Purple mops and media releases

The mop that went off

When I tell people who don’t work under the sales/marketing/PR umbrella that a major part of my job is to write media releases they often scratch their heads and ask me, ‘What are they?’ I normally start off by telling them that a media release is a document that I email out to the media to alert them of a particular product/person/news story you would like them to cover. If they continue to look lost I usually add: ‘because if you have something to sell it ain’t going to sell if no one knows about it and the media is our main channel’. (Advertising, social media and word of mouth are others.)

The media get back to you if they are interested in seeing the product, interviewing the person, etc. If you would only like the media to report on your story after a particular date then you set an embargo, which is a particular date set by you that stops the media from reporting on your product/story too early. Why set an embargo? In our case I am dealing with selling books and we don’t want the media publishing a nice big spread with an author interview, book review and extract a month before the book is actually available in shops. People will read it, say, ‘Hey, that looks like a good book!’ but then forget about it as soon as they find out it’s not available to buy yet.

Now because Exisle generally publishes self-help/health/parenting books, our media releases aren’t structured like a normal media release (you know the inverted pyramid for news stories: who, what, when, why, how). Instead they are more marketing oriented. Why? Because if I sent out a media release saying ‘Latest self-help book out now!’ I dare say not many would request a copy. My job is to sell the concept of the book to them, to make them want to read it so badly they should have had it yesterday. And I do this by writing a media release more like an info sheet with a catchy headline and smartly written words, all carefully plotted to make the book sound like the latest must read (which, of course, all Exisle books are!).

The process for writing these does take a bit of time. For me, I like to understand the concept fully and wholly. I read the book’s Advance Information Sheet sent by the editor, I read the author’s questionnaire we get every author to fill out, I read the book’s back cover blurb and finally I read the first or second chapters (I’d like to be able to say that I read all books that I work on cover to cover, but sadly time is limited). From this I start gauging a selling point; I look for the sizzle in the sausage. Here is what the book is about but how do I sell it?

The book I’m working on at the moment is called Mindfulness For Life. I could blab on in the media release about how mindfulness has been practised for millennia, how it will make you a happier person, how it’s about living in the moment. Boring! Boring! Boring! But what if I write it like this: ‘Stop daydreaming and start living your life in the present moment! These days we find ourselves in a fast paced world where we’re distracted and preoccupied with a past that has already gone and a future that has never happened — except those who practise mindfulness.’ Do I have your attention? I hope so.

If the media release is a success I get requests pouring into my inbox: Can I have a review copy? When can I interview the authors? Can we extract? etc, etc.

This may sound a bit off topic but on the weekend I went to the markets and as my boyfriend and I walked around we noticed that just about every third or fourth person was carrying a purple mop. When we finally got to the particular stall selling purple mops, there were a man and woman carrying out live demonstrations on a piece of lino showing everyone how spectacular this mop was. They were doing wet and dry demos, there was yelling, shouting — all with the aim of showing people how spectacular this mop was and for only $10!! There was a crowd of people gathered round, $10 notes were being flashed everywhere and the woman went round collecting them all. It was like a high-octane auction. Now if they had just stuck a bunch of purple mops in a box and sat in a fold-up chair with a magazine all day, do you think they would have sold as many? It’s all in how you sell it.

Happy selling :)

P.s Mindfulness For Life will be out in July!

*First posted on the Exisle Publishing blog

Stop the procrastination

A messy desk - one thing I used to procrastinate over!

Procrastinating. I've found that only procrastinators know what this word means. Maybe because procrastinators sigh with relief when they find out that their problem actually exists and has a name, which must mean they're not the only one suffering from this horrible curse.

I don't know about you but I used to be one of the biggest procrastinators around. For those who don't know what procrastinating is it's (according to our favourite encyclopaedia Wikipedia): "the act of replacing high-priority actions with tasks of lower priority, or doing something from which one derives enjoyment, and thus putting off important tasks to a later time." In my uni days I'd ALWAYS leave assignments to the last minute pulling an all nighter the night before typing away like a bleary eyed lunatic and drinking red bull (which actually states on the can that it's made for students!). I'd wake up the next morning a living zombie and ask myself WHY oh WHY did I not do it earlier!

It really was a mind/body struggle. I'd laugh, I'd cry, I'd clean the bathroom, do the dishes, weed the garden, go shopping, anything to stop me from sitting down and writing the god damn thing. It's a horrible feeling too, that sickening feeling of dread, that feeling that you can't delay the inevitable forever but your going to try mighty damn hard to anyway.

Just do it!!! You'd tell yourself. Yeah in a minute when I've had a shower, in a minute once I've grabbed a snack, in a minute once I've made my bed, in a minute once I've clipped my toenails. I'm surprised I'm still mentally sane after going through this process with just about every assignment at university.  My how jealous was I when my uni friends would say to me, "oh that assignment, I did that weeks ago!" after I'd been babbling for 10 minutes about how bad I was struggling. I wished badly that I could change and I tried to change my ways but I found that the habit was too deeply ingrained.

I don't remember a thing of my last ever week of uni. All I know is that I had five assignments due and 12,000 words to write. I switched on robot mode, bunkered down in my room and thought if I can do this I'm superwoman. I got it done. Then collapsed in a heap, the most exhausted I've ever felt in my life and I never wanted to type a single word again.

So uni was finished and I thought my procrastinating habit was gone for good. But sadly no, next came full time work where I became bombarded with so much to do everyday that I found I was slipping back into my old habit again. Some tasks I would put off and put off (of course the most important tasks are the ones that require the most effort!) and I found myself not being as productive as I should be. I also found that (funnily enough) the more I procrastinated the less successful I was at my job. I was stressing out and falling more and more behind until I just looked at my computer screen and hung my head in my hands. I couldn't take it anymore, I needed a solution. And that solution was mindfulness.

I had no idea what mindfulness was to begin with. I'd seen it mentioned in a few women's health mags but had never really bothered to "get" what it meant. That is until I had to write the Trade Information Sheet for our new book coming up in July called Mindfulness For Life. The TIS goes to sales reps and is what all online book stores and databases go off for their book descriptions - so I had to know what I was talking about. From the first page I was hooked, what was this magical thing called mindfulness? Everything I learned intrigued me further until I knew I had found the solution that would work for me.

Mindfulness is all about being present in the here and now. So many of us spend our lives rushing around worrying about the past and stressing over the future. We don't stop to really focus on the present and be fully aware of ourselves. Being mindful means you focus on one thing at time, finish it and move on to the next. You don't worry and stress over how much work you have to get done, you just put your attention towards what must be done now. You finish each job as they come up and don't half start five jobs at once.

By changing my behaviour I found myself getting more things done and stressing less, it was a godsend. If it's a big job, cut it up into smaller parts/sections and focus on completing one bit at a time. With a bit of practice procrastination can soon be a thing of the past, something mindfulness says we shouldn't worry about!