Speaker 1: On this edition of the Self-Publishing Show.

Lillian Sue: You don't want to have a publicity campaign focused on things you can't speak to, focused on things you're not comfortable speaking about just to get your name in the papers, just to get your name in a particular podcast. If it's not serving your ultimate goals, then it shouldn't be a part of that campaign.

Speaker 1: Publishing is changing. No more gatekeepers, no more barriers, no one standing between you and your readers. Do you want to make a living from your writing?

Join indie bestseller Mark Dawson, and first-time author James Blatch as they shine a light on the secrets of self-publishing success. This is the Self-Publishing Show. There's never been a better time to be a writer.

James Blatch: Hello, and welcome to the Self-Publishing Show with me, James Blatch.

Mark Dawson: And me Mark Dawson.

James Blatch: Mark, we have a Patreon supporter to welcome. I think that's your job.

Mark Dawson: Well, I know you didn't give much time to figure this out. Hang on. Just trying to dig it out.

James Blatch: I've got his name. Do you want me to do it?

Mark Dawson: Well, I think you probably should do then, yes.

James Blatch: Thank you very much. Paul W. Samuelson who has joined us at patreon.com/selfpublishingshow, and is in line for a bunch of goodies and may even win the Ads for Authors course, which will go live in August, middle of August, beginning of August, around then. I don't know the exact date. I'm not a details person.

Now Mark, we have had our show last week, but not at the time of recording. Our show is to happen. So we can't really talk about it, but we will, I think, probably after the show, our first recording after the show, we'll have a review back at some of the sessions, some of the learning points. And a reminder, although it is now 40 pounds, but it's well worth it, because I'm-

Mark Dawson: $40.

James Blatch: $40. Absolutely certain the show was an amazing success that you can get your digital ticket at selfpublishingformula.com/digital.

Right, we have an interview today about public relations. Now this is I think quite a difficult subject, because public relations is a bit of an old fashioned industry. You and I, Mark, have had had some involvement with this and you and I are both, I think, a little bit cynical about what they offer indie authors for the amount of money involved, and it's a difficult thing to budget for when you're doing everything else. But Lillian Sue, who is our interviewee today, is somebody who will talk to you about being proactive PR wise yourself, doing stuff very cheaply yourself, and then how to contract people and how to pay for them for your services. So that's an interview worth, listen to, and Mark and I will be back for chat off the back, but here's Lillian Sue.

Lillian Sue, welcome to the Self-Publishing Show. Thank you for joining us. We're going to talk PR, and I think it's an interesting area because half of PR world for me is quite old school and not necessarily worth it. It's very expensive. And there's a growing element of PR geared around indie authors I think is quite exciting, so hopefully we can talk about those two areas.

Before we talk about PR, do you want to give us a little bit about your background and your work in publishing, how you ended up in this position?

Lillian Sue: Sure. I started my own freelance business almost 15 years ago now, and I started in the copywriting and social media sphere. I actually added on public relations as a service because I had a lot of entrepreneurs and folks coming to me and asking me, "Hey, I'd love to do a press release. Is that something that you offer clients?" And I got tired of telling them no. And these were great people that I loved working with and everything else. So I started exploring how can I get experience in that area? And I actually started doing publicity more so on the film and television side, really cut my teeth working with indie filmmakers and indie projects on film festival circuits and that, and then I decided I've always loved writing myself.

I had been published before. I'd had some interest in learning more about what self-publishing was all about from the writing side, and I thought there is a market here for me to see if I can help indie authors, because there was quite the gap that I saw between indie authors that were doing everything themselves versus the authors that were traditionally published and had a publisher and an agent to back them and who were managing all of their publicity. And I thought there has to be a way in which I can close that gap and make sure that indie authors not only have the correct knowledge and the tools, but also the personalised support to help them gain the confidence to learn how to navigate the world of marketing and PR, knowing that they have expert guidance and support, which is why I started doing a lot of PR coaching.

Which is basically I work with authors, they come to me with questions, they come to me with areas that they're stuck on, and I help them push past that to actually learn how to build and launch their own campaigns, which I think is also a lot more rewarding in a lot of ways, because I've talked to a lot of other indie authors who have said, "You know what, I've worked with publicists and PR agencies in the past. The campaign didn't turn out the way that I wanted it to. And now that that's over, the momentum's done, I can't ask for help. I don't know how to get it restarted." So they end up worse off than they were when they first started.

I thought to myself I need to do that work to bridge that gap because there are so many incredible authors and people that I speak to on a daily basis. We chat all the time. I support them by helping to promote their books. I read their books and everything as well. They deserve those tools and that knowledge to really learn how to basically make PR work for them. Being self-published should not be a detriment to that. And it also in my view does not have to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

James Blatch: Let's talk about the definition of PR. What's the scope of PR when you talk about it for writers?

Lillian Sue: PR in a nutshell is the most cost effective way to help you share your story with global audiences and to build relationships with the media. There's several different ways. Public relations is kind of, if you imagine an umbrella, and underneath that umbrella there's several different areas that you can build strategies focusing on.

So there's things like paid media is one. A lot of media will say, "Hey, if you want to be featured in an article or an interview, you'd have to pay for that piece of coverage." That's one area. The larger area that I tend to focus on with my clients primarily is earned media. So earned media is organic media that you don't pay for, and the media covers because they find your story compelling. One of the things that authors really gravitate towards when it comes to marketing is email and social media, and maybe even building a website because those things there's low barrier to entry, you don't have to pay for things. You can kind of launch it yourself and build your own audience.

With PR, the necessity there is learning how to tell your story in such a way that the media will want to engage with. So I tell authors all the time that the two big tenets of PR in general, no matter what strategy you're building, is storytelling and relationship building. And that goes across the board. And as I mentioned before, there's several different types of strategies you could look at. Thought leadership is one that you can undertake if you are looking at one of your goals is, "Hey, I want to present at book festivals and conferences. I want to be featured as a panellist. I want to have a table and have book signings there." Well, in order to get there, you have to build the foundation that shows the people running these conferences and these festivals that you know what you're talking about. And thought leadership is the way to do that. By writing and doing video posts that share your insights, your knowledge, your experiences, to really showcase the fact that you're able to educate people about the writing process, about editing, about self publishing, whatever it is.

So thought leadership is one area. Media relations is where you focus on obtaining reviews, getting those interviews, doing maybe collaborations with other authors, doing major events where you can collaborate with other industries, let's say, or other authors, other associations to really raise the profile and awareness of your book and yourself as an author. And you do that because you want to really raise the profile of your book beyond your own audiences.

And by going by a framework that I tell authors, if you have no media experience, it really helps to break it down this way. First, go with genre specific, then local, then international. Genre specific is a great place to start if you don't have media experience, you don't have experience doing interviews, because a lot of these podcasts might be smaller and they might have processes that will help you get more comfortable with answering interview questions, with working with different bloggers to do reviews, that sort of thing.

But although they're smaller, the fact that they're genre specific means you're reaching your readers where they spend their time. Because they're listening to these podcasts, they're reading these blogs, they're following these reviewers. So it's a great place to cut your teeth in order to really build on that media experience, and then once you get comfortable moving to the next tier up to do local media experience is about figuring out the angles of how can I appeal to, say, my local radio station, my local TV station? Am I doing an event where partial proceeds from the sales of my books will go to fund a certain nonprofit that will help improve the local community as well as raise awareness of my books, that sort of thing. And it really depends, the type of strategy that you build underneath public relations depends on really what your goals are.

So if you're looking at building your reputation as an author and really standing out there as a great speaker and educating people, then thought leadership's the way to go. If you want to really focus on raising awareness of your book and talking more about why the themes of your book are important, why you wrote it, what you want audiences to get out of it, then media relations should be the focus. I tend to counsel authors that if you don't really have media experience, it's good to pick one direction to focus on. So prioritise which one of your goals you'd want to work on meeting first, and then once you get the hang of it, you can really incorporate these things into a more well rounded, robust strategy.

You could be doing author signings and interviews and book conferences. You could have your book in book boxes. You could be doing signings in bookstores all over the world. Plus doing a conference circuit or a podcast circuit where you do these different interviews while you're on a media tour. But it's all about building incrementally, gaining that experience, getting comfortable ,and really learning each step of the way how to make it work for you.

James Blatch: And am I right in thinking that the thought leadership lends itself more to nonfiction and maybe fiction authors trying to build a nonfiction business expertise, and media relations might work better for fiction authors, or am I wrong there?

Lillian Sue: It's not necessarily the case, and I say this because both fiction and nonfiction authors have... There's certainly similarities, of course, in the experiences that they have and the knowledge that they gain. But there's also things that are really quite beneficial to their audiences, to readers, to aspiring writers who will be attending conferences and reading these blogs and trying to get more knowledge prior to writing their books.

The media relations side can absolutely benefit both fiction and nonfiction authors, because both types of authors can speak to what inspired them to write the books. They can speak to centralised themes within their books. Where genre authors have a little bit more leeway is talking about things like world building is really big, cultures that they've developed is really big. Maybe languages is really big. And that's where they have a uniqueness that can really lend itself well to thought leadership, because you have so many aspiring authors in every genre who want to learn more about how to develop these things for their own books, and yet a lot of resources aren't readily available.

And both sets of authors can really talk a lot about themes and experiences. I think that's an area that nonfiction authors tend to lean more into. Whereas fiction authors tend to push that aside in favour of focusing more on their genre and the worlds that they've built. But it is a missed opportunity because there are a lot of industry associations, nonprofit organisations, groups, all of that sort of thing that would really benefit from having both nonfiction and fiction authors reach out to them, foster relationships, build collaborative partnerships, and tell their audiences why even a fiction book is worth examining on the topic of grief, on the topic of mental health, as this month is Mental Health Awareness Month.

So there there's definitely opportunities on both sides, but it really comes down to how you narrow your focus, and when you are reaching out and attempting to foster connections with these different groups of people and different types of media, how you go about doing that.

James Blatch: You mentioned at the beginning that the two tenets were storytelling and relationships, and I know straight away that a lot of authors listening to this will think, "Storytelling, yep, I can do that." Relationship building. We do seem to have a higher proportion of introverts, I include, I think Mark would say is introverted. I'm slightly introverted as well, surprisingly so, in the author community than we do in other communities. And I think some people will be a little bit frightened of the relationship building side of things.

Is there a way of getting around that for those people who are uncomfortable thrusting their hand out and saying, "Hi, this is me."

Lillian Sue: I understand that. It can be nerve wracking in the sense that the first time you send out an email pitch, you've done your research, but you don't know this person. You don't have an existing relationship and it can be nerve wracking. So what I suggest to authors is look at how you've built your place in the writing community. I'm a part of the writing community on Instagram. It's very robust. We support each other on a daily basis. We're always championing and cheerleading each other's books and helping to spread the word. And a great way to dip their toe into that is dig into a little bit about the authors out there that have their own platforms, because there are fellow writers that have blogs that they've started that say, "I'd love for a bunch of us to get together and share some industry advice so we can learn from each other."

There are other ones who have done podcasts, just like yourself, who talk to authors all the time about how do you feel about the portrayal of certain tropes in romance, or how do you feel about the issue of representation in sci-fi/fantasy? And they have great conversations around this. And then there's even other authors that will do Instagram live series. They will just hop on one on one and have conversations together about what their book's about, what are they working on now, what have they learned after publishing their first book?

And even outside of genre specific media, focusing on media that's built by fellow authors that has to deal with writing craft and the knowledge of it is a slightly easier way of dipping your toe in the water. Because for a lot of authors, they've already built a relationship with these other writers. They know them. And the more of these types of conversations that they have, the more of this type of writing that they do, the more opportunities they have to get referrals, to build more relationships and to continue to grow that community within there.

When you're looking at PR it's all about taking that first step and it doesn't have to be "I've never sent an email to a media outlet in my life. I'm scared." You don't have to start there. Look at your own community for writers and authors and just see who's doing the Instagram lives, who has a podcast, who has a blog that might be willing to hear from you or who want your perspective. Because I think the biggest thing that I talk to about authors about when it comes to PR is mindset. Mindset blocks and limiting beliefs is huge because so many of them come through all of this and they still have that line of thinking that, "Nobody wants to hear from me. All of the knowledge is and the expertise and advice is written by authors who are New York Times best sellers. That's where it should come from. Nobody needs to hear from me."

What I always tell them is there's a lot of similarities to your process, particularly in self-publishing, but every experience is still unique. There's a lot that you've learned. There's a lot that you've gone through and experienced. There are a lot of things that you've tried that maybe haven't worked for you, that people would really benefit from hearing about it from you. And why would they trust you? Because you're just like them. You're in the same boat. This is how you foster that community and build that audience that's going to give you that great foundation to move up to the larger podcast. Maybe eventually pitch a TV show, maybe eventually pitch radio. It's all about taking those incremental steps.

James Blatch: So mindset and self belief have to be there at the beginning.

Now, Lillian, you've done a brilliant handout for us, a PDF, which I'm looking at now. I think it'd be very useful just to go through some of that so that people can make the most of it. It's effectively steps, I think, foundational steps to having a good strategy. Is that right?

Lillian Sue: Yes.

James Blatch: So should we have a look at one or two of those? You talk about the PR myths. What are the PR myths that we need to be aware of?

Lillian Sue: There are some major PR myths out there that come up again and again, and that I've seen certainly with all my years of doing PR and working with entrepreneurs. Some of the big ones are things like any publicity is good publicity, which in today's day and age of social media, just simply isn't true because people, I think when that myth came about, they don't account for damage to your reputation and they don't account for how long that damage can stick around for. And in today's day and age of social media, people can dig up things that happened 10 or 15 years ago that you might have forgotten about, and the problem there is you don't want to wait until you've built a more high profile, positive reputation for yourself and around your work in order to then have something that happened a decade or a decade and a half ago come back and bite you.

So it is a good reminder to folks that if you are going for a publicity campaign, if you're looking to pitch, that you should really clean up beforehand, do that social media audit, make sure that there's nothing out there that is detrimental to what you're trying to build as a business, as a brand, and as an author right now. And also, just a reminder that when you're building your own presence through publicity, you want it to be focused on what you're actually doing. You don't want to have a publicity campaign focused on things you can't speak to, focus on things you're not comfortable speaking about, just to get your name in the papers, just to get your name in a particular podcast. If it's not serving your ultimate goals, then it shouldn't be a part of that campaign.

James Blatch: The internet never forgets.

Lillian Sue: Absolutely not.

James Blatch: As aspiring politicians often find out these days, okay. So I can see going through the handout, which by the way, will we give away on selfpublishingformula.com/pr to get this for free, I can see that you're encouraging people to explore what they start off thinking about PR. And I think I probably have a slightly negative experience having worked in PR before as a videographer and finding myself working with... You get some odd characters in the industry and not everyone is, I think, as valuable to the client as others, and some are brilliant and some are not. And that's the problem with PR. It's slightly amorphous.

Whereas I think what you are doing here is tightening it up a little bit. So expecting people to almost start with a negative feeling about PR. That seems to be how you framed this.

Lillian Sue: One of the reasons why I thought it was important to tackle that, and I do this in other free journal resources that I've created as well is because it does keep coming up a lot. There is a lot of fear around it. There are a lot of misconceptions. There's a lot of beliefs that in order to get ahead, you have to have three things, an audience in the thousands, you have to have a lot of money, and you have to lie about what's going on in order to get ahead. These are the big three that has cultivated surrounding PR going back decades thanks to big oil and tobacco. That is the foundation that they built.

And for myself, because I work with indie brands, indie entrepreneurs, authors, solopreneurs, I want to break it down back to their level and talk about the fact is that if you have concrete goals in place, if you are confident on how you are positioning yourself, and if you are willing to learn more about how it works, then you don't need the audience in the thousands, you don't need a hundred thousand dollars a year to launch a good campaign, and you don't need to lie, because the storytelling component of it is really about being authentic and being you and figuring out how to connect with people, in not so many words. It's essentially the marketing PR version of writing your book blurb. How do you get people to buy into who you are, what makes you tick, and why your book matters without writing an academic thesis?

So these sorts of things I tend to focus on because it's really important too, to help them build their expectations going into a campaign. I have lost track of how many people have come up to me over the years, James, and said, "I don't have any media experience, but I want to do the talk show circuit. Get me on Ellen DeGeneres, get me on Jimmy Fallon, get me on Graham Norton, because that's what I want." And it just does not work that way. You cannot go from 0 to 60 right away.

James Blatch: So the steps that we can take, which you're very helpful foundational in this handout, and you're talking about here, ultimately, the expectations is a very important part of this, which you talked about in your first answer. A lot of people listening to this won't be building an expertise thought leadership business. They'll be wanting to sell more copies of their romance series.

Is this achievable with the level of PR that we have access to, to sell more books?

Lillian Sue: I believe that it is an achievable goal. I see the frustrations all the time about how they say I put my book on sale and nothing's happening. My question to someone who says that is, are you putting it in front of the right audiences? Are you spending time where your audiences are spending time? And the benefit, as I said before, of getting into these genre specific review sites, doing interviews with them, going on these podcasts, is that you are reaching your readers. They're going to listen to what you have to say, read or watch what you have to say, and that's going to push them to at the very least check out what your book is about.

The grand rule of thumb when it comes to any marketing is people don't know what they don't know, and if you don't put it out there, then no one's ever going to know that you're out here. I never sugarcoat it to anybody who talks to me about it. It is work. It is work to put together that marketing strategy, to put together that PR strategy that's going to help you make those goals. But if you've done everything else under the sun, like your email newsletters, the social media, building your website, and you're still not reaching the people that you want to reach, my question is what do you have to lose by learning how to build this and launch it properly?

James Blatch: Lillian, where can people get more information if they want to go beyond what we're handing out here in the PR from you?

Lillian Sue: Best place to do that would be to follow me on Instagram @LilianSueCopywriterPR, all one word, because I'm there five days a week, posting new tips and strategies, and talking about how to push past mindset blocks and limiting beliefs and all of that, and how to do everything from brainstorming how deep you want to go with your writer's biography to learning how to find the right people to reach while doing media contact research. I also answer questions all the time. I invite questions from my audience all the time and talk about some of the issues they've had, some of the questions they have, and even some of the fears that they have around what can I do... The other big one is what can I do if I start sending out these emails and I'm not getting responses? Is that the end of it? Have I wasted my time. And just counselling and coaching them through how they can keep the momentum going on a campaign.

James Blatch: Do you offer specific services to authors, one to one coaching?

Lillian Sue: I do, yes. I do have individual coaching sessions that authors can book with me. It's flexible based on their schedules and they can book with me on it no matter what part of the process they're in. If they come to me and go, "Hey, I'm stuck on building my media kit," versus, "I think I've exhausted building my media list. How do I find more people," or even, "Help, I've booked my first interview and I'm really nervous. Can you help me out with that?"

To expand on that I have a eight week coaching programme that people can sign on with me, and every single week we have a coaching call that focuses on one area of PR. I have the calls recorded. I give them resources to help them build that particular portion for that week. And in between calls, we're always talking about any questions they have, anywhere they get stuck.

And then after that, for authors that want to have something that's a little bit more self-directed, at their own pace, I have a PR course that is a hybrid model, actually, because in addition to going through each chapter and each lesson that has a video slideshow with templates and resources, along with quizzes to help reinforce their learning, if they get stuck, they can actually book coaching calls with me in certain chapters that'll allow them to talk to me directly about what issues they're having with that particular chapter.

And then lastly, for authors that might have a little bit of a bigger budget and maybe less time to learn how to launch their first campaign, I also offer campaign services. So I will be the one to actually work with them to build the media kits, build the media list, and actually manage the pitching and interview scheduling for them. I have heard from authors who like that option primarily because they tell me they want to see it done the right way the first time, and then they can go and go into coaching with me to learn how to do it themselves, and then if they get stuck, they know that I'm there as a resource.

James Blatch: Okay, well, that's great, Lillian Sue. Thank you for joining. I think it's a big area and it's an area that's not very well understood, and I think one of the aims I wanted for this interview is to have a broad understanding of the area and the things we need to do to get started. I think that's what we've covered, particularly mindset. So plenty of places to get more information. And just to say again, thank you very much for the handouts, definitely worth it. Selfpublishingformula.com/pr. Lillian Sue, thank you very much, indeed. I think you've joined us from Canada, is that right?

Lillian Sue: Yes, Western Canada.

James Blatch: Excellent. I hope you're looking forward to some nice warmer weather there and it's been useful.

Lillian Sue: Thank you for having me, James. I really appreciate that. And any time that your listeners have more questions, feel free to send them my way or I'd love to have another chat down the road to get more into the different specifics of different areas as well.

James Blatch: And I think there's definitely an interview to do there where we start from a point of view of, "Okay, let's start with a media kit. What's involved in it?" But time wise, that's probably a whole interview, isn't it, and we can cover those specifics, but let's definitely do that.

Lillian Sue: I would love to. Just let me know when you'd like to chat next and I would love to come on again.

James Blatch: Super. Thank you very much, Lillian.

Lillian Sue: Thank you, James.

James Blatch: There we go, yes. So some practical advice on using public relations. I've got to be quite honest, I've never had a particularly fulfilling experience using PR both for our show and for some of the book stuff. I know you have had some success. You've been in some pretty high profile magazines and newspapers. Is that a result of your spend on PR, Mark?

Mark Dawson: Now and again. I haven't listened to the interview, so I'm not going to comment on what was said because I don't know what was said, so just as a general position for me, I don't think PR is something that I would recommend to most authors. It can be quite expensive and typically there are no indications of... The contract won't be pegged to any degree of success. So you're putting someone on retainer, usually, and the idea is that they get you pressed, but they're paid anyway. So I have been in plenty of newspapers, been all pretty much all these newspapers now. And most of those, at least in the early days, came from Amazon. So Amazon would be looking for an author and did often put me forwards to speak to newspapers.

Other times I have had a PR on retainer for about 18 months before and had some success, got some bits and pieces landed, but I am a little bit sceptical in the modern age that getting PR is necessarily going to be something that you're getting money back from. So the obvious example is my PR did a great job, got me onto Breakfast News in the UK, so in front of probably a million people, I'm talking about the launch of a new book and it went well, I didn't make a fool of myself. The hosts were, as much as they were able to, suggesting that people could go out and buy the book that I was talking about.

And as I sat in the taxi on the way from the studio in Manchester, coming back to Salisbury, I checked to see how many copies I'd sold and I sold zero. So I think you go into it with a degree of scepticism. If you like the idea of being in newspapers, on the radio, and on television, that's fine. That's a good reason to do it, because it is quite enjoyable and it's pretty good for the ego. But if you're expecting that to shift tonnes of books in for you to make your money back, I would caution against that. In my experience I don't think it's very likely.

James Blatch: I think I agree with all of that. But the good thing about the interview, Lillian Sue's interview is that there was lots of tips on how to DIY this and get the kind of reach that you pay for, because that's the other thing that's changed. A few years ago they paid for their contacts book and they built that up over 50 years. Today you can Google the right people. In fact, almost every byline, which is strange name for basically the name of the journalist who's written an article in a newspaper, if you look at that online, underneath will be their email address, so you can actually pick out the right journalist you think's a good fit for you. And I send my book... In fact, I haven't done it yet, but I have a little PR plan for release after today, I've got today out the way for my book, I am going to send that out to the air plane spotter type magazines. And that worked for me last time. A couple of them ran competition.

I think that is it. Mark Dawson, so in real time, not when this is going out, in real time you and I are about to go into a busy couple of weeks running up to our show and we will report back on that I think the next time we record one of these I think might be after the show. Although I can't put my hand on my heart and say that. We might record one at the show. It's a possibility.

Mark Dawson: Yes, it's possible. We'll see how we get on.

James Blatch: Lot of things up in the air. Meanwhile I need to start a third book. Well I have started a third book when I need to finish it. I'm thinking about junking what I've started and starting again. Might do that.

Mark Dawson: Okay. That's a conversation for another podcast.

James Blatch: Yes. I think I need to be a little bit more commercial with my choice of story. Anyway, there we go. That's another discussion. Good, thank you very much indeed Mark, thank you to the team in the background, and to our interviewee Lillian Sue. That's it for this week. All that remains for me to say, is it's a goodbye from him.

Mark Dawson: And goodbye from me. Goodbye.

James Blatch: Goodbye.

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