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You Can Write and Distribute Your Own Publicity Releases Online

By Virginia Lawrence

Ready to do some publicity for your book?

You know your book best. If you can write a great book, you can write an outstanding publicity release to publicize that book. Then you can distribute that release without spamming and give writers a reason to mention your book in their publications.

Write the Publicity Release

Start by writing a killer publicity release. You want a release that will interest someone who writes for the type of publication read by your target market. The release should be:

• Newsworthy
• A good presentation of your story
• Written for the media
• Factual
• In active voice
• Long enough to tell the story without being too long
• Hype-free
• Using personal quotes only by permission

Format the Release

After writing the release, be sure format the release professionally. This is the easiest part for writers. Format the release as carefully as you formatted your book. Use your usual exemplary grammar and format the release to make it an easy read.

Start with a headline containing fewer than 170 characters. Follow with a first paragraph starting with city, state, date, and the most important attention-grabbing information.

Use the following paragraphs to give the details. Be sure to include applicable quotes, then finish with author background and full contact information.

Distribute the Release

Use an online publicity release service. There are several services, but I use PRWeb at http://www.prweb.com. PRWeb allows us to choose how much we want to pay for our release distribution, and the fee we choose determines the extent and speed of the distribution. Those fees are extremely reasonable, with each step up in cost bringing additional services:

• Free releases are made available to the search engines in a specialized RSS feed.
• $10 releases get better placement, they are available on PRWeb.com in a keyword search, and they generate performance statistics.
• $30 releases are included in Overture and Google, and they go out on eMediaWire.com.
• $80 releases are included in Yahoo News and at least seven additional important search engines.

Commonly, a well-written $80 release will be viewed by more than 20,000 people. If the publicity release contains enough important news, it’s likely to be picked up by several media outlets. Now, those are only the short-term advantages. The fact that the release remains listed online is a fabulous long-term advantage. Having your publicity release continuously listed on influential sites means that your release helps to build the number of important links leading to your Web site. The release will increase the number of links counted by Google when determining the importance of your site. This means that your publicity releases will continue to work for you. They’ll increase traffic to your Web site even after they generate the media articles you want.

–© 2006 Virginia Lawrence, Ph.D. SPAWN's Webmaster and Technology Editor, Virginia is a professional Web Developer and Online Marketing Consultant. She routinely places client sites on the first page of a Google search. Contact her at virginia@spawn.org or visit her Web site at http://www.cognitext.com.

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