Terrible Tuesday
Trying to get people to look at stuff (which in theory is relevant interesting and helping them do their job) can be a real challenge.
We have spent the last 3 days (Friday Monday and today) building relevant lists of people who have previously reviewed books on, or written articles about Afghanistan, people who are interested in books and people who are interested in current affairs.
We have then sent out 100's of personal emails and spent time phoning around, sounding 'jolly' and 'happy', to check whether they wanted to cover the story and or review the book.
So far not one of them has even received the email. It has either been deleted as not being of interest (although if that was the case then surely they would remember looking at it and thinking it is not of interest - especially as they were only sent an hour or so before calling them), or simply dropped into a spam rejection filter as it had not come from an accepted email address.
We are usually really lucky and supported by media as our books are human interest stories which they love. However, even when we are giving away a goldmine (we have with previous book honestly - www.yukongoldminingclub.com - but am not bitter honest) trying to get them to be interested proved difficult. With the goldmine, after a week of much the same as we are getting today, a friendly news journo at The Observer opened my email and saw that it was a story worth telling. Despite me sending the same story to 20 other journalists at the same paper and 5 copies of the book to various desks, it was still easier to send a bike around to pick up a 6th copy than find one of the elusive other 5!
Well we are at the same place again - we know we have a story which is relevant and interesting but trying to get people to look at it is another matter. We will simply have to increase the thickness of our skin and carry on regardless in the hope that tomorrow is not weepy wednesday!
We have spent the last 3 days (Friday Monday and today) building relevant lists of people who have previously reviewed books on, or written articles about Afghanistan, people who are interested in books and people who are interested in current affairs.
We have then sent out 100's of personal emails and spent time phoning around, sounding 'jolly' and 'happy', to check whether they wanted to cover the story and or review the book.
So far not one of them has even received the email. It has either been deleted as not being of interest (although if that was the case then surely they would remember looking at it and thinking it is not of interest - especially as they were only sent an hour or so before calling them), or simply dropped into a spam rejection filter as it had not come from an accepted email address.
We are usually really lucky and supported by media as our books are human interest stories which they love. However, even when we are giving away a goldmine (we have with previous book honestly - www.yukongoldminingclub.com - but am not bitter honest) trying to get them to be interested proved difficult. With the goldmine, after a week of much the same as we are getting today, a friendly news journo at The Observer opened my email and saw that it was a story worth telling. Despite me sending the same story to 20 other journalists at the same paper and 5 copies of the book to various desks, it was still easier to send a bike around to pick up a 6th copy than find one of the elusive other 5!
Well we are at the same place again - we know we have a story which is relevant and interesting but trying to get people to look at it is another matter. We will simply have to increase the thickness of our skin and carry on regardless in the hope that tomorrow is not weepy wednesday!
posted by Dan Hiscocks at 1:06 PM
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