Marketing
Lucy’s Home Front:
an interfaith historical romance
Team Members:
Tiffany Watson
Project Description:
This project was a term long commitment meaning I had about 10 weeks to learn about the book marketing and publicity process while making a book marketing and publicity campaign. I was assigned the title Lucy’s Home Front in week 3.
I created a tip sheet, media kit, email marketing campaign, and social media strategy documents which are available to be viewed to your right (if desktop) or below (if mobile). All of these documents were developed in InDesign exported into PDF and converted into PNG for web displays on this site.
A quick note on the documented files
These documents were originally designed for print only, therefore the colors vary slightly from the originals due to the conversion from CMYK to RBG.
Unrepresented Additions:
In addition to these projects, I also created a marketing campaign and budget which included ad placements in various trade journals/newsletters like Publishers Weekly, Bookseller, and Pacific Northwest Bookseller. I primarily focused on placements in niche newsletters for Publishers Weekly newsletter Religion BookLine due to the books themes of spirituality and interfaith romance, while also highlighting the regionalism of the title with in the Pacific Northwest. I designed the various marketing materials (primarily banner ads) using InDesign.
Alongside the marketing materials, I also created a publicity and marketing schedule and created a document to manage the book’s metadata for input across all spectrum of sales and marketing platforms.
Reflection:
This project was completed in my first year as a Book Publishing student in 2018-2019 school year.
Since then, I have worked on book publicity campaigns for MindBuck Media and had the opportunity to exchange ideas with publishers, booksellers, journalists, and librarians during the PubWest 2020 conference.
My perspectives around tipsheets and media kits have changed significantly due to these enriching experiences, this means that the publicity documents I plan to create in the future will vary from the ones presently presented.
This is all in due to a better understand of the needs of each outlet that these sales documents are intended.
Media kit should be a self-contained resource with that enable journalist and other media outlets to create an engaging story on the fly. Media moves quickly and often times not through the proper channels of contact, journalist and book reviewers may engage authors directly, so it is vital that a media kit preps both the author and journalist for these encounters should the publicists not be contacted as a go between. Therefore a typical media kit should include a one pager (preferably an interactive PDF with hyperlinks), an author events schedule/book tour, Q&A with author, Information about the Publisher, and Talking Points. A media kit with all of these preps both media outlets and authors for fruitful exchanges for each party.
Tipsheets need to better address both the physical book on bookstore shelves but also create a clear profile for the book’s main audience. For the Physical Book: the book cover must be attractive and a focal point on the front page. This will often determine the placement of your book in stores that do not participate in co-op (if you are an indie publisher planning to send out tipsheets to indie stores this is vital). Comp titles need to include something akin to Read-Alikes. Bookstores are following suit with libraries and Amazon in including more Read-Alike parings, by creating your own you shave some additional work off the bookseller and also ensure that the Alike books match your target audience.
