Snark Bites: Media Kits

As an active book blogger, I'm always excited to work with authors to promote their books. Often, new authors don't really understand what is expected of them or what they need to provide for a blogger to be able to create a successful post showcasing their book to its best advantage.

The list varies from blog to blog, but commonly requested pieces of information include:

•  The book's title, author name, publisher, date published, genre and word count
• A high quality cover image
• The book's blurb, an excerpt and buy links
• A high quality author photo
• An author bio and author links

Sometimes, new authors provide this information in the body of an email, which can create a bevy of formatting issues and also be difficult to retain. In other instances, authors have sent me separate documents for each piece of information.

You can imagine the headache associated with trying to keep track of multiple documents within the Word processor while attempting to transfer everything to the blog post. I have chunks of hair missing on parts of my skull...

I've found I can always tell an author with multiple titles or who has some experience under their belt. When asked for their promotional info, those authors provide a single Word or RTF file that contains everything with plain formatting for easy copying and pasting.

These promotional packets have a variety of names. I've heard them referred to as media kits and tear sheets. No matter what it is called, a promotional packet is an invaluable tool for authors and book bloggers.

What should tear sheets look like? Below is a sample of what one might look like. There's a lot of wiggle room, but what matters is that all of the information is contained in one place.

Below are screen shots of the media kit I'll be providing to Sheryl Hayes for inclusion at the end of this post. I hope she'll find it helpful.

Here's a screen shot of the first page of my media kit for THE CHILD THIEF:

Pages two contains the excerpt and buy links:

Page three has my author information:

I hope the information here is useful for authors in their future promotional efforts. I'm sure you'll discover that you save both time and effort once all of your book's information is assembled in one easy grab-and-go place.

*Originally blogged on Author Sheryl Hayes' site.