Launching Our Own Promotion

When we engaged Paul Krupin to send out a publicity blast (see our posting of December 3, 2009), he provided us with the list of hundreds of individuals in the media to whom he sent the news release. The list included names, addresses, and telephone numbers, but did not include e-mail addresses. This means that if we want to send out our own releases without engaging his services for a second round, then we will have to find the e-mail addresses on the Web.

Monique spent several hours on the Web researching e-mail addresses and found sixty-two. It is a small list to start with, but it’s a start! We sent out a Valentine’s Day press release to journalists who write about food and travel for daily newspapers and received, in return, four “Read” reports, four “Not read” reports, nine “Mail delivery failed” reports, and three “Delivered” reports, for a total of nineteen reports. But we did not receive any requests for a review copy of the book – yet.

Paul told us that the response rate for press releases is from 0.5% to 1.0%. This means that we’ll need to send out a lot more releases to get even one reply!