How to make sending email more efficient
Since we are all writers and / or work in the publishing industry and word smithing is how we earn our keep, I thought it might make sense to discuss how to communicate more efficiently in email messages, given that we are all swamped (and often checking messages on the fly on a mobile device about half the size of my palm). Here are some of my top Do’s and Don’ts.
Do
- Use a descriptive, specific and accurate subject line. Also, amend / clarify your subject line if the topic of the message changes. When busy people scan subject lines on the hundreds of messages that arrive daily in their inboxes, guess which messages get opened first?
- Make sure your response (and electronic signature) appear at the top — not the bottom — of a message chain. Remember that many people are accessing email on Blackberries and other mobile devices and can only see the first few lines of an email without scrolling.
- Make sure your contact information appears in all messages (new ones as well as replies and forwards) as well as on messages sent from webmail accounts or mobile devices so recipients have your contact information at their finger tips at all times. Many people have been creating increasingly complex signatures, some of which take up a lot of space. If you have a long electronic signature, consider using it for new messages only, and then create a second signature with just your email address and phone number for replies, forwards and mobile devices.
- Include your email address in your esignature. You may think it is redundant since the address appears on your email message. However, depending on if / how the message is forwarded, the email address does not appear.
- Consider creating a discussion group, like Google Groups or Yahoo Groups, if you know you will have a lengthy and ongoing exchange between a number of people. This way, all responses to a particular topic easily stored in one place (and referred back to in the future). You can also set preferences so that you receive a notification email every time someone posts in the group, once a day, once a week or once a certain number of posts have accumulated. Ideally, you want to participate with a Gmail or Yahoo email account, but you can do so from any email account.
Don’t
- This one is not new, but it continues to be a problem. Do not, not, NOT Reply All when it is not necessary. If you need to respond to more than one person on the distribution list, please show some consideration for busy colleagues and take 30 seconds to remove the people who do not need to receive your response.
- Also not new: do not send unsolicited, large, i.e., 500 KB+ attachments. Most email providers limit the size of the user’s mailbox. Once the limit has been reached, the user can no longer send email messages (although received messages usually are stored. Somewhere). If you need to send a large message, consider uploading it to a document-sharing site like Google Docs or a file-sharing site like You Send It. That way, the recipient can simply click on a link to download the document directly to their hard drive. (Of course, if someone has just asked you to send a JPEG of an author photo or cover, it’s a good bet they’re ready to receive and deal with a massive file landing in their inbox.)
- Do not set a rule requesting a notification when the recipient opens or deletes your message. If you don’t get a bounce back, assume the message has been received. If you don’t get a response, assume the recipient is really swamped. If it’s really important that you do get a response, send a follow-up message with a subject line that indicates the urgency of the message or give the person a call. Being asked to notify someone when I read their message is a bit like telling my manager every time I go to the bathroom — some things just don’t need to be shared.
What are your top email tips / pet peeves? Please feel free to weigh in with your own in the Comments section.
Working with book bloggers
As newspapers have slashed book sections, we’ve been really lucky that blogs have allowed lots and lots of people to talk about books. At the same time, publishing houses can be tricky for bloggers to navigate (given that we ourselves sometimes find other houses — and sometimes our own — tricky to navigate).
Here are some suggestions for book bloggers looking to obtain review copies of books from publishing houses (and if you are a book publicist, author or literary agent, feel free to pass on this information if you find it helpful):
- Know your imprints. Contemporary publishing houses are behemoths made up of a number of different imprints (departments). If you are regularly reviewing and requesting books, it is important you learn who is who. In most cases, there is no one contact person (or email address) for Penguin or Random House or Simon & Schuster — you’ll need to distinguish between the different imprints and know who to contact. Also, remember that all Children’s / YA imprints are separate from adult imprints. Here are some links to lists of imprints and email addresses at some of the largest publishing houses:
Simon & Schuster (List of divisions and imprints — no emails listed)
- Include a buy link for the book and, if applicable, to the author’s website. Most book publicists don’t care too much whether the buy link is to a publishing house or to an e-commerce site like Amazon or Indiebound, but we do want to see a link.
- Feature the most recent edition of the book. Check the publication date of a book and the cover (and buy link) for the most recent edition of the book. It can be discouraging when we see a review a year after a book has been published … with no mention of the paperback. Keep in mind, too, that many readers prefer to purchase the cheaper paperback edition of a book, so this information is valuable for them, too.
- Feature your country’s edition of the book. Assuming most of your readers are located in the country in which you live (which is often but not always the case), feature the cover of and buy link to the book in the store in that country. So, for example, if your readers are primarily in the US, make it easier for them and feature the American edition of the book; if you readers are primarily in the UK, feature the British edition.
- Be mindful of the book’s on-sale date. In an ideal world, all reviews would be published on or around (within a week or so of) the book’s publication date. Although readers can preorder books, they often will not unless the author is well-known and the book is highly anticipated, so most early reviews don’t generate too many sales. We realize we cannot dictate when someone can run a review, however, but if the review does early, we do appreciate your making a note of this. (Also, keep in mind that just because you receive a finished book from us, it doesn’t mean it is available in stores — we receive finished books six weeks ahead of time and we send these books to journalists, bloggers and others who need to receive books ahead of time.)
- Request current / upcoming titles. In publishing, we’re focused primarily on current and upcoming titles. This means we often don’t have the budget to provide (complimentary) review copies of books that have come out years (or even months) previously. This doesn’t mean we won’t ever provide them — and you can always ask — but it does mean that you will need a pretty good reason for needing / wanting those older books.
Book publicists: what would you add? Bloggers: questions / comments?
How Excel can make book publicity easier
In the field of book promotion, we don’t often use Excel, and the truth is that you only need mention “pivot table” or “concatenate” to make my head swim. But even though we don’t need to make use of Excel’s advanced functions, book publicists and authors can use it for one basic purpose: to efficiently maintain lists of names. In fact, storing data in Word is akin to, say, writing a book in Excel.
As handy as Excel can be for our lists of names, it needs to be used correctly so that the information can be easily mail merged and / or imported into various publicity databases and mailing systems. Here are a few Excel issues / questions that I’ve seen arise:
Leading zeros: Excel’s default format causes “leading” zeros to be dropped. For example, if you were to enter “06520″ into a cell, it would appear as “6520.” Some users attempt to rectify the situation by replacing the number “0″ with the capital letter “O.” This looks correct, but it means the information can’t be imported into a mailing system (or a database connected to a mailing system), because the system does not recognize letters in the zip code field (at least not if you’re in the US).
–> Instead, highlight your column, then click “Format” from the top menu bar, then “Cell,” then select “Text” in the box on the left on the “Number” tab. This will allow you to “keep” all leading zeros.
Address fields: All databases use separate fields for each element of an address, so in order to be able to import the address into any publicity database (to generate address labels) or even to mail merge address labels, you need to separate out the address into its components.
–> All databases are slightly different, but it usually works to create separate fields called Address1 (street number and name), Address2 (Floor / Suite / Apartment number), City, State and Zip. Click here for a template. (One caveat: if you are an author or literary agent working with a publicist who has asked you to submit names, show them the template before you use it; they may ask you to make some small changes to the fields.)
Sorting: If you need to sort your contacts, i.e., some contacts should receive galleys while others should receive books, or some contacts receive personal notes while others do not, do not highlight or use a different color text for those records.
–> It may seem to make sense to highlight certain names — the way one would in a book or on a piece of paper — but in Excel, there’s no function that allows you to sort by color. (Excel alphabetizes, i.e., sorts, by column.) So instead, create a new column, called, say “Personal Notes” and mark off a “P” (or an “X”) next to those contacts who should receive personal notes. Then, when you highlight that column and hit the “ABC” button on the shortcuts menu bar, all your contacts who should receive notes will be in one place.
What are some of your Excel bugaboos / quick fixes?
