If your book promotion plans play out well, there’s a good chance you’ll be asked to be interviewed. You can also work toward scheduling interviews yourself with your sources. A good media interview helps further cement your ideas in the minds of potential readers and customers.
If you’re setting up interviews with journalists or podcasters or bloggers, you need to do this well in advance of your book’s publication. This is not only to get on a journalist’s schedule but also make sure that such articles or broadcasts appear just before or during the first weeks of your book’s publication.
Your goal is to interest journalists in your ideas, your book and you – so that they will want to spend time interviewing you for articles or podcasts or blog posts. If you get a book review and an interview in a publishing-industry periodical, the review and the interview will be targeted toward booksellers, buyers and librarians. But other journalists will tell the outside world about your book.
So, to begin with, you should send press kits to journalists, bloggers and podcasters who you will hope will interview you. These press kits should be electronic, generally, though you should check beforehand to see if the journalists or bloggers prefer to receive galleys in print or electronic form.
The press kit, whether electronic or print (again, check which form the journalists prefer to receive – though most today prefer digital kits), will have, in addition to basic information about you and your book, a sample Q&A document, in which you provide answers to questions that you’re most likely to be asked during an interview.
We’ll look at this very important element of your interview process in our next post.