As part of a small publishing house that is constantly releasing books, I'll be seeing my own first standalone short story come out next month from there, actually, but one of the things I constantly see posted in my house's super-secret Facebook group is that they're having trouble getting their books reviewed in major outlets.
Having worked both sides of the fence as a reviewer of indie books and an indie artist in literature and music, I thought I'd offer up a few suggestions on how to maximize the attention you'll get from the media.
10. Make Sure It Is Finished and Scheduled for Publication There is no point in sending a reporter an unedited manuscript full of formatting errors and typos. He or she will at best ignore it and at worst nuke it with criticism. Likewise, you have to be able to say when and where and how it will be available. There must be a definitive date, otherwise there's no point in doing a review because no matter how awesome your work may be and how lovingly a critic may describe it, the audience has to find out when and where they can get it.
9. Make Sure YOU Are Finished By that I mean you need to have all your promotional gear ready to go. You need your book in ePub or PDF form and possibly a few review copies if the outlets you're talking to are old school. You need a high-resolution copy of your cover and a nice author's shot of you. You need a 100-word biography telling them who you are and what you do, and you should be able to describe your book in another 100 words as well, 200 max. Write a template email to use when contacting people, and make sure it contains all the required links, contact info or anything else that a critic might need. Your press kit needs to be well organized and fully stocked.
8. Identify Your Local Media The power of a local author is that simply being one is news in and of itself. "Local Author Redefines Vampire Genre" is a great headline, and you'd be surprised in this day and age how much news is still local and how well such stories actually can do. Be liberal with your definition of local, as well. As far as I'm concerned, Texas is local, and that gives me at least half a dozen major metropolitan centers full of newspapers and blogs. Most cities have a helpful list on Wikipedia like this one. However...
7. Don't Just Send a Copy to the Paper I've reviewed stuff that was simply sent to the Houston Press and ended up in the "What's all this?" pile. It does happen, but it's generally a waste of time and money. Any decent-size paper gets tons of stuff and yours is probably going to get lost. Instead...
6. Look for the Writers Who Care About Local Authors Now that you've got an outlet, what do you do? Well, the best thing is to hit their search bar and type in things like "novel" and "author" and "book." If they have a tag for books or book reviews, even better. Go through the results and make a note of which writers are interested in local books and have written reviews. If they've done one before, they'll probably do them again. Feel free to email them through whatever contact format they have on site, and if there isn't one, simply email the editor and tell him or her you're trying to reach so-and-so about a possible review. I get plenty of forwards from the editor that way. You'll get much better results by targeting writers rather than editors because the editors are usually much busier,
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