Friedl Dicker-Brandeis and the Challenges of Book Publicity
Hi folks.
One of the things I've been working on lately is trying to get more art historians, women's studies professors and museum book shops to know about our book FRIEDL, about a Bauhaus artist and teacher who died in a concentration camp during the Holocaust. The book is beautiful, and beyond that, it's the only one of its kind on the subject -- so once people know about it, it should sell like crazy, at least in the academic world.
What I didn't know about was that Chapman University, earlier this year, ran a Holocaust essay contest in which FRIEDL was offered as one of the topics.
If I can find the time, I'd like to get more schools to do the same. This will require either a ton of phone calls or a very wide mailing. This is the great challenge of book publicity for a small press: lots of great ideas, but a very small budget, and a lot of questions, primarily "how"?
One good place to start, I've found, is trade or web publications. What you need to do is say:
a) What is my intended audience?
and then
b) What is their common denominator? What do they all read?
If you can get an article or advertisement in a publication that 1,000 high school teachers read, then you don't have to send a blind mailing to $1,000 high school teachers. Not to mention the fact that your audience respects its trusty publication or information source. If it sees your product mentioned there, it will take notice.
I've tried this approach a couple times, but it's too early to see if it's worked.
A variation on this line of thinking is to buy an affordable ad in a special issue that will be heavily marketed. We recently excerpted material in a timely publication that sent press releases to national media. The banner ad cost us very little, but time it would have taken us to publicize a back list book on a national scale would have cost us at least three times as much. The idea is to think of clever ways to get the same exposure while minimizing the financial risk. At the end of the day, for a small amount of money we became part of someone else's P.R. blitz, saving ourselves a lot of time and money.
I try to think this way about every book. I think right now, FRIEDL is the one best positioned to succeed, especially since the Jewish Museum of New York has devoted an exhibit to her. It's my opinion that the next step in Friedl's travels should be a woman's college like Smith or Wellesley, or an art college with a program in art therapy. Hopefully a web savvy curator will stumble upon this post while I'm working on something else, and the wheels will be set in motion. That's the great thing about the internet. Say something, forget about it, and reap the rewards months down the line.
To order FRIEDL books or to discuss ideas on how to publicize the book, call (310) 203-3837.
One of the things I've been working on lately is trying to get more art historians, women's studies professors and museum book shops to know about our book FRIEDL, about a Bauhaus artist and teacher who died in a concentration camp during the Holocaust. The book is beautiful, and beyond that, it's the only one of its kind on the subject -- so once people know about it, it should sell like crazy, at least in the academic world.
What I didn't know about was that Chapman University, earlier this year, ran a Holocaust essay contest in which FRIEDL was offered as one of the topics.
If I can find the time, I'd like to get more schools to do the same. This will require either a ton of phone calls or a very wide mailing. This is the great challenge of book publicity for a small press: lots of great ideas, but a very small budget, and a lot of questions, primarily "how"?
One good place to start, I've found, is trade or web publications. What you need to do is say:
a) What is my intended audience?
and then
b) What is their common denominator? What do they all read?
If you can get an article or advertisement in a publication that 1,000 high school teachers read, then you don't have to send a blind mailing to $1,000 high school teachers. Not to mention the fact that your audience respects its trusty publication or information source. If it sees your product mentioned there, it will take notice.
I've tried this approach a couple times, but it's too early to see if it's worked.
A variation on this line of thinking is to buy an affordable ad in a special issue that will be heavily marketed. We recently excerpted material in a timely publication that sent press releases to national media. The banner ad cost us very little, but time it would have taken us to publicize a back list book on a national scale would have cost us at least three times as much. The idea is to think of clever ways to get the same exposure while minimizing the financial risk. At the end of the day, for a small amount of money we became part of someone else's P.R. blitz, saving ourselves a lot of time and money.
I try to think this way about every book. I think right now, FRIEDL is the one best positioned to succeed, especially since the Jewish Museum of New York has devoted an exhibit to her. It's my opinion that the next step in Friedl's travels should be a woman's college like Smith or Wellesley, or an art college with a program in art therapy. Hopefully a web savvy curator will stumble upon this post while I'm working on something else, and the wheels will be set in motion. That's the great thing about the internet. Say something, forget about it, and reap the rewards months down the line.
To order FRIEDL books or to discuss ideas on how to publicize the book, call (310) 203-3837.
posted by Atkins Gal at 10/13/2004 07:51:00 AM
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