Side Door Communications offers a variety of services to help get your book or resource in front of the right media. We customize our services based on your needs, your budget, and the timeframe of your campaign.

Media Relations Campaigns

Side Door Communications offers media relations campaigns that can be customized to our clients needs. Whether you’re looking for a full-blown campaign to all media channels or just a small campaign to selected media channels, we can help you get noticed.

The purpose of a media relations campaign is to obtain strategic media coverage; this may be through magazines, newspapers, the Web, radio, or television. We work with both faith-based and mainstream media outlets, nationally and locally, depending on the nature of the material and the author’s platform.

Benefits of a media relations campaign include:

• Increased awareness of your product
• Reaching the media read/watched/listened to by your target audience
• Positioning yourself as an expert in a particular subject area
• Keeping you top of mind with key media personnel, helping pave the way for future projects
• Helping your book stand out from the thousands of others
• Increased ministry awareness

How it works:

First, contact us to discuss your project via phone or e-mail. We’ll help you decide what kind of campaign makes sense for you based on your product, the timing, your budget, and the kind of results you’d anticipate. Sometimes we approach all channels; other times we approach only one channel—such as faith-based radio or general market newspapers.

Next, we ask that you send us a copy of your manuscript for review. This allows us the chance to see if this is a project we feel we could do a good job on. We also make sure that we feel comfortable with promoting the type of book being presented and that it’s something we can genuinely get behind.

Once we’ve had the opportunity to review the book and talk with you, we’ll present you with a detailed proposal. The proposal will include what the campaign will cover, including what press materials will be written as well as selected media that will be contacted. We’ll also give you a preliminary timeline and lay out all the costs involved. If you find the proposal favorable, we’ll ask you to sign a contract that outlines all the terms of the agreement.

Then we get to the fun part—launching the project. We thoroughly read your book to find creative media hooks, potential story ideas, potential interview topics, and more. We develop creative press materials such as a press release, Q&A, author bio, suggested interview questions, mini-excerpts and other materials that highlight what you can offer the media.

We spend lots of time researching and customizing a media list that makes sense for your project. While we’ll take an intelligent risk on media we send to, we don’t waste your money by contacting media that make no sense. We’ll also scour the Web and our own databases throughout the campaign to find niche opportunities and new media channels.

Once we have everything in place, we’ll execute the campaign by pitching the media outlets. Oftentimes, they don’t respond to the initial pitch—they’re inundated with pitches every day. So we’ll continually follow-up offering new story ideas or interview topics. This is how we get our best coverage. If they’re interested in an interview, feature, review, excerpt, or article, we’ll handle the coordination and make sure you have all the details.

We also provide you with a detailed report every two weeks. In the report, you’ll see exactly what we’ve been working on, what media outlets we’ve been pitching, what the response has been, and what kind of coverage has been obtained. We account for everything.

Press Material Development

While we always develop materials for a campaign, we also write press materials on an “a la carte” basis. If you’re looking for a series of corporate press releases, a press release about a new line of books or a single book, or an entire press kit, we can help. We know that writing media (and consumer)-friendly press materials can be time-consuming, especially if you’ve never written press materials before or if you’ve written more than your share. We’ll help alleviate this burden by writing them for you.

The purpose of our press material writing service is to develop materials that will resonate with the media and provide them the information they need to do their jobs better and to get you the coverage you’re looking for.

Benefits of having us develop your press materials include:

• Gives you back your time: stop spending hours writing press materials when you have a multi-page list of other things to do
  
• No cookie-cutter press releases: we write original materials that appropriately position your author, company, or resource
  
• Keeps you or your organization top of mind with the media

How it works:

Contact us to let us know what kind of assistance you need—whether it be a single press release or a full press kit. We’ll do the research/review the book/talk to the necessary people and send you the completed material. We’ll continue to edit it until it’s exactly what you want.

We can either send you the completed material to handle distribution or we can distribute it for you.

In-House Publicity Department

I worked in-house for a major Christian publisher so I understand the day-to-day nuances of an in-house publicist. If you don’t have a dedicated publicity department, find yourself without a publicist for any length of time due to a maternity leave or a job vacancy, or just need an extra pair of hands to get you through a challenging time, I can personally step in. From my office, I’ll serve as your in-house publicity department, responding to media requests, pitching media, writing press releases, and handling the myriad of issues that come about every day. This is a fully customized service—please contact me directly for details.