Authors and business people often go to extremes to publicize their book or product launch. Sometimes, the most successful method can appear in front of them. Take for example, book publicity. It is the one of the toughest cases to crack. Each year, at least 50,000 authors are published in the United States. Tens of thousands of authors publish electronic books. Most fail to get noticed. Very few achieve any of their goals as authors – to build up readership.

Here’s a way to get the word out and polish off your book before it hits the stores: sampling. Major corporations utilize focus groups, pollsters and other marketing experts to build up their brand name. This is similar to planting seeds to get a garden or orchard to grow. The more seeds you plant, the better your chances to grow vegetables or apple trees. As an author, you can use sampling or “seeding,” to build up awareness of your book. During the publishing process, we discovered a clever way to attract readers, and at the same time, we can upgrade our book.

Having been through the publishing process for many decades, we experimented with what every author secretly fears: a peer review. But, we did it with a twist. Instead of waiting until the book is published to read the reviews, we posted the book on our website to accept all criticism in advance. We called this a “Public and Peer Review” of our book, entitled “Investing in the Great Uranium Bull Market: A Practical Investor’s Guide to Uranium Stocks.”
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You’ve just reviewed the final results of your last pro-active media campaign to launch that
new product or service. The numbers look pretty good: media impressions were in the millions;
coverage was evenly split between broadcast and print; and a leading national paper ran three
stories on the launch-pretty impressive. But could it have been better?

Analyze this

Analyzing issues or campaigns is the first big step in truly understanding any communications
success or failure. With busy schedules and/or tight client budgets, more often than not, media
analysis isn’t always carried out. A big investment is being made on gathering the media content,
but not on measuring and analyzing the trends, successes, and areas for improvement. Stories
are often filed away immediately or distributed to a limited group, never to be looked at again
or analyzed at all.

If you’re already conducting ongoing media analysis half the battle is won. But if not, you can
bet your client or director will demand it soon. New analysis technologies combined with increased
expectations to determine communications ROI (Return on Investment) are making analysis a must,
not a should.

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The world of PR is benefiting from dramatic changes in the way media coverage is being delivered electronically to your computer desktop or PDA of choice. Perhaps the nuisance of ink on your fingers is being replaced by a bad case of “BlackBerry thumb” — but nevertheless getting your media coverage electronically has never been easier or more mobile.

These changes now drive the development of new tools from content providers, and new software programs to help better manage and analyze media coverage. The automation occurring at the database level and through the real-time delivery of organizational news, to internal and external stakeholders, is now almost taken for granted. And the holy grail of PR — to automate media analysis and measurement — is already under way; but where should software stop to make way for human analysis?.

Media analysis programs can save countless hours quantifying and sorting media coverage in an unlimited number of ways, including by circulation, region, ad equivalency, company programs and services, and competitive brands. However, do you really want a computer program qualifying how each story affects your organization? It’s a gamble with little upside.

Just Say No

The automation of tone and sentiment has already been incorporated into some software programs, but how accurate can it be? Every story, across every medium, will have a dramatically different meaning or impact for various organizations and their stakeholders. Behind the news emerge both winner and losers.
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News releases are not the best way to get major media coverage, but they can be used to increase the frequency with which your company name appears in the press.

Press releases will get you coverage in set features like business notes, and new personnel columns. They also provide a good way to let allies, employees and customers know what you are doing. For these purposes, post releases on the company website, send out by e-mail, or distribute by one of the services like PR Newswire or PR Web.

Here is a quick list of 33 possible reasons for you to write and distribute a news release.
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