Why email signatures are important
One of the reasons why I haven’t posted in a while is because it’s been really crazy — as fall often is for book publicists — and I’ve been madly booking interviews (and rescheduling them, as so often is the case). Lots of late nights and heading to the office on weekends. Now more than ever I’ve come to appreciate that some people are easy to reach and others … not so much.
For example, some producers routinely list three phone numbers in their electronic signatures — direct number, show / studio line, cell phone — while others don’t even have an esignature. Although I do prefer email to the phone, I still use the latter (particularly when I’m not getting a response by email). Guess who gets the hot, last-minute booking?
Many other people request review copies of books and when mailing addresses are included in email signatures, I can easily pop books in the mail. But some fail to include mailing addresses in esignatures. So on a busy day, when I barely have time to go to the bathroom, guess who doesn’t get the book?
Of course — the knife cuts both ways. Reporters and producers who can’t reach a publicist are liable to move on to the next book or author. At the end of the day, most of what this boils down to is an email signature. So make it a good one.
If you want something, make it easy for me to get it to you
I missed my lunchtime Pilates class earlier this week because I was busy sifting through 96 messages I had filed in my “Follow up” folder for a certain book over the past few months. (We published the book in hardcover last April and by the time the winter rolled around, the author wasn’t keen to continue doing interviews.)
So there I was, plugging the information from the email messages into our publicity database so I could make sure to send copies of the paperback book as well as follow up with the reporters / producers. Well before realizing that a sandwich consisting entirely of pate (even a hearty, meaty concoction like country pate) is not advisable, I noticed a trend: people would request interviews and, while most included a few sentences about their story / organization (thankfully!), a good three quarters of the journalists neglected to include mailing addresses.
Eliminating “desire to maintain aura of mystery” as a reason for failing to include complete contact information, I’m guessing journalists don’t want to be inundated with packages, books, press releases and other assorted and unwanted items that arrive in the mail. All well and good. Except when they want something. If I were less thorough, I would likely have deleted requests that came in without mailing addresses. (Read between the lines, here, folks.) But I am thorough, so I either responded asking for an address or looked up the organization online. I got what I needed, but let’s face it: my time — anyone’s time — could have been better spent in numerous other ways (like doing Pilates, perhaps).
Email signatures — on new messages, responses / forwards and on Blackberries / other PDAs — are vital. Would you leave a voicemail message for a professional contact without leaving your full name and phone number? Hopefully not. So what makes it okay to sign off an email with just your name and not a word about your company or its website?
I know some of you are rolling your eyes and wondering how much more I could possibly blather on about the finer points of electronic signatures, but this is important because it makes business quicker and easier to conduct. Help me spread the word about the importance esignatures (and then hopefully I won’t have to post about this topic so often). See, I really can go on forever.
10 New Year’s Resolutions
My New Year’s Resolution last year was to get my oven fixed. Which didn’t get done. It’s been five years. So this year, rather than coming up with a resolution for myself — and being of the sometimes bossy persuasion — I thought I’d come up with some resolutions for … other people. (I can do that, right?) Here, categorized:
Publicity
– Set up a Google Alert for your book (or all your books if you’re a book publicist). They’re not fool proof, but free, quick to set up and pretty darn effective more or less makes up for that. Make sure, though, that there is *one* person assigned to forward press mentions to editor / author / agent / publicity director — you don’t want to duplicate efforts and have everyone forwarding everyone else the same mentions.
– Set up an RSS reader like Bloglines, Google Reader, News Gator, or any number of others. For a publicist, an RSS reader is an invaluable tool for following numerous publications and websites (and broadcast outlets). For authors and anyone else, it’s a good way to stay on top of the news in general or to keep yourself briefed about a specific topic(s). For more information about RSS readers, check here.
– Make sure an author’s web presence is established early, as in, by the time galleys are sent to the media (typically four-six months before a book goes on sale). Depending on the author, “web presence” could mean any or all of the following: website, blog, social networking profile, discussion group, wiki, etc. Whatever it is, get it up there ASAP because while you’re dithering over fonts and flash, readers and journalists are out there Googling the book. In this day and age when basic sites can be created in a few minutes for free, there’s nothing more frustrating than not being able to find accurate information about something. (I’m not advocating throwing together a shoddy site simply so you can lay claim to having one; I am saying think about this earlier rather than later.)
– Set an email signature. On your desktop account. On your PDA. On your replies and forwards. You may know someone, but what if they have to forward your message to someone else? Sending an email message without a signature is akin to calling someone and not identifying yourself. It’s unprofessional. Unless you’re emailing Grandma.
– Don’t be sloppy. Do not pepper your messages with emoticons. Do not write all in lower-case letters. Do not write all in upper-case letters. Don’t use cell-phone abbreviations when you have a full keyboard at your disposal. Punctuate properly. Don’t ramble.
– Use Reply All — when appropriate. We’ve been conditioned to not use Reply All (with good reason). But sometimes, when I email a producer / writer and copy an author (or vice versa) and the contact only responds to me, I’m left simply forwarding the message. Not only is that a waste of my time, but when time is of the essence, it could lead to a missed opportunity.
General
– Use a “Follow up” tag / tool / label / folder. A few years ago I was working with a very busy author who was pretty much impossible to track down by either phone or email. As a result, interview requests constantly went unanswered and I could barely keep track of who still needed a response. What I learned (in addition to figuring out how not to tear out my hair) was that segregating interview requests in a “Follow up” folder (or using the Follow Up tag in Outlook) made it that much easier to figure out who still needed an answer. Sometimes, when I know an author takes a long time to respond, I email them requests with a blind copy to myself so I can file the message in the “Follow up” folder. Of course, this means you have to follow up on the “Follow up” folder, but at least I can tell the difference between “To Do” and “Done.”
– Don’t waste time by asking stupid questions. What is a stupid question? The definition of a stupid question is very simple: it’s one you can pretty easily answer yourself. Kind of like, “Can you tell me who wrote this book?” If you are asked a stupid question, you can either 1) say you don’t answer stupid questions 2) answer the stupid question or 3) provide the link to the answer to the stupid question. I suggest option 3.
– Try not to ask someone else to do something when it’s quicker to do it yourself. There are exceptions, of course — extreme busy-ness, need to delegate, blah, blah, blah – but sometimes it really is more efficient to do something yourself rather than waiting for someone else to do it. For example, if I want to know whether I can get an author to a city in time to do an event / interview, I could call or email the travel agent asking for possible flight times. Although my travel agent happens to be the World’s Best Travel Agent, it still is faster to hop on to Travelocity and sift through my options.
– Exercise. Two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese. Well, you didn’t think you could get away from that one, now, could you?
Writing messages for Blackberries and other PDAs
This weekend, literary agent Janet Reid posted some of her email rules, which reminded me I’d been working on a post about PDAs. While these devices are incredibly handy, they have their limitations, so it’s worthwhile keeping these points in mind (whether you’re using a Blackberry / other PDA or simply writing messages that may be read on them):
Writing messages for Blackberry / PDA users:
– Messages can only be downloaded in full when the user has service, so make sure all the vital information is at the top of your message.
– PDAs hyperlink email addresses (and smart phones “recognize” phone numbers) which means you can email / call with the click of a button. This also means that it can’t hurt to repeat both an email address and phone number within the body of a message (like in your electronic signature) so the user can quickly respond.
– My Blackberry, which dates back to the Civil War, cannot display HTML (the computer language that allows you to view pictures and formatting and all the “pretty” stuff). Since you may be contacting journalists who are similarly handicapped, make sure your pitch isn’t dependent on fonts, colors, etc.
– The other thing I can’t see on Berry messages is email addresses. (I can see that an email message is from John Doe, but I can’t see that his address is john.doe@nytimes.com.) So make sure you always use an email signature (both with new messages as well as with replies and forwards).
Using Blackberries / PDAS:
– Make sure to set an email signature on your PDA. Users often neglect to do this (even if they have set an e-signature for their desktop account) which means a sizeable number of your messages are being sent with only your email address to identify you.
– You have the option of removing the “Sent from my Blackberry / iPhone / etc.” signature from your messages. Some heavy users deliberately use it as a “disclaimer” to excuse the occasional typo resulting from thumbing an email message, which is fine, but don’t leave it there simply because you didn’t know how to / couldn’t be bothered to remove it. You can always replace it with … your esignature!
NPR Books Watch — 9/5-9/11
You may or may not be aware, but there are at least two settings for your automatic email signature: you can set it 1) only when you write a new message 2) all the time, when you write a message and when you reply to / forward messages. I highly recommend the latter.
Just the other day, my colleague and I offered people in our company copies of a book whose authors were speaking at The Strand Wednesday night. Several people asked for a copy of the book, but without email signatures, we didn’t know where to interoffice the books, and that meant we had to email them to ask for their locations and they had to email back. WASTE OF TIME.
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But now I’m in a good mood because now that the Olympics and conventions are over, we’re back up to 20 book stories on the national NPR shows for the week. Nice.
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Here are the NPR interviews for this week. Anyone who emails me the imprints of all the books listed (or houses if no imprint is available) will win the NPR Books Grid for the prior week that includes, in addition to the information below, interviewer, pub date, imprint, post-interview Amazon ranking, pre-interview ranking (if the book was mentioned on Shelf Awareness and I was able to look up the number before the interview), and interview hyperlink.
TOTAL book stories for the week: 20
All Things Considered: 4
Book Tour: 1
Day to Day: 2
Fresh Air: 3
Morning Edition: 1
NPR.org: 3
Talk of the Nation: 3
Tell Me More: 1
Weekend Edition Saturday: 2
| All Things Considered | Three Books / Chick Lit That Features Heroines, Not High Heels | |||
| All Things Considered | My Dad, John McCain | Meghan | McCain | Children’s |
| All Things Considered | Man in the Dark | Paul | Auster | Literary Fiction |
| All Things Considered | Three Books / Prodigal Pages Celebrate Many Awkward Returns | |||
| Book Tour | Stand the Storm | Breena | Clarke | Literary Fiction |
| Day to Day | Can You Ever Forgive Me? | Lee | Israel | Biography |
| Day to Day | Massacre at Mountain Meadows | Ronald W. | Walker | History |
| Fresh Air | Hot, Flat, and Crowded | Thomas | Friedman | Politics |
| Fresh Air | War Within, The | Bob | Woodward | Politics |
| Fresh Air | Limits of Power, The | Andrew | Bacevich | Politics |
| Morning Edition | Bacardi and the Long Fight For Cuba | Tom | Gjelten | History |
| NPR.org | Books We Like / Bottomless Belly Button | Dash | Shaw | Graphic Novel |
| NPR.org | Books We Like / The Lost Spy | Andrew | Meier | History |
| NPR.org | Books We Like / Names on the Land | George R. | Stewart | History |
| Talk of the Nation | Save the World on Your Own Time | Stanley | Fish | Education |
| Talk of the Nation | Tell Me How This Ends | Linda | Robinson | History |
| Talk of the Nation | Forever War, The | Dexter | Filkins | History |
| Talk of the Nation | In a Time of War | Bill | Murphy Jr. | History |
| Tell Me More | How Does it Feel to be a Problem? | Moustafa | Bayoumi | Current Events |
| Weekend Edition Saturday | When We Were Romans | Matthew | Kneale | Literary Fiction |
| Weekend Edition Saturday | Jim Copp | Daniel | Pinkwater | Children’s |
