Five Ways to Get and Keep Media Attention After Your Book Launch

As a TV producer for nearly 20 years and also the author of two books on productivity—Listful Living and Listful Thinking—I know what it’s like to pitch yourself and your book as well as what it’s like to be the media gatekeeper.

When you’re launching a new book, the focus of your pitching and media strategy is the book and only the book. But it’s not always easy to know what your next step is after you’ve finished the book launch. And let’s be honest, after just a few months your book baby is already a toddler and the media has likely moved on.

As a media trainer, I often work with authors in the toddler stage of their media journey. They’ve done some media and they want to keep it going without being repetitive. Plus, you can’t keep pitching the same thing to the media—they won’t bite!

Here are my tips for getting and keeping media attention in the weeks, months, and years after your book launch wraps.

1. Overhaul your mindset

Shift your mindset from consistently building interest and sharing the newness of your book to focusing on your position as an author and expert with lots of valuable information to share. And yes, most of that is in the book. This is different from just telling everyone you have a new book. After a month, your book is old news. Sorry, but it’s true and acknowledging that is key. Plus, I’m sure you’ve exhausted yourself with your pre-sale efforts as well.

But this doesn’t mean you need to leave your book behind in your plan for media attention. For example, I still talk about the content of my first book, Listful Thinking: Using Lists to Be More Productive, Highly Successful and Less Stressed, years after its 2015 publication date. The content and knowledge are still relevant. It’s all about the way you frame these things as useful to your audiences. To do this, you can check out my free resource of 10 questions every author needs to answer. You’ll be surprised what kind of content ideas come from your answers.

2. Safeguard your media contacts—and invest in them.

Save all the contact information for any producers or journalists you worked with during your book launch. Send them thank you notes (yes, real paper ones!) after working with them and connect with them on LinkedIn. Treat them like people and more than likely they will do the same. I can count on one hand the number of thank you notes I got in the nearly 20 years I was a television producer.

It’s also important to stay in touch. Sending pitches on topics related to and even beyond the scope of your book is one way to do this. For more on what to pitch check out this episode of my live-stream show “Inside Scoop” where I break down the top five media-pitch questions.

If there are authors in your professional network whose work might be a good fit for producers or journalists you know, you can make introductions. Ask if they’re open to it first of course. They’ll be grateful you did and remember you as someone who has their finger on the pulse of noteworthy things. These repeated interactions build positive, lasting relationships, which you can think of as investments in a sustainable media strategy in the long term. Then, when you have something important to talk about again, they’ll remember you.

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3. Consume media in a new way.

You probably used to read or watch interviews with authors and dream about the day that would be you. Well, now it is!

That doesn’t mean it’s time to stop watching and reading, though. It’s important to stay an active consumer of media once you’ve published your book. There’s valuable information in those interviews that you can learn from. Stay on top of new releases and see how those authors leverage media coverage.

And then, this is the key, keep watching those authors and see how they appear in the media when they don’t have a new book out.

What are they speaking about? How is it tied to their published work? Pay attention, and take action accordingly!

4. Take the conversation beyond the book …

One of the most valuable lessons I learned as an author is that just because something isn’t in your book doesn’t mean you can’t talk about it. In fact, as time goes on, you need to expand the reach of your expertise.

For instance, I did a segment on PIX11 News in New York City about how artificial intelligence can make you more productive. This is not something that I wrote about in either of my books, but I sure have a lot to say about the topic. And guess what, AI wasn’t even a thing when I wrote my first book. It doesn’t matter. As a productivity expert I can use my knowledge to share things and I was still identified as the author of my book.

5. … But also reuse the content from your book.

Start a podcast. Post on your blog. Do videos and live streams on your social media and LinkedIn profiles. The content for these endeavors should absolutely come from your book. For instance, you can take a nugget from your book and turn it into a blog post on the topic. Then you can do a Q&A livestream or a quick video of your main talking points. Media begets media. Then you can use this new content to pitch producers again. I go into this in depth in my free checklist for becoming a media expert.

Most importantly, you must consider yourself an expert in the topic you wrote your book on—not just a person who wrote a book about that topic. Getting and keeping media attention requires a mindset shift. You need to identify as an expert in order to speak confidently and precisely about your work in the media.

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