An author with a new book sends an email that says the book is out and describes what it’s about. Nothing happens. The author concludes local media is unreachable.
A book coming out is news to you and to your family, and to nobody in a newsroom, because several hundred thousand books come out every year in this country. The announcement email frustrates me, because I understand exactly why authors send it. You finish a book, you’re proud of it, and you want someone to care. Newsrooms ignore that email because they’re busy, and because it asks them to dig the story out of the book themselves. Nobody in a newsroom has time for that job. Newsrooms need a story. Your book is usually where the story comes from. Get that right and this region has a lot of coverage available.
What media outlets cover authors in Tampa Bay?
The Tampa Bay Times is the largest newspaper in Florida and owned, unusually, by the Poynter Institute, which I wrote about in the school that owns a newspaper. It’s a newsroom of around a hundred and twenty people and covers arts, books, and culture alongside everything else.
WEDU is the PBS station for the region and produces local arts programming; it’s profiled local bookstores and cultural institutions, so you know the sort of thing it looks for. WUSF is the public radio side, and it runs local interview programming that regularly features people with expertise and a story attached.
Creative Loafing covers arts and culture with a different sensibility and a tolerance for the specific and the odd. Then there’s a layer of neighborhood and community publications, chamber newsletters, and local news sites that cover their own patch closely and need material.
Podcasts belong on this list too. There are more local and regional shows than there are newspaper column inches, they book constantly, and they’re the easiest yes available.
How do you pitch local media about a book?
Lead with the story. The book is the credential.
Compare two pitches. The first: my memoir about growing up in the industry is out this month and it covers forty years of change. The second is different. I ran computer operations for a grocery chain for twenty years, and I can tell you exactly what happens to a store when the systems go down for six hours. That happens more often than customers know.
The second is a story. It’s a fact somebody wants to know and a person who can speak to it. The book comes up in the second paragraph as the reason you can speak to it.
The first pitch is a dud every time I see a version of it. It’s all about the author. The second is about the person reading the paper, and that reader is the only one an editor is thinking about when they open your email.
Keep the pitch to a short paragraph, name the specific person you’re writing to, say what the story is, say why you’re the person for it, and offer availability. Attach nothing. Include one link. Timing helps. Local media covers what’s happening this week, so hook the pitch to something: an anniversary, a piece of news in your field, a season, a local event. A story about family history lands better in November than in March, and a story about hurricane preparedness lands in June.
What makes a local author newsworthy?
Four things make a local author newsworthy, in rough order of how well they work.
Expertise attached to something current. If your subject touches something in the news, you’re a source, and being a source is a faster route to coverage than being an author. Reporters quote sources repeatedly over years. One book feature doesn’t.
A local angle in the book itself. A book about this place, this industry here, or people from here answers the assignment editor’s question about why their readers should care.
An unusual life detail. Editors are people, and they read further when a person has an odd background. The one that’s always worked for me is thirty-three years in enterprise IT followed by a career writing other people’s books, and people ask about it. An event. A talk, a fair, a signing, or a launch gives a listing a date, and listings are the easiest coverage to get.
Of the four, I think being a source is the most valuable. A feature is lovely for a week. A reporter who has your number and trusts you to pick up will call for years, and every call puts your name in front of readers without you asking for anything.
Be useful before you need them
The most reliable route into local coverage is being a source before you have anything to promote. Reporters need people who will answer a question quickly, explain something technical in plain language, and not waste their time.
If you have real expertise, tell the relevant journalists it’s available, with no ask attached. One short email: this is my field, here’s my background in a line, call me if it comes up. Some will file it. When the story lands, you get the call. A quote as an expert does more for a book than a review does. It makes you somebody who knows a subject, instead of somebody with something to sell.
Start with the easiest yes
The sequence that works runs from smallest to largest, and most authors try it backwards. Community publications and neighborhood sites first. They cover local people doing things and their standards for what qualifies are the most generous. Then podcasts, which book constantly and need guests every week. Then the alternative weekly and public radio. They take specificity and character. Then the daily paper. That has the most competition for the least space.
Each step makes the next one easier, because coverage is evidence. A producer looking at somebody who has done three interviews sees a person who can do an interview. That’s a lower risk than an unknown, and a pitch mostly exists to reduce their risk.
I’ve done more than a hundred guest appearances on podcasts by now, and the first ones were small shows that would say yes to anyone with something to say. That’s the only place to start.
The idea that small shows are beneath an author is pure vanity, and it costs people the practice they need most. A nervous first interview belongs in front of a small audience, where the stumbles don’t follow you around.
What follow-up should authors send to local media?
Most pitches die from silence, and most authors read the silence as rejection. Usually it’s an inbox with four hundred unread messages and a deadline today.
Send one follow-up, seven to ten days later, three sentences, no reproach.
Restate the story in one line, add anything new that’s happened since, and say you’ll leave it there. That one message rescues a good share of the pitches that would otherwise go nowhere, and almost nobody sends it because it feels like pestering. Two attempts isn’t pestering.
The reluctance to follow up frustrates me more than almost any other habit in this business. Authors will spend a year on a manuscript and then refuse to send three polite sentences because it feels pushy. One nudge is ordinary professional behavior, and treating it as rudeness throws away pitches that were good.
After that, let it go and pitch something else later. Journalists move outlets and beats constantly, and the person who ignored you this spring may be the person looking for exactly your subject next year. Keep the list, keep it accurate, and treat every name on it as a relationship that runs for years.
What should an author do with local press coverage?
Most authors get a piece of coverage, post it once, and let it disappear. That wastes the durable part.
Authors will spend a year on a manuscript and then refuse to send three polite sentences because it feels pushy.
Put it on your own site on a page you control, with the outlet named and dated. Link to the original. That page becomes part of the public record that both readers and search systems use to work out whether you’re a real person with a track record, which matters more each year, and which I go into in my piece on why websites matter more now.
Then reuse it. Quote it in the next pitch. Put the logo on your speaker page. Coverage is a credential, and a piece from a neighborhood paper three years ago still helps you get the next booking.
My take
Local media covers stories, and a release date isn’t one. Find the angle that makes your book news, pitch the easiest outlet first, and be useful to reporters before you need them. When the coverage lands, don’t post it once and forget it. Put it on a page on your own site with the outlet and the date. A neighborhood paper from three years ago still helps you get the next booking.
The part that comes first
All of this assumes there’s a book and it’s worth talking about. The most common thing I see is somebody planning publicity for a manuscript that’s two years from finished, because publicity is more fun than drafting and feels like progress.
When I’m writing my own books, everything goes into getting the pages down. I don’t usually outline first. I write the first chapter, then the outline, then whichever chapters interest me, and I connect them afterward, a habit I call the ink blot method. There’s no press release anywhere in that process, and I wouldn’t want one there. Publicity feels like progress because it’s social and drafting is lonely, and that feeling fools a lot of capable people.
It’s not progress. Coverage of a book that doesn’t exist converts to nothing, and the goodwill from a good interview expires. Do the book, then do this.
If the book is the part that’s stalled, that’s my work. Being a ghostwriter in Tampa means we can sort out what you have and what shape it wants in person.
The rest of this cluster is in the Writing in Tampa Bay hub, and the Discovery Intensive gets you from a pile of material to a plan in about thirty days. That’s when a pitch has something behind it.
I think Tampa Bay’s media is far more open to local people than most authors assume, and I’d like to see more writers from here in those pages. The ones who get there treat reporters as people with a job to do. The announcement email keeps failing no matter how many times it goes out.
Local press works best as part of a plan. Sell Your Books lays out book marketing without the hype, drawn from launches that worked and launches that failed.
