cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Formula I'm fucking crazy. What I'm doing here, is this common? I don't even know. Its such an easy formula that it seems like other people must be doing it. Bait a major media outlet, provide them with everything they need for the best story they can run. Have book ready to pitch right after story run. Sell book. Use hype from book to sell TV show. Use events being put on for the TV show to bait major media outlets again. Pitch another book. Repeat as necessary until you have a bunch of money. Not that I have any money to speak of, but this plan has been working really well for the last year. I just had another phone call with the editor from the NY Times. Boy are they ever hot to trot on this. They are convinced that every major media outlet is going to want to cover this, which seems surprising to me but I guess that they know their business. Personally, I'm not going to pitch the story to any other media outlets. There are 4 reasons for that. First is a matter of loyalty. The Times has been good to me in the past and I would not be where I am right now without them. They deserve exclusivity so far as I can give it. Second is that for my purposes I really don't give a shit about any other media outlets. What I have to sell right now is a new book and my market at the moment is the book editors who decide whether to bid on a book and how much to offer. The one publication that every single one of them reads is the NYT. They see something in the Times and they get a hard-on and they take it seriously. That is my sole purpose in wanting media coverage this month. To amp up the publishing interest in the new book. My audience right now is about 300 people at various publishing houses. All I want is their eyeballs and a little bit of room in their brains carved out for yours truly. Third, dealing with a whole bunch of reporters doing big stories all at once is a pain in the ass. I believe in picking one or a very few at a time and giving them full access so that they write the best possible article and are especially grateful for my attention. I don't have time to deal with multiple papers at once in the next few weeks, nor will I have enough geese. Fourth, there is the question of the Times' loyalty to *me*. Newspapers can sometimes develop a sense of ownership over someone they have covered right from the start. When both of my books hit the shelves, I want the books to get written up in the Times since that will massively boost sales. I think that this is more likely to happen if they have a sense of me being 'theirs' in some way. Whether its in the NYT Book Review per se or in Dining & Wine or whatever section, I don't care. 4:54 p.m. - 2010-10-13 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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