For Book Authors
If you’ve written a book — or even if you’re just thinking about writing one — we’re well-positioned to help with Op-Ed support. We’ve worked with a growing number of authors at various stages of the book development process and can design packages to accommodate your specific needs.
How We Work
In our experience, many authors are surprised to find that they get surprisingly little marketing support from their publisher, and we’re happy to help fill some of those gaps. We’re also happy to play a supporting role when you have an engaged publisher, or even if you’ve hired a publicist. To be clear, we are not a publicist or a PR company, and we don’t do a number of the things they can help with, but we’re happy to collaborate with them.
Our comparative advantages tend to lie in two areas: One is that we will be much more familiar with the science — a deeper grasp of the content of your specific book, as well as the broader context in which your book is situated. The second is that we’ve developed strong relationships with psychology-inclined editors, and in some cases, those connections can prove to be more useful than a publisher/publicist’s network.
Also, whereas a publicity team is focused on your book in the months leading up to publication and a few weeks following, our interest in helping to share the ideas doesn’t have an expiration date. We’re happy to help you with the “long tail” of your book’s dissemination as long as you remain committed to sharing it. That doesn’t always entail big boosts in the sales of your book, but it does help with spreading its insights.
Although we do hope our efforts can help you sell your book, that’s not our primary focus — our main concern is sharing your book’s contents. Hopefully book sales will follow, but while Op-Eds can be a good way to market your book, they’re not a guaranteed path toward that goal. We are open, though, to helping with other means of promoting your book besides Op-Eds, including pitching to podcasts, placing excerpts and Q&As, and connecting you to other people in our network who can be helpful.
Timing
The main time we can be helpful is when your book is about to be published. Op-Eds are a useful tool for helping to get the word out. But the more advance notice we have before publication, the better — although we can swoop in at the last minute and help with Op-Eds your publisher may have been trying to place, having a few months to plan a strategy is a far more effective approach. It’s never too early to reach out so that we can have a sense of what’s coming.
There’s also often value in establishing yourself long before your book is in print, and we are happy to be involved much earlier in the book development process. Writing Op-Eds when you’re just starting to think about writing a book offers a number of advantages. For one, it can help you work out the ideas you’re considering writing a book about. You can get a sense of whether the ideas need a book-length treatment or can be handled in a shorter form. You can also learn a lot about whether you enjoy the process or not, before committing to a much larger project. A successful Op-Ed can also be a great calling card when looking for agents or selling your book proposal — in some instances Op-Eds even lead to offers of book deals, although that’s relatively rare. We don’t currently officially offer help with book proposals or book development, but it’s something we enjoy doing, so we may be able to consider helping with that in some instances.