Ad Age Editor, Ken Wheaton, Shows PR How to Pitch

Ken Wheaton is Advertising Age's managing editor. He's also an author. Since I pitch Ad Age, his email caught my attention when it landed in my LinkedIn inbox. His subject line, "Bacon and Egg Man, My Second Novel, On Sale Now," made me assume he sent me a bad pitch. But I'm outing him, with his permission, because it's the exact opposite.

Ken's bio on the Age Age site notes "short, to-the-point e-mail queries are appreciated. Read the site and recent issues before pitching." As you'll see, he follows his own advice.

----
Friends, colleagues and the rest of you,

Forgive the mass email (believe me, there are a lot of you), but I just wanted to announce that "Bacon and Egg Man," my second novel, is now on sale in print and as an ebook. Perhaps I've already annoyed you on Facebook or Twitter or email, but I figured I'd cover all my bases. After all, three years later there are still people in Grand Prairie, Louisiana, who have no idea I wrote a novel called "The First Annual Grand Prairie Rabbit Festival." And the priest there bashed the book in church!

But there'll be none of that this time. "Bacon and Egg Man" is a little different. If anyone gets upset it'll be Mike Bloomberg. What's it about? Here's a blurb:

"Bacon and Egg Man is a sly send of up of a politically correct food establishment, where the Northeast has split off from the rest of the United States. The new Federation is ruled by the electoral descendants of King Mike, a man who made it his mission to form a country based on good, clean living.

But you can’t keep good food down. And Wes Montgomery, a journalist at the last print paper in the Federation, is a mild-mannered bacon-and-egg dealer on the side. Until he gets pinched and finds himself thrust into Chief Detective Blunt’s wild-eyed plot to bring down the biggest illegal food supplier in the land. To make matters worse, Wes is partnered with Detective Hillary Halstead, the cop who, while undercover, became his girlfriend.

Their journey takes them from submarine lairs to sushi speakeasies, from Montauk to Manhattan, where they have to negotiate with media magnate The Gawker before a climactic rendezvous with the secretive man who supplies the Northeast with its high cholesterol contraband, the most eternal of all breakfast foods: bacon and eggs."
So those of you a bit squeamish about my first book can rest easy that there's no drunken priests or wayward Pentecostals in this one. Nope. Just food, politics, media and corruption -- so a whole other set of things to give offense. 

Here are links for easy online ordering:

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Bacon-Egg-Man-Ken-Wheaton/dp/162467111X/ref=la_B003W4VVZY_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1361310611&sr=1-1# 

B&N: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/bacon-and-egg-man-ken-wheaton/1114586338?ean=2940016341446 

How can you help? Well, the most important things are reading and talking about the book. I don't care how you read it. Some of you like paper, some of you like digital. Doesn't matter. (Well, I get more money from ebooks, which translates to more bourbon, so there's that.)

1. Obviously, buy the book and tell me how much you love it. Actually, tell everyone ELSE how much you love it. Email them. Call them. Make a general nuisance of yourself.
How can you help? Well, the most important things are reading and talking about the book. I don't care how you read it. Some of you like paper, some of you like digital. Doesn't matter. (Well, I get more money from ebooks, which translates to more bourbon, so there's that.)
2. Review the book on Amazon and Barnes & Noble's website. This helps a lot. Even if it's just a 3-star review that says, "Meh. Ken's much better at drinking than he is at writing."

3. Link to it on Facebook and tell your friends and family how awesome it is. I know you all have Facebook pages now. Get cracking!

4. Tweet about it. Blog about it. Pinterest about it. (Wait. Do you Pinterest things? Pin it. That's it.)

5. Like the Amazon and B&N pages. (I don't know if that actually does anything other than give me the warm fuzzies.)

6. Join and/or like the Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/baconandeggman 

7. Go down to your closest bookstore and bug them to stock it on their shelves. (The publisher is Premier Digital Publishing, the distributor is Ingram)

8. If you have a Goodreads account, review it there as well.

9. A teacher? Awesome. Assign it to your class. They'll learn something, I'm sure.

10. Just leave copies in random places.

I also want to thank all of you who read the first book. And thank all of you who've already started putting out the word about this one. It helps. Really.

Cheers, Ken
----

Why does it work? Here's my take.

1) It's Personal: Not everyone can pull off Ken's style. But his personal approach to this request helps connect with the recipients.

2) It's Honest: Ken is upfront, even self-effacing, about his note's potential for being interpreted as spam. This defuses the issue completely. 

3) There's Context & It's Singular: He sent it out to his LinkedIn contacts. It'll either work or it won't. I doubt he'll lose any LinkedIn contacts over this ask...assuming it's not the first of many. As it's the first one I've received from him, I'm betting it is.

4) Call to Action: Book promotion is a pain in the ass. I blame the industry more than I blame book publicist's for the need to include complex instructions for book promotion. But the point is he included a thorough set of instructions. If you have a choice? Require only the most lightweight user action for the recipient to act on your pitch. 

Ken also provided me some great insight based on his role at AdAge:
"To be fair to regular PR practitioners, in my case the only client I'm answering to is me. And as I view even a LinkedIn message as email, I stick to my personal voice. Full disclosure: I tend to be awful at my own cover letters! And my query letters sent to agents back in the day weren't exactly the stuff of marketing legend. 

Perhaps it's just being loose and free that helps. That's not to say, however, that as a reporter I appreciate a pitch in which someone I've never met (or e-met) acts like they're a close personal friend of mine. 

It will also be interesting to see what--if any--kind of reception the book gets when the publisher's marketing department starts sending out press releases this week or next."

Bottom Line?
Your pitch writing will evolve with time. But you need to customize them based on the context you have with the recipients to improve your success.