here once a week to talk about how we are approaching online marketing for his new book, Fortune & Freedom.

Jim hired me to do a Blog Outreach Campaign. During the campaign, my team will reach out to three blogs each day and ask them to tell their readers about this book. We did a few things in advance to increase the chances of success.

First, I read the book. You would be surprised how many publicists and marketers never read the books they are promoting. Even editors and publishers often don’t read the books they are publishing. In some cases, the authors have not read their own books! This happens with ghost-written books. Several times I have found authors completely unaware of what is in their own books!

The best ideas for marketing come from a deep understanding of the product and a deep understanding of the target audience. When you do your research on both sides of that equation, you can “find the lightning” that links your product and the target audience. For Jim’s book, time is the lightning.

“Time is the one nonreplaceable asset,” says Jim Hirshfield. If you’re not convinced of that already, his book will do the job. In marketing the book, we are focusing on saving journalists and bloggers time. We wrote a really short news release and a really short pitch, hoping journalists would reward us for our brevity by asking to see the book.

So far, so good. About a dozen journalists have asked to see the book already. Here’s what one top business publication said about our pitch: “The reason we said yes instead of no (like we have to every similar request we’ve ever had in the past) is because you kept it short. We like to support this sort of behavior.”

Besides a short pitch, we also save time for journalists and bloggers by providing a well-chosen excerpt in multiple formats: text, Word, PDF, and HTML. The excerpt, along with high-res and low-res artwork, is readily available through the Media Room on Jim’s web site or by request.

You can’t tell by this post, but we’ve learned the hard way that we get better results when we say less. Think of ways you can reduce your pitches, news releases, and business plans to the bare minimum. You’ll find people appreciate it and reward you with their full attention.

STEVE O’KEEFE
Executive Director, Patron Saint Productions, Inc.
Author, “Complete Guide to Internet Publicity” (WILEY)