Does Your Book Launch Need a Press Release?

Well, it depends.

My first salaried job required that I sit at a white cubicle—in a sea of white cubicles—drafting press releases about zombies and slugs. I’d email drafts to my manager and wait for hours for tiny edits. Then someone else on my team who did public relations for Xbox would send it to our client for their feedback before we’d distribute the release about a new game or expansion pack.

I was 22, and after those final edits were wrapped, I’d walk to the bus stop in the pouring rain, the sky pitch black if I left any time after 5 p.m. (which was every day), and I’d question my life choices. I’d watch people stream in and out of the methadone center across the street from my bus stop and think that maybe writing about zombies and slugs and video games I didn’t really understand as a life choice wasn’t so bad.

As frustrating and borderline dangerous as waiting on feedback could be, I learned a ton in the four years I worked at a huge PR agency in Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood. I had to remind myself of that while I was in it, too, or I would have packed up my room in our little Wallingford Craftsman and moved back in with my parents.

As the media landscape evolved in the mid-aughts, and I shifted into a career driven more by the emerging marketing Wild West that was (and is) Social Media, I kinda ditched press releases.

I didn’t think they were relevant.

That was until I moved to Edmonds.

Press Release Towns

I’m anecdotally exploring a phenomenon I’m calling Press Release Towns. With a population of about ~43,000, Edmonds is a seaside city that feels like a small town. It has one hometown paper and another online news source, both of which are run by lean teams. For all intents and purposes, it’s a small town. And small towns operate in scrappy ways.

When I moved to Edmonds in 2018 and found my first few copywriting clients, I helped them with light, local PR. And when I reached out to those two main news outlets, both of them asked me for press releases.

I remember opening their email responses to pitches I had sent and leaning back in my office chair, stunned that press releases were still a thing.

Can I send a press release? I thought to myself, chuckling. Of course, I can send a press release! I was born for this.

Thirty minutes later, my new contacts had all the information they needed, including a stakeholder quote and a quick boiler plate about the company (boilers are essentially a paragraph description of the company your news is about. If you’re representing yourself, you title your paragraph something like ABOUT WHITNEY POPA and include a few sentence bio. More on that in a forthcoming post if you’re interested).

Your Book + Press Releases

I love living in a press release town. It makes my job, plus our local media’s job, easier because you’re essentially handing them a pre-written story. Companies supply them all the time, but does your book need one?

Well, it depends. Ask yourself these questions: