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The Tip Sheet
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issue of : May 2003
- Writers Road Tour - A Literary Happening! A New Service!
- Surfin' - A great source for media websites, Brainpop.com, and Mostly Fiction
- Tips From the Top - Our monthly advice column – Preparing for an interview
- Look What's Coming Up - A calendar of upcoming events
- What Have You Done For Me Lately? - Our latest media bookings
Writers Road Tour
Lecture Literary Management, Inc. in association with PTA, is proud to announce the new Writers Road Tour – regional college author tours with a national reach! This all-new road tour format will effectively promote your author to college markets, local media and bookstores in 8 city Regional Tours starting this fall.
The Writers Road Tour takes your author to eight major college or university campuses, coupled with a wide-reaching PR campaign. Your author will participate in one of three panels, each featuring three authors, promoted as community wide events. This all-inclusive package provides complete tour and public relations management while achieving targeted exposure. You will get:
- Live campus community audiences and weeks of community-wide promotion in each market
- Major local media attention, book signings and book sales
- Information on the book and author posted on our website
- Coverage in the trade media
- Blast e-mails to 200 radio stations and 100 print outlets
- Author releases and links on our website to your individual publicists
- A print ad in each college paper featuring your author (s) and promoting the event
- Distribution of the Writers Road Tour event posters featuring participating authors
- And more!
For more information or to submit your authors for acceptance into the Writers Road Tour, please contact Rick Frishman at 212.593.5845 or frishmanr@plannedtvarts.com.
Surfin'
In every luncheon we have ever attended, the media always had one thing to say, "Know who we are and what we are covering!" Make life easier for yourself and visit http://newslink.org/broad.html. This great resource is easy to navigate and easy on the eyes. It contains links to tons of media websites. So whether you need to discover what the Washington Post or KEYE-TV in Austin, TX are covering you can do it all from this one site.
Focusing on smaller books, http://mostlyfiction.com is a nice addition to the Amazons of the internet – in fact Amazon is a sponsor. You can search the site in many ways but we enjoyed browsing by category – some of the categories included Latino Literature, The Wild West, and Facing History.
One of the most amazing and helpful sites we have ever seen, http://www.brainpop.com deserves to be bookmarked and sent to everyone you know. With the tagline "BrainPOP the more you know, the more you know!®" – they rule! BrainPop makes original animated movies that demystify just about everything. Aimed at kids the site contains cartoons, activities, quizzes and more that cover hundreds of topics. The content is great for parents too. You can find out all the answers to those hard questions before your kids even ask!
Tips From the Top
Top tips on how to best prepare for a media interview:
- Write down the five main points you want to cover.
- List anecdotes, facts, or jokes that help you make each point effectively.
- Anticipate the questions interviewers are likely to ask and prepare answers that include your main points. It helps to study the host's prior interviews to find his/her favorite questions and approaches so you'll know what to expect and how to respond.
- Keep answers and explanations simple. Complex information tends to lose or bore interviewers and audiences.
- Never try to steal the limelight from the host or interviewer. Your job is to make them look good, while getting your main points across.
- Practice by having friends and family pretend they're the interviewer and question you.
- When you practice, videotape yourself or stand in front of a mirror to observe your performance. Be conscious of your posture, facial expressions and gestures. Ask your interviewer to honestly appraise your performance.
- When friends and family aren't available to help, interview yourself aloud.
An excerpt from GUERRILLA PUBLICITY: Hundreds of Sure-fire Tactics to Get Maximum Sales for Minimum Dollars by Rick Frishman, Jill Lublin and Jay Conrad Levinson.
Look What's Coming Up
Some annual dates that just might relate to a Morning Drive or Satellite TV Tour topic:
August 2003
| 1st | Birthday of Francis Scott Key (1779) (wrote "The Star-Spangled Banner") |
| 1st | Birthday of Herman Melville (1819) (Moby Dick author) |
| 1st | Anniversary of the creation of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau (1990) |
| 1st | Premier of MTV (1981) |
| 2nd | Anniversary of Iraq invasion of Kuwait (1990) |
| 5th | Premier of American Bandstand (1957) |
| 6th | Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima (1945) |
| 29th | Anniversary of the sinking of the Royal George one of the worst disasters in maritime history |
September 2003
| National Hispanic Heritage Month | |
| 1st | Labor Day |
| 3rd | Anniversary of the beginning of the Penny Press – New York Sun was launched on this day (1833) |
| 5th | Birthday of Jesse James (1847) |
| 7th | National Grandparents Day |
| 8th | Anniversary of the completion of the Northern Pacific Railway (1883) |
| 8th | Premier of the Oprah Winfrey Show (1986) |
| 19th | National POW/MIA Recognition Day |
| 23rd | First Day of Autumn |
| 25th | Anniversary of the First Double Header in Major League Baseball (1882) |
| 26th | Rosh Hashanah begins at sundown |
October 2003
| National Breast Cancer Awareness Month | |
| National Disability Employment Awareness Month | |
| 1st | 70 Anniversary of Babe Ruth "Calling His Shot" (1932) |
| 1st | Anniversary of the debut of the CD player (1982) |
| 1st | Anniversary of the opening of Disneyworld (1971) |
| 5th | Yom Kippur begins at sundown |
| 6th | Child Health Day |
| 13th | Columbus Day |
| 16th | National Boss Day |
| 24th | United Nations Day |
| 26th | Daylight Savings Time Ends |
| 31st | Halloween |
What Have You Done For Me Lately?
Here's a sampling of our latest bookings:
CNBC-TV, "Wake Up Call"
BLOOMBERG TV, "Small Business"
GLOBE AND MAIL
DES MOINES REGISTER
INCENTIVE MAGAZINE
CAREERBUILDER.COM
What I Learned Before I Sold to Warren Buffett (Wiley) by Barnett Helzberg Jr.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
Stuff Happens (Wiley) by Lloyd Thaxton and John Alston
WALL ST. JOURNAL SUNDAY INSERT
SACRAMENTO BEE
SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS WIRE
Merrill Lynch and The National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship
CNBC-TV, "Wall Street Journal Report"
Everyone's Money Book (Dearborn) by Jordan Goodman
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Teen Ink: What Matters (HCI).