What “authorpreneurs” need to know about media interviews

If you’re an expert who has written a book or you are an “authorpreneur”, one of the most important things you can do is secure media interviews. When you’re on radio, television, podcast shows or in print, your credibility shoots up.
Interviews are a great way to reach potential readers and ultimately, more clients.
It’s important to stay extremely organized in the process. Not only do you want to keep very close track of who you’ve contacted, you want to make sure you don’t double book interviews.
Before jumping into the process of finding interview opportunities, think in terms of how you can get the most traction from your efforts. For example, you can tie your media pitches around specific occasions such as holidays.
A quick Google search will bring up lots of great information about upcoming holidays.
Staying organizedr
I’ve found a few great tools that allow me to stay organized and plan out my campaigns.
The first is a simple tracking form you can easily create in Word or Excel. Below is a very basic form. You can make it as simple or complex as you like, but be sure not to spend all your time in creation mode.
The other is a year at a glance wall calendar. In 2016 I bought a paper calendar. I really like that I can take a look at the entire year all at once. Mind you, this is simply to give me a quick glance at what’s coming up and the calendar is a nice planning tool.
Although very inexpensive, the greatest downside is durability. As long as I don’t make mistakes in what I put on the calendar, resulting in crossing out information only to scribble in something else, this calendar can work.
For 2017 I decided to go with a laminated, erasable calendar. Even though it’s more expensive, I know it will be worth it. I don’t have to worry about getting every day correct from the first time I write something down.
I got both calendars off of Amazon. Both were delivered within 48 hours of ordering and with my prime membership I didn’t have to pay shipping.
Keeping on top of newsr
One of the simplest ways to find out what’s going on is to do a Google Alert. Google Alerts is a content change detection and notification service, offered by the search engine company Google. The service sends emails to the user when it finds new results—such as web pages, newspaper articles, blogs, or scientific research—that match the user’s search term(s).

There are plenty of alternatives to Google Alert with some of the more popular being Mention, Social Mention and Talk Walker Alerts.

The point is, you want to stay on top of what is happening in your industry.