Used to be you did the big hits. USA Today. NY Times. NPR. If you could get them. You did newspapers and local television and radio and went on tour and the PR people booked you into these circuits and everything worked pretty much the way it was supposed to. That was because people all listened to the same sources. And the PR people could deliver on what they set out to do...now all bets are off.
Social Media has moved in on the vacuum of the collapse of newspapers and mainstream media. I don't mean collapse like they are not there I mean that they are there in a different formats. There are no book sections left really. Go try and get a book covered in a newspaper. Very difficult. All the people who covered my earlier books are gone. Their positions don't even exist. Television and radio is deluged with content now. Books are way down on the totem pole if they are on the pole at all.
And worse than all this PR people don't really get social media. It is too personal. It really has to be done by the author for it to work because it is not big hits but a million small ones. You couldn't pay a PR person enough to pull this off though some may try. The truth is it is an eat what you kill world now and every author must master PR or risk not selling.
On the positive side it is a poor mans game again. You just have to roll up your sleeves.
www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher
Social Media has moved in on the vacuum of the collapse of newspapers and mainstream media. I don't mean collapse like they are not there I mean that they are there in a different formats. There are no book sections left really. Go try and get a book covered in a newspaper. Very difficult. All the people who covered my earlier books are gone. Their positions don't even exist. Television and radio is deluged with content now. Books are way down on the totem pole if they are on the pole at all.
And worse than all this PR people don't really get social media. It is too personal. It really has to be done by the author for it to work because it is not big hits but a million small ones. You couldn't pay a PR person enough to pull this off though some may try. The truth is it is an eat what you kill world now and every author must master PR or risk not selling.
On the positive side it is a poor mans game again. You just have to roll up your sleeves.
www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher
