A little while back I did a small mailout to the readers of this site asking for their questions relating to Press Kits. The subject of “Press Kits” is by far the most popular topic on this site and the results of my mailout back that up.
I simply asked
“If you could sit down with me in the pub tonight, what are the one or two top questions you’d ask to get your press kit and bio in good shape?”
The response was amazing! It took me quite a while to get through them all and work out some answers but here is the first batch. The questions asked came in all shapes and sizes but they mostly centered around a few core themes. The absolute top question was along the lines of
“How do I make my press kit stand out from the crowd?”
and really, that’s a critical question. There is no point investing good time & money into the best press kit in the world if it’s just going to get lost in a sea of millions.
It seems like a very straightforward question but it has a very long answer so what I’ve done is to break this article up into four separate articles. This way I can do the topic justice and answer as many specific reader questions as I can. I know there is a lot of information to go through here but there are many, many things that have to fall into place to put the odds in your favour. You don’t have to do everything perfect but the more items you can cross off the checklist, the better your chance of standing out from the crowd.
** Spoiler alert **
If you are the sort of person that doesn’t like to know how a movie ends then cover your eyes now. I’m about to give away the ending!
The answer to “How do I make my press kit stand out from the crowd is quite simply…
“Put the right information into the right hands in the right format”.
That’s it!
If you do these three things “Put the right information into the right hands in the right format”, and you do those things reasonably well, you can’t help but have success!
I’m going to expand on those three elements in the next few articles but let’s start with a few definitions:
- “The right information” = Content. Your press kit must contain good information. It must be Descriptive, Imaginative, Honest and most of all it must be relevant and beneficial to the reader.
- “the right hands” = Permission. That’s a strange word to see here but it’s critical to the whole thing. If you get nothing else right, do this bit good.
Permission means that the person reading it has given you their express permission to send it to them. You must never randomly spam people with your press kit. That’s the equivalent of standing on the street corner hoping that someone will book you. That’s a “shotgun” approach and it will put you exactly where you don’t want to be, in the crowd with the millions!
Take a “laser beam” approach and focus in tightly on who you approach. - “in the right format” = Substance and Style. This means having professional styling and artwork, not using amateur photographs or home-burned cd’s, knowing when to send hard copy & when to use an electronic press kit (EPK).
- Last but not least I’ll include a simple Checklist that you can use as a benchmark to measure your press kit or as a roadmap to follow in making one.
Thank you sincerely to all those who sent in questions, they were very much appreciated. Let me know if I’ve answered yours!
As always, please leave all the comments and questions you like. I can’t wait to hear your thoughts.
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