The Legend of Sensei Tsinelas by Jason Tanamor is Ooligan Press’s forthcoming contemporary YA novel. It follows a grieving teen as he struggles with bullying, finding hope in a potential superhero, and learning to accept his Filipino identity.
The team has been in the marketing stages for a while now. Over the summer, we worked on blurb and review requests and things are beginning to come together. We were able to secure three blurbs from some very cool authors to use in our marketing materials and our copy chief is currently looking over our first round of trade review requests. I’ve learned a lot about how the marketing world works and what a true superpower “the ask” is.
“The ask” is essentially the call to action and the reason behind contacting them. When I began sending out my blurb requests, I honestly took some gambles. Not every author has their own contact form, and if they do, sometimes they don’t have one that has enough characters for how long our requests are. Contact forms are great, but it does sometimes feel like sending something into the void. Other authors don’t have any mention of how to contact them outside their own agent’s email, so I did send some of my requests directly to their agent. This “ask” was actually a good procedure because I got responses back. Agents will know who to direct it to, which is the goal of our blurb requests.
Behind the scenes as the project manager, I have been working with the design manager to get the final cover finalized and the second interior prepped and ready for the proofread that went out. We had some last-minute changes we had to implement into the manuscript and these had to be approved by editorial, Jason Tanamor (our author), and the design manager.
I am also hard at work making the sales video. The sales video is divided into two parts, the intro where the book is introduced and we provide a mini synopsis, and the second part is a Q&A that Jason is currently filming for me. Keep an eye out because it will be featured on the Ooligan Instagram (shoutout @ooliganpress)!
After coming back for the fall term, the team began working on the press kit. This includes writing the one sheet, which I mostly tackled. A lot of it is taking things we’ve already written like the back cover copy, pulling a blurb, adding in the author’s bio, and putting them in one spot. I had the team brainstorm headlines and questions to be used for discussion and for the Q&A portion. It’s currently being looked at by the marketing and publicity manager, and we shall see what revisions we need to make!
Press kits are an important part of the marketing of a book. The point of the press kit is to make a journalist’s life as easy as possible, so that they can easily pull quotes from the one sheet or the Q&A section to help them write their articles. The press kit should give a grand overview of the book itself but in the most condensed way possible. It’s important to touch on themes and highlight the very best of the book and its author. These things all add up, and scoring reviews is great publicity for us and helps us sell more books.
The team is going to start working on our social media strategy next week. I will update you on how that goes once blog writing for next term comes back around!
Written by Annie Egghart.