Let's start with something most authors don't want to hear: journalists don't care about your book. Not yet, anyway. What they care about is their audience, and whether what you're bringing them is something their readers, viewers, or listeners will connect with. The moment you understand that, everything about media outreach changes.
The media doesn't want to be sold. They want stories. Specifically, they want stories that resonate, that feel timely, that touch people where they actually live. Walk into any pitch thinking you have an easy sell and you've already lost the room. There is no easy sell. There is only a story that serves their audience or one that doesn't.
This is where most authors go wrong. They lead with the book. They talk about the plot, the characters, the journey to publication, all things that matter deeply to them and almost not at all to a producer or editor deciding what makes the cut. The question a journalist is always asking, consciously or not, is: why does this matter to my audience, right now?
So before you pitch, ask yourself that question. Does your book connect to something happening in the news? Does it speak to an experience a broad group of people are living through? Does it offer insight, comfort, provocation, or answers around something people are already talking about? If you can draw that line — between your story and their audience's world — you have a pitch worth making.
Don't just focus on the story your book tells. Focus on how it lands in the real world. A memoir about surviving illness becomes a conversation about healthcare and family resilience. A novel about immigration becomes a timely cultural story. A business book becomes a piece about what's broken in a particular industry and how to fix it. The book is the vehicle. The story is what drives it.
At the risk of being repetitive: focus on them, not you. Meet their needs and the needs of their audience, and you'll meet yours.
It really is that simple.
And that hard.
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