What is a press release?

A press release is simply a news article presented to the media to portray you, your service, or your company in a positive light. Press releases are an important part of an overall marketing plan because they will help keep your product or company in the public eye.

The press release falls under marketing’s category of public relations. Instead of serving as an overt advertisement for your product or service, the press release seeks to define you and your company as newsworthy. This is important to keep in mind. The target audience of a press release is not the buying public. It is the media. If you can convince the media you are newsworthy, they will get the word out about your company for you.

What is newsworthy?

For a press release to be successful, it must be newsworthy. Tens of thousands of books are published yearly. What, exactly, is so special about yours that an editor should allot space to announce it?

The fact is, nobody cares that yet another self-published writer decided to self-publish a book. Anyone with a computer and a word processing program can self-publish today. Announcing that you self-published your own book is not news, regardless of how great you think your book is.

To find the newsworthiness of your book, you need to swallow your pride and determine a news angle. And to develop a news angle, you must ask the question “Why?” Why is my book of value to the media? Why should an editor be interested in this story?

Newsworthiness can be defined in two ways: proactive and reactive. Proactive newsworthiness is when you can independently create a news article of interest, and normally it involves an actual event or activity.

For example, each year, Bards and Sages Publishing sponsors an international writing contest that benefits various charities. Both the release announcing the launch of the contest and the release announcing the winners are proactive news items. Other examples of proactive news would be sponsoring a poetry reading at a library, receiving an award, or announcing that a theatre group is performing your work.

Reactive, on the other hand, attempts to tie your product to current events. By taking advantage of existing interest in a topic, the author can generate interest in his own work. For example, right after a news story breaks regarding previously unidentified side effects of several popular prescriptions would be the perfect time to release a book on natural healing. Your release is in reaction to recent news events.

Are you Credible?

Once you have defined a news angle, you need to convince the editor that you have the credentials to support the news in question. No editor is going to run a news article announcing a writing contest when the judges are a bunch of teenage girls posting the winners on their Myspace.com page. Nor does an editor care that your website won a “Hugs & Kisses” award from your friend’s website. In order for your announcement to be newsworthy, it must be credible.

Take inventory of your qualifications. Whereas early we were asking “Why,” now we are asking “What?” What professional and charity organizations do you belong to? What is your education? What are your writing credits? What awards have you won? What is your business background? What in your life experience makes you newsworthy?

Now at this point some people might say “but just because I don’t have a degree in blah blah doesn’t mean my work isn’t credible!” This is absolutely true. But in the real world, that editor is inundated with hundreds of news articles and must quickly be able to sort through them all. She is working with a finite amount of space and a tight deadline. Who is she going to trust? A writer who has published twenty articles on the subject of her book through various publications, or a writer who has never published anything or formally studied the topic? Right or wrong, the editor does not have time to “give you a chance.”

But just because you don’t have formal training or paid publishing credits, does not mean you can’t prove credibility. Let’s assume you’ve written a book on home schooling. So maybe you don’t have a degree in education. In fact, you didn’t graduate high school. But you home schooled all three of your own children, who went on to graduate college and earn successful careers. You are part of a parenting group in your community that shares tips on home schooling. You have spent years working as a volunteer in a local adult literacy program. Your real world experience is just as credible as a degree, so long as it is presented accurately. Your life experiences are the news story, and this can segue into promoting your book.

 

Sample press release copy, not credible:

 Jane Doe announces the release of her self-published book, Successful Home Schooling. This book provides parents with helpful advice on how to home school their children.

“I wrote this book because I wanted people to know that they can teach their children just as good as an public school teacher can,” says Doe. “You don’t need a degree to teach your children how to read.”

Even though Doe never graduated high school, she has been able to successfully home school her own children using the methods described in her book. Now other parents can use these proven techniques to educate their children at home.

The book is available through Lulu.com at http://www.lulu.com/janedoebooks

 

What’s wrong with the above sample? Most obviously, Jane Doe admits she’s uneducated and self-published, and she wants parents to trust her to provide solid information on educating their children. Jane doesn’t give the editor a reason to think she has any credibility, and therefore the release fails.

 

Sample press release copy, credible:

 For the past five years, Jane Doe has worked as a volunteer tutor at the Anytown Adult Literacy Center. She started volunteering at the center after her youngest child left for the University of Anytown to study medicine. After home schooling her three children (two lawyers and the future doctor), you would think the former high school drop out would want to take it easy. Instead, she’s taken her incredible story and written a new book designed to help other parents successfully home school their own children.

Doe, who is also a member of the Anytown Home School Society, has taken her twenty plus years of practical knowledge and condensed it into her book, Successful Home Schooling. In the book, Doe not only discusses her own experiences with the public school system (eventually leading to her dropping out her senior year), but also how she came to the decision to home school her own children and the process she designed. Candidly discussing the trial and error approach of her early attempts, Doe then carefully explains how she finally developed her process and how it helped her own children reach their full potential.

Successful Home Schooling is available at http://www.lulu.com/janedoebooks

 

In the above sample, the fact that Doe has been successfully serving as a literacy volunteer and has home schooled three children who all went on to college provides contrast to the fact that she is a high school drop-out. This both gives her credibility and creates interest in her as a person. Editors, believe it or not, love success stories. And instead of portraying herself as just another self-published author, Doe instead illustrates how she has succeeded against the odds.

 

How do editors use press releases?

The process of writing a press release is much different than most other forms of writing. In most articles or stories, you start off slowly and build up to your eventual climatic ending. The press release works in the reverse. You have to get to the point first, and then add all of your details later in order of importance.

This is because of the two ways editors use a press release. Most commonly, press releases are used as “filler” in a newspaper or magazine, filling up the blank space between the featured stories. Because of time constraints, editors don’t actually “edit” press releases. If space is tight, they simply cut the release to fit. And when they cut, they cut from the bottom. This is why it is important to both keep your release short, and insure that the point of your release is in the first paragraph. You just don’t know where the editor is going to cut. You might spend weeks carefully crafting a detailed seven paragraph release, only to have the editor chop off the bottom four paragraphs.

The second way editors use press releases is to look for future human-interest stories. Human-interest pieces sell papers. Particularly in the internet age, people can get their daily news just about anywhere.

Newspapers and magazines, to keep reader interest, need to focus on what readers cannot get from electronic newswires and radio news broadcasts. This is why human-interest pieces are important.

People like to read about other people like them, everyday people in unique situations overcoming the odds. In our previous example, Jane Doe’s release is the perfect human-interest story. Not only is Jane a person who has overcome the odds, but her story can segue into more in depth stories about the state of education in the region in general.

But editors are inundated with news pieces. You have, on average, about 20 seconds to get an editor’s interest. If you have not gotten to the point in that time, your release goes in the shredder or gets deleted and he moves on.

 

About the Author:

Julie Ann Dawson earned a degree in English, Liberal Arts from Rowan University in 1993.  While there, she also studied marketing, public relations, and sociology.  Upon graduation, she worked as a Public Relations Assistant for the City of Bridgeton’s Department of Recreation and Public Affairs, writing press releases, creating marketing literature, and assisting with organizing special events.  She honed her sales and marketing skills while working for a South Jersey Kirby vacuum distributor, first as a sales representative and then as a team leader and finally as a recruiter.  While with Kirby, her sales efforts won five paid vacations, including trips to Hawaii and Montreal.

Her work has appeared in a variety of print and digital media, including such diverse publications as the New Jersey Review of Literature, Lucidity, Black Bough, Poetry Magazine, Gareth Blackmore’s Unusual Tales, Demonground, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and others.  In 2002 she started her own publishing company, Bards and Sages.  The company has gone from having two titles to over one hundred titles between their print and digital products.