Why Regional Pitching Can Leverage Big Success

Penny C. Sansevieri

CEO, Author Marketing Experts, Inc.

With all the talk of Facebook, Twitter, blogging and other social media, we often forget how we used to promote a book: locally. Many books that hit big success did so by building a regional buzz. But regional seems a lot less sexy these days and often gets overlooked. If media is being pursued, it's often on a national level, bypassing individual markets altogether.

One of the things I've found about regional promotion is that it can often surprise you. When we worked on The Kennedy Detail last November, we had enormous success regionally, while major stations and national markets seemed to lag in interest for this exceptional title. In fact, I believe that part of the reason this book hit the bestseller list was because of the regional buzz.

If you're wondering how regional coverage can affect your success, let me tell you another story. Some years back, two women in Louisiana wrote a Cajun cookbook. Now, if any of you have been to Louisiana you know that there are hundreds of Cajun cookbooks, nothing really unique there, right? But these women figured that out and decided instead of trying to do a national push, they would focus regionally. They were everywhere: airports, drycleaners, coffee shops, grocery stores and restaurants. The result? They built exceptional buzz for this book and ended up getting the attention of a New York publisher who offered them a big deal to buy the book. Sometimes small can be big.

So, what would regional pitching look like for you? Well, my recommendation to any author is saturate your market. Make sure everyone in your city or town knows about you and what you're doing.

Additionally, you don't need to just focus on your region, you could expand this out to other parts of the country as well. If the idea of pitching regionally has piqued your interest, here are some ways to make it work:

• Don't repurpose national pitches: This is a big one. I don't recommend that you use your national pitches for your local market. Local cares about local and even though every station will report on major national stories, it's always best if they have a regional tie-in.
• Get to know your area: This is especially true if you're pitching outside of your market. Get to know the nuances of the market you are going after. Know their hot buttons and then decide whether your story can tie into them. But regardless, you want to understand the market you are pitching.
• Local media varies: Local media will vary depending on the region you're in. For some markets print has the biggest voice, for others it's broadcast. By digging into your area and getting to know the region, important segments will start to become apparent. For example, in areas that have a lot of morning shows they will generally have a pretty balanced broadcast and print consumption. But other areas might surprise you. For example, I just moved from San Diego where, despite the size of the city, they only have one paper serving it: the San Diego Union Tribune. If you don't make it into that paper, you're not in great shape. Especially if your regional campaign is heavily driven to print. The flip side of this is that this city has a lot of great broadcast opportunities both in TV and radio, so your time might be better spent there.
• Tailor, tailor, tailor: Don't forget that local matters so you'll want to make sure to position your pitch on a local angle.
• Getting to know you: It's easier than ever to get to know a market by reading, listening, or watching online. This will help you identify reporters, journalists, and radio hosts who might have a keen interest in what you are pitching.
• Event pitching: Regional media loves talking about events and other tie-ins. One of the best ways to get local media is by doing an event.
• Getting into bookstores: If your goal is to get bookstores to place orders, a regional push can help there as well. If you're doing events or media locally, this will help drive readers into the stores and the numbers start adding up, which could encourage bookstores to order more copies!
• Small is big: When we pitch regionally, we never overlook the small, local papers. Often they are the freebies you get in supermarkets. I have found that they are often very well-read in the community and can help to drive a lot of interest to your book or event. They are sometimes difficult to find, though, and don't always show up in media databases. Having someone in the area is great to help identify these local publications. If you don't have anyone locally, call the bookstore where you're doing an event, and if there isn't an event as part of this media push, call the local supermarket and ask them!

Getting focused regionally can be a great enhancement to any campaign. It's also a great way to bring longevity to a marketing push. Regional markets aren't always as hung up on book release dates as bigger, national markets are, so the window is much wider here for pitching.

Good luck!

Follow Penny C. Sansevieri on Twitter: www.twitter.com/bookgal

Guest Post: How Turning Off Your Cell Phone For One Week Can Change Your Life

Ring! Ring! Ring! We’ve all heard it far too many times. Cell phones. It seems some would have to surgically get theirs removed from their ears in order to live without them. They take them to work, home, to dinners, even to the bathroom. God forbid they miss a call. Irritating, and someone would say mildly entertaining, to watch. But what if we were that type of person?

Yes, messages, calls, meetings and even alarms are a few things that we manage through our cell phone. There are some moments when we feel that without cell phones our lives would have been handicapped, but is it really so?

Are you someone who goes to sleep with your Blackberry tucked under the pillow? You know you have a problem but you just can’t help yourself? Well, consider this. We wonder sometimes what our lives would be like without them. But consider this, ten, twenty years ago people didn’t have cell phones and yet they lived life just fine.

Sometimes our fear is that we’ll miss an important call, or that some emergency will happen. I had a friend that always worried about that but he knew he had a problem. He was missing out in life and it was irritating his friends and family. So, he gave himself a challenge to spend one week without a cell phone. Yes, he left it at home. He knew most phone calls could wait until he got home to return them and if his family was to call him with an emergency what could he do anyway? They lived thousands of miles away.

Do you know what happened? One week turned into two weeks. Two weeks turned into three weeks and today, he doesn’t even use one. Yes, life does go on. See what a difference it makes in your life.

Visit The Thrillionaires website: thethrillionaires.com

FIVE THINGS TO CONSIDER WHEN WRITING YOUR NOVEL WITH THE HOPES OF SOMEDAY SEEING IT MADE BY HOLLYWOOD

In our never-ending search for novels that can be made into films, we are constantly disappointed by books that could have been, but aren’t, movie material because the author wasn’t thinking about the needs of the motion picture medium when constructing his or her book. Here are my top five considerations for “writing your novel to be a film”:

1) A CASTABLE PROTAGONIST. Movies require a character interesting enough to hold our attention for two hours, and the stronger the character the more likely it is that a bankable star will want to play it. Bankable stars are primarily male, and in the age range of 30-60.

2) A CLEAR THREE-ACT STRUCTURE. That’s what keeps us watching—a powerful beginning that hooks our attention, a second act that never lets it go, and a climactic third act that leaves us with a resounding feeling of finality.

3) AN AMERICAN CENTER. Stories with foreign settings and concerns are made into movies of course—but not every day, and not regularly by the big studios. “The Bourne Identity” takes place all over the world, but its primary character and concerns are American-centered.

4) ACTION. Novels that are primarily introspective are difficult, if not impossible, to make into films. Make sure your book drives your characters into meaningful action, in which they change for better or worse.

5) AN IMPORTANT SUBJECT MATTER. “To write a mighty book,” Melville says in Moby Dick, “you must have a mighty theme.” Moviemakers love larger-than-life stories, ones that will capture the imagination of the global marketplace.

Next time you sit down to plan your novel, confer with me before you make a decision that will preclude it from being a Hollywood film!

Guest Post: NEW YORK TIMES CONFIRMS HOLLYWOOD IS BETTER BET THAN THE STOCK MARKET [via Laura Yellen]

Two movies from iDeal Partners Film Fund had premieres last week at Sundance: “Arlen Faber,” a romantic comedy with Lauren Graham, far left, and Jeff Daniels, and “Motherhood,” a day-in-the-life comedy with Uma Thurman.

New York Times
January 25, 2009
SCENE STEALER
Suddenly, Hollywood Seems a Conservative Investment

By BROOKS BARNES
LOS ANGELES

WHEN it comes to Hollywood financing, the sky doesn’t fall so much as it just changes color.

When the movie factory needed cash in the 1980s, it tapped individual investors through brokerage firms. That strategy ran its course, and in the 1990s German tax credits became the next sales pitch: Funnel money to our movies via a legislative loophole, Mr. Berlin Financier, and you can take immediate tax deductions.

More recently, the likes of Goldman Sachs, along with giant hedge funds, poured billions of dollars into groups of movies called slates. The idea was that investing in a dozen or more movies at once, with the return calculated in aggregate after all had been released, was a sure-fire way to invest wisely. In many cases, though, it wasn’t.

Now that the economic crisis has washed away much of that money, a new pickup line is starting to waft through the air in deal-making hot spots like the Sundance Film Festival. The new line is this: Wall Street, real estate, the art market — all of those other supposedly stable investment areas — are now such a mess that Hollywood is one of the safer places you can park money. Although the movie business has been hurt along with nearly every other industry, it’s proving far more resilient to recession than most.

“I can legitimately say: ‘Hey, wait a minute. My company is outperforming almost everything,’” said Jana Edelbaum, co-founder of an independent financing and production company called iDeal Partners Film Fund. “I think that’s a pretty strong selling point.”

Ms. Edelbaum has been pressing a lot of palms lately in preparation for the premieres of two iDeal movies last week at the Sundance Film Festival. One of them, “Motherhood,” is a day-in-the-life comedy starring Uma Thurman, Minnie Driver and Anthony Edwards. The other, “Arlen Faber,” is a romantic comedy starring Jeff Daniels and Lauren Graham (of “Gilmore Girls” fame). Each cost less than $12 million to make and has multiple distribution offers.

NOW three years old, iDeal operates out of New York, with financing to make about eight movies. It manages risk to investors through a variety of routes: preselling its films to foreign distributors, casting commercially tested actors, taking advantage of state tax incentives for filming. With that approach, Ms. Edelbaum at the outset was able to promise her investors a risk floor of 70 percent on the chance that none of iDeal’s films succeeded.

But as iDeal rounds the home stretch on its first batch of movies, Ms. Edelbaum is projecting at least a 15 percent return for her investors and — if something big happens with “Motherhood” or “Arlen Faber” — as much as 40 percent.

“Obviously, I want to make as much money as I possibly can,” she said. “But I am being dreadfully realistic and conservative given the current environment. It’s the non-Madoff approach.”

Ms. Edelbaum is far from the only independent producer promoting herself to investors with a calmer-waters pitch. The Exodus Film Group, a Venice Beach, Calif., production and financing company, focuses on animated films and has had a slow start, with its recent “Igor” selling a sluggish $19.5 million in tickets.

Coming Exodus entries like the animated “Bunyan & Babe,” featuring John Goodman as the voice of Paul Bunyan, are more promising. But John D. Eraklis, the company’s founder and chief executive, says investors aren’t waiting to find out.

“We have witnessed a surge of existing investors interested in upping their commitment as other opportunities have become less compelling,” Mr. Eraklis said. “I recently had an investor tell me that we no longer occupy the high-risk portion of his portfolio.”

Anybody making the Hollywood-is-safer argument just six months ago would have been laughed out of town. Complex accounting methods, tremendous competition, soaring costs — it wasn’t exactly a safe part of the woods for even the most sophisticated investor.

All of that terrain is still intact, of course, but compare it with imploding investment banks, plunging real estate prices, a whipsawing stock market, Warhols sitting unsold and Bernard L. Madoff. At least in the worst instance of Hollywood investing, you’ll probably catch a glimpse of Angelina and eat some really good shrimp.

“Is investing in movies more attractive now because of what is happening elsewhere in the economy? Yes,” said Daniel H. Black, a partner at Greenberg Traurig, the large entertainment law firm. “Does that mean all the risk is gone? Absolutely not.”

The big studios probably won’t be able to rely much on this pitch. Their upfront needs are too big — Universal’s last round of private financing, which closed in September, totaled about $3 billion — and Wall Street and the real estate market may sort themselves out before their current slate deals expire.

The biggest players in the investment world have also soured on entertainment because they have been burned badly before, said Amir Malin, a partner at Qualia Capital, a media-focused investment firm.

But for independent producers — especially ones that operate in a transparent manner — the strategy could offer a lifeline. They are in a particularly tough spot because they have almost no hope of tapping the debt markets, there is a dwindling number of buyers — with outfits like New Line folding — and costs are soaring. (Marketing an independent movie now costs more than $25 million, according to the Motion Picture Association of America).

What do investors have to say? Daniel Crown, the former chief executive of Crown Theaters, his family’s movie theater chain in the Northeast, said he recently put money into iDeal — but not because he has cinema in his blood.

“If you can find the right film executives, people who consider themselves fiduciaries more than producers, it’s one of the best bets you can make right now,” Mr. Crown said.

“Just remember that it’s over when you start taking yourself so seriously that the project stops becoming a commercial movie,” he continued, “and starts becoming an art project.”