The Tears and Triumphs of a New Author Chapter 21

Chapter 21


Some how, we had to let the world know about 'Lady Justice' and it was up to us to do it.

Authorhouse had done a fantastic job producing the book, but after that, it was all on us.

Obviously, our connection to the outside world was the Internet. Some how, we had to get people to our website, www.booksbybob.com.

We were on all the social networking sites, but we needed more.

The marketing guy from Authorhouse had sent us an email with links to sites he thought might be useful to us.

One was a website listing all of the newspapers in the United States, state by state.

I had read that Authorhouse would prepare a press release for me --- for a fee, and submit it to selected papers, but again, I could do that for myself, so I studied press release construction and prepared my first press release.

The process was grueling. I had to pull up the newspapers in a particular state and then open their website and find the appropriate email address for press release submission.

I spent as much time as I could spare, and over a two week period, I sent press releases to EVERY newspaper in Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Arizona, Florida and New York.

I have no idea if any paper actually published the releases, but they certainly received them. We did get responses from a couple of newspapers who offered to review 'Lady Justice' if we sent their book editor a copy, which, of course, we did. We haven't heard back from them yet.

We did learn a trick. After I sent all the emails the first time, I pulled up the sent messages and put the email addresses in a special newspaper address book. It would save me hours of labor on my next press release barrage.

I had also found websites on the Internet,I-Newswire.com, PR.com, Free-Press-Release.com, and Prlog.org, on which I could post my first release. I used them all.

If the world didn't know about 'Lady Justice', it wasn't for lack of trying.