BEST ENDEAVOURSJane Cable’s blog about what happens once that digital publishing deal is in the bag continues.
BEST LAID PLANS 2
Way back when, about a hundred or so years ago, I used to work in PR. Great fun it was, except when I had to pick up the phone to some unsuspecting journalist (or anyone else, for that matter) so as I struggled up the greasy pole to the dizzy heights of account management, I needed an assistant.
Enter Lisa. A former drama student who was frankly wasted as PA to one of my clients. We worked together; lived near each other (defeating the tube strikes by driving from Wimbledon to the South Bank in my beaten up Ford Fiesta); even escaped the evil pitches we worked for together, to end up in an office above a hairdresser in Kensington with a kindly but chaotic boss who spoiled and cherished us. And we’re still friends twenty five years later.
It was Lisa who sent me the original tiny silver seahorse featured in the story, wrapped up in tissue inside a birthday card. And even more surprisingly, this year she sent me an improved model on a chain, together with matching earrings. Because she’d seem them and thought of me. They arrived just days before Endeavour made their offer on the book.
So who but Lisa would I turn to for the PR expertise to launch The Seahorse Summer? She did a fantastic job for me on The Cheesemaker’s House, and this time it should be just a fraction easier. Why? Because even in these enlightened days there are a great many newspapers and magazines who won’t touch independently publisher authors.
To be honest we spent most of our meeting at a mutually convenient motorway service station catching up on family news. For a few years in our twenties we lived in each other’s pockets and while distance and circumstances don’t exactly separate you, they do drive a wedge into your understanding of the everyday aspects of each other’s lives. But when you actually meet, it all falls into place again so easily and trust is instantly restored. I drove away thinking there’s a novel in that somewhere.
But as usual I digress. This blog is meant to be about planning a PR campaign. The objective is very much to get reviews. It’s hard to think of a big enough hook to make this a news story, so the book is going to have to stand or fall on its own merits. But stand or fall, it needs to stand out from the crowd. And we did come up with a couple of potential ways to achieve this.
The next most important thing is targeting the right journalists and this will be Lisa’s next task. It isn’t as easy as it was in the 80s when you could just phone the magazine and ask. There wasn’t such a thing as email and everything had to be sent snail mail. Or in our case, packing Lisa into a taxi filled with goodies and sending her off to spend the day at ICP towers, chatting to writers and distributing her loot. In 2016 she probably wouldn’t even get past security.
Jane Cable is the author of two independently published romantic suspense novels, The Cheesemaker’s House and The Faerie Tree, and a sporadic contributor to Frost. The Seahorse Summer tells the tale of how two American soldiers born sixty years apart help forty-something Marie Johnson to rebuild her shattered confidence and find new love. Discover more at www.janecable.com.