Jesus versus Salvador Dali and the FBI! These are the last two chapters of Bigger Than Jesus by Robert Chazz Chute: The Man You Are Not and The Man You Are. Enjoy!
Next episode: I interview Scout Trooper, master unicyclist and videographer/marketing genius Brian MacKenzie. Then we start a new reading: Higher Than Jesus. Expect explosions, jokes, sex and violence and funny surprises. Bad guys will burn! Um…I’m talking about my next crime novel, not the Brian MacKenzie interview. It will all be fun.
Check out our sponsor, Kit Foster of KitFosterDesign.com, for excellent web banners, Quote Art, book covers and more!
Crack the Indie Author Code is #1 on Amazon: FREEEEEEEEE until Nov. 30, 2012.Click the image to go pick it up. If you love it, please review it. Enjoy! ~ Chazz
Another free ebook! Has Chazz gone mad? Plus, in this chapter of Bigger Than Jesus, our luckless hit man is captured by Vincent and in the sights of a SPAS-12.
Higher Than Jesus is free for you to download until Nov. 23! It’s hardboiled sex and violence with lots of funny dialogue. Jesus is in Chicago killing a bad guy on Christmas Day, brokering an arms deal and failing miserably at group therapy. Grab the ebook as it races up the hardboiled and suspense lists.
A shout out this week goes to new newsletter subscriber PC Zick of pczick.com and author of Live from the Road. Want a mention in the podcast for your website, business or book? Subscribe to the AllThatChazz.com newsletter.
This is podcast is sponsored by the amazing graphic artist Kit Foster of KitFosterDesign.com. He can do amazing work for you, too!
This podcast is sponsored by Kit Foster of KitFosterDesign.com. Check out his portfolio and use his services for book covers, web banners, Quote Art, book trailers, promotional videos and all your graphics needs. He’s the best!
For more writing & publishing advice, you could go nuts and buy Crack the Indie Author Code. Just sayin’.
Part One of this article and points 1 -7 appear at ChazzWrites.com. For a sample media kit, please take a moment to sign up for my newsletter in the link to the right or send your email address to expartepress at gmail dot com and I’ll email the pdfs to you anyway. However, if you mention your website in the newsletter sign-up form, I’ll give your page a plug in the All That Chazz Podcast. I’m easy that way.
Now, on to more fun yet crucial points about creating a killer media kit:
8. Some people think email is easier to delete so they send boxes to media outlets. Stick with email. You’ll never hear from a bunch of the journalists you approach. Printing out a fancy press kit and trying something UPS-delivered with a red ribbon on it is not worth the expense. Better to hit them up for editorial coverage several times through the year and do it cheaply instead of betting it all on one killer package that has to hit now to pay off. Save some of your chips for the next roll. Seriously, please save your money. A document that arrives in the mail is just as easy to dump in the garbage can beside the desk. If the package is perfumed in any way, you just went from quirky and interesting to creepy stalker.
9. Unless you’ve cured cancer and have been keeping it a secret from the world’s medical community until now, don’t pay for a huge media release from a press release propagator. I tried it and, besides jumping through their annoying hoops, it had all the amusing charm of throwing money out the window of a moving car. It was expensive, had no measurable impact and their sales team kept calling until I got mean.
10. Keep the press release short and to the point. More than one page is a strain and a mistake. If you’ve got too much to share it will get lost so use it in your catalogue page. Bullet points are awesome if you can fit your content to your pitch. A solid FAQ page with lots of white space is an alluring alternative. Don’t send a video on CD. There’s a good chance the production values will be too low and they’ll also be afraid that if they watch it, they’ll die in seven days. (Give them a Youtube link instead if you feel your video is that strong.)
11. Provide some detail in your author bio that establishes you as an expert: Awards won, relevant job experience, books written or other media in which you’ve appeared. Keep it short (or go longer if it tells a story. Rags to riches is good. Plucky, spunky and coming up will probably have to do.) You have an advantage over all the other press releases your target will receive today: Every reporter wants to publish a book, too, so they want to meet you and find out how you cheated, lied and took enough drugs to get this stupidly quixotic.
12. Think visually and use images: Luckily, this is where your killer book covers come in. To make sure the attachments got opened so they could see and appreciate all my awesome covers, I used this ad designed by Kit Foster of KitFosterDesign.com at the bottom of my cover letter:
13. Provide your name, contact numbers, email address and websites. It’s a really good idea to remember this point so they can contact you for the interview unless you are wicked clairvoyant.
14. When they interview you, be positive and chipper and helpful. It’s not in the bag until it’s in print or on air, so pretend you’re an extrovert. Later you can go back to being miserable in private. I am.
15. Hit multiple news outlets over time. It’s unlikely one media event will sell a lot of books. You could get a bit of a bump depending on the venue, but awareness takes time. Sales usually require repeated encounters as you permeate the world’s consciousness. Don’t bet everything on one roll of the dice and keep your expectations low to very conservative. Success always pleasantly surprises me.
16. Someone will be unhappy about your apparent success, however deceptive appearances may be. Ignore them. Several someones may contact you to write their book idea (as happened to me after a much-publicized contest win.) Run away screaming at full speed with your hands over your head. Change phone numbers, and country of residence if they persist.
17. Remember that you don’t do this for the fame and riches. It’s all about the writing and the orgies with the Roman toga theme. Get back to the keyboard and TO-GA! TO-GA! TO-GA!
McDonalds used to have crap coffee. It tasted so bad, I thought it was a mistake. Then I tried it again and it tasted just as bad. Then they wanted to compete with Tim Hortons and Starbucks and improved. On my next try, I thought the McDonalds’ coffee wasn’t bad (and it was all I’d consume there.) However, after drinking it, I’d always feel awful and sleepy soon after. I found out why: It’s the mold we’re drinking in cheap coffee.
As a writer, I’m incredibly sedentary. I’m drinking, and chewing, kale shakes with some positive results to combat becoming puddin’. When I eat cookies, cakes and carbs, I feel lethargic. Knock back a kale shake and I feel energetic and focussed. But I missed the coffee. I drink almond milk as coffee, but was overloading on aspartame.
Next addition to the arsenal? Coffee, but not your dad’s coffee. Strong coffee filled with slimming MCT oil, coconut oil and unsalted creamy butter loaded with the kind of fats that are healthy for your brain and make you feel full.
I’m working on brain and body hacks using Bulletproof Exec. I can’t afford shipping in coffee, but I do have access to fire roasted coffee that seems fine. (It’s the mold and mycotoxins often found on coffee beans that make you feel like crap and when I drink the fire roasted stuff, I feel fine. I experimented with the butter (ghee) and MCT oil and coconut oil today. WIth a little bit of Xylitol (or stevia) it’s okay. It doesn’t taste as great as a latte loaded with sugar and cream, but the options I’m working with now might save my life, so there’s that.
Did Han shoot first? This week Jesus comes under fire from Jimmy Lima, underboss of New York’s Spanish mob, The Machine. A game of bad versus evil turns from cherry pie to gunfire in two (count ’em, two!) chapters of Bigger Than Jesus by Robert Chazz Chute. Listen for my stereotypically Canadian pronunciation of “about”.
Grab it on Amazon, and if you shop on Amazon for anything, please do so through AllThatChazz.com and they throw me a few crumbs to support the podcast and Ex Parte Press. Thank you!
