How To Market Your Book: Marketing And PR Tips with Expert Publicist, Nicole Dunn

 

Marketing a book is a tricky balance between giving just enough to reel people in without giving away too much that it spoils the book. It may sound easy, but if it were, people wouldn’t be hiring publicists. Experts like Nicole Dunn thrive in these kinds of puzzles. Running her own PR firm called Dunn Pellier Media since 2008, Nicole specializes in PR and media services for clients in the health, wellness, fitness, beauty, and lifestyle industries. Throughout the years, she has built a trusted brand that counts bestsellers among its satisfied customers. Joining Robin Colucci on the podcast, she shares some timeless marketing and PR tips that authors might want to start applying in their own book marketing efforts.

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Read the transcript here:

How To Market Your Book: Marketing And PR Tips with Expert Publicist, Nicole Dunn

I’m very pleased to introduce to you, Nicole Dunn. Nicole is a former senior-level television producer who started her own PR firm Dunn Pellier Media in 2008. When she did so, she set out not only to uncover a niche in the health and wellness area of PR but also to tie her extensive connections and experience in TV production to build brand legacies. Knowing that good PR is all about telling a great story, DPM uses out of the box angles with precise strategy, backed by decades of industry experience, along with a great team to garner impressive media for clients in the health, wellness, fitness, beauty, and lifestyle industries. Her headquarters are located in Los Angeles, but our company serves clients worldwide. It is one of the only PR firms focused on the wellness industry specifically. 

This is a huge asset for anybody in this particular field who’s looking for PR to find a specialist who has all the right connections to help you get your particular message out. It’s a cool approach that she has there. She also serves as the Los Angeles Chair for the Forbes Business Council and in 2020, her firm was awarded Best Event and Social Media by PR Daily for work with the Wellness Your Way Festival, which was hosted by Kroger and Grammy-nominated singer Jewel. Nicole herself was nominated as a Los Angeles Businesswomen of Influence Honoree for 2018.

Welcome, Nicole. I’m happy to have you. 

Robin, it’s great to be in the show.

It’s very cozy here with a nice cup of tea. 

Good. It looks like it is.

That’s my favorite emit. A cup of tea, ginger snap cookies, a comfy chair and a book.

I definitely hear you on that one because I love a good book. I love having it in my hands. I love reading a book. I don’t like reading it online. For me, it is not the same thing as a good old book.

A lot of people feel that way. We’ll see books in print for a long time to come. As I was doing a little bit more reading, even though we’ve known each other for a number of years have, which is cool. I never heard the story of you making that shift into PR in the early 2000s. I’d love for you to tell me more about this origin story of what led you away from TV production and to become a PR agent yourself. 

It’s interesting how your career can shift fast. I had worked my way up to supervising producer under the executive producer on shows and then could not find work. It was disheartening to think that a talented woman like myself, and I give myself a lot of props because I know that I was a talented producer could not find work. Every job interview that I went on, the men would tell me, “You’re too overqualified. If I give you this job, you’ll probably eventually take my job. I would respond with, ‘Yes, you’re probably 100% right.’” I hired a coach and the coach said, “You have got to do PR.” I thought, “Why on earth would I ever want to do PR?” I love television. I love everything about it.

TAC Nicole | Book Marketing & PR
 Book Marketing & PR: It’s important to not give away too much, but at the same time, you want to give just enough to reel them in.

Finding the guests, developing the segment, working with the network to figure out what exactly is going to happen during the segment. Working with the executive producer, making sure all the staff knows what they’re doing on the show day and taping. That was a big highlight for me. I loved everything moving about television. I liked the high pace of it. I thought this person was crazy telling me that I needed to be in PR, but at the same time, I’d met my husband who was then my boyfriend, but not my boyfriend yet because I met him on an airplane and worked in the music industry. He said, “You should look at doing PR because you’re not getting any jobs in television and you still have this whole other side that you can bring to PR because you have those television skills and you have the contacts.”

With the advice of this coach, I decided that that’s what I was going to do. I was going to try the PR thing out. I was a part of an all-women mastermind group. One of the girls said, “I have the perfect client for you. When you’re ready, I’m going to introduce you to said clients.” I said, “Okay, great.” I helped two experts. One was a lawyer and one was a chiropractor. I got them both on CNN and decided that the television thing was the shiny things. It was like, “Shiny things over here.” It wasn’t working out. When I started doing the PR for the chiropractor and the lawyer and getting the lawyer on CNN for a bunch of stuff, I realized the lawyer had several books as well.

One of them was called the Esteemable Acts. She had a fantastic story behind her and she just overcame a lot. That’s the thing about PR. There always is a story to something. I had good luck with her. We ended up going into Oprah’s network and we were pitching her for a television series. They were interested. We went back and forth. It didn’t end up working out. Then I went back to the girl from the mastermind group and I said, “I’m ready for a real paying client.” She said, “His name is Tony Horton.” I said, “I don’t know who that is.” At the time, Tony had a VHS program with Beachbody that was P90X. I went and I met with him. He was from Massachusetts originally and I was from Massachusetts, although he was born in Rhode Island. He said, “Why should I hire you?” I said, “Why not? You don’t have anything else going on.” That seemed to have work for me in the past when I got that back and said that.

It didn’t pay a lot but I got the job and I figured out a creative way to sell Tony Horton. We went to Washington DC. We ended up doing the National Press Club. We did an event with them and that’s how we got our start. That’s how I got my start booking serious media like CNN, Bloomberg, the Hill, publications like that. We created this whole scenario around him that the military was not fit to fight and they could barely do pushups. Here was this guy who was destined to be the next Jack LaLanne and he was the one who opened up the path for me to do PR. He was the one that I wanted to do health, wellness and lifestyle because of, and I saw those transformations that people had, and it was like, “This is awesome. I love this.” It morphed from fitness into authors.

Tony Horton at that time not a lot of people had heard of him. They had heard of P90X maybe, but it didn’t necessarily make the connection. Even then, it was still more of a fitness fringe thing. The work that you did with Tony Horton put him on the map. 

I feel like we did everything. Not only did we do TV segments, but we also got him book deals. He had Harper Collins and he had another book deal before that. He did three books.

I know at least one was a New York Times bestseller. 

It was the first one. That was my real first job where I actually was helping someone with a book and I got into the thank you section. It was like, “I got into the thank you section.” On one of the additions, they missed putting my section in about me. Tony said, “Did you like what they put in about you?” I said, “No, they didn’t put anything about me.” He’s like, “Oh my gosh.” We corrected it, but it was a heart-throbbing moment for him to say like, “Didn’t you love what I wrote about you?” We did create a nice legacy for him. That’s what we continue to do for authors and experts. We love building legacies. For me running a company that focuses on PR is one of the top things. Helping someone with their legacy so that they have legs to stand on. They have credibility, they have everything that they need to go down the path of being a successful author.

I know that your great success with Tony Horton is part of why you chose to focus on the health, fitness and medical type space. What other motivations are there for you? I know there’s more than that.

Number one is my love for media. I don’t say this as anybody, but there’s somebody that doesn’t have any media. It’s a drive for me to see what we can come up with, what we can do for them. My passion is health and wellness now. I feel like working in television, I didn’t have the time to do anything for myself because you’re constantly working and trying to put together stuff for yourself. I feel like I learned so much from television about the time that I didn’t have. Now I know that more Americans are caring about their health, their wellness, and it’s important to me. I know now that it’s a billion-dollar industry and there’s a lot to be had.

There is always a story to something.

One thing that surprised me, I guess it’s funny because when you look back, you don’t always remember. It’s like when something’s been a certain way for a long time, it’s easy to forget that it was ever different. One of the things that you say in your bio is that there wasn’t a whole lot of positive reporting around health and fitness. Can you say a little bit more about that and how it’s changed? 

I even think now, there’s not a lot of positive stuff around wellness. What we strive to do is to have nourishing news. We want to take our clients’ information that’s nourishing and fulfill Americans with that nourishing news. The media cycle is interesting. We’re focused on politics and COVID. People want an escape from that. Back then, people were less concerned about health and wellness. They weren’t reading labels. The consumers weren’t into it as much as they are now. Through COVID is brought us to an even different place where people are, they’re like, “I want to know what’s in this. I want to know more about my health. How can I regain my health and happiness?” They want more. The media cycle still is 50% focused on wellness and all things happiness. I know a lot of these outlets, they want good happy news. They don’t want to focus on the negative.

They get plenty of that without having to deal with PR. One thing that comes up a lot for my clients, not in every case, but frequently enough to ask you are they might be wrestling with how much should I reveal about the content of my book before it’s released especially for those who are working on a whistleblower type piece or something where they’re doing a big unveil. How do you advise your clients around something like that?

What we try to do is we try to come up with enough information that’s a teaser that’ll get them hooked. You want to give them a teaser and a hook to be able to reel them in to either buy the book, read more, click here, and find out more. It’s important to not give away too much, but at the same time, you want to give enough that they’re like, “This is going to pique my interest and I’m going to want to look into this more.” We tend to try to come up with a couple of paragraphs and comb through it to see what are the hitting home beats that people are going to resonate with. We don’t want to give away too much. I’ve seen people give away too much and if they have a big name, then it helps and they still get PR.

If you’re starting out, you want to make a name for yourself and build your legacy. It gives more fodder for people to say like, “I’d like to book this person on Good Morning America. I’d like to book this person for an article for the LA Times.” It has to resonate, you have to hone in on the audience and exactly what the messaging is, but giving away too much spoil what the book is. There are no surprises anymore. Let’s have surprises.

Everybody wants the peek-a-boo, the big reveal. Also, it’s such a dance because if you don’t say anything then nobody knows about anything, and then you don’t have a chance to build momentum for the idea or momentum for people being interested in you. It’s like a balancing act. That’s something that sounds like you work with your individual clients to help them navigate that.

To help them understand too. You don’t want to give away too much, but you want to give away enough that’s going to again, “I’m curious about this author. I want to see more.” People Magazine does book reviews and they always have 4 or 5 different reviews. I’d say probably every other month I find one book then I’m like, “I want to read more about this book.” I will look at it to see what people have to say about it online on Amazon and book reviews.

When should an author hire a publicist, at what point on their part? 

I have had a lot of different types of authors. I’ve had people that were not famous that we helped make famous. I’ve had people that were famous that we helped. I honestly think the best thing for people to do is to be able to build their own base first before they come to someone like me. I can build the base for you, but it does take time. You have to think about even a year before you’re going to release your book. If no one knows you, you’ve got to start having people talk about you, or you have to be featured in articles, or you have to have a one-sentence about something within your genre and your expertise. It is hard because it’s a sea of experts and there’s a lot of competition.

You have to stand above the competition. I do say that people should do their own PR first so that they know how much time, effort, energy it takes to start to build something as a base for yourself. We always suggest going for newbies to go to HARO, which is Help A Reporter Out. You can go online, you can sign up for reporter acquirees, and then you can start to build and start submitting exactly what the reporters looking for, not everything around it. That way you can start to get some mentions and you start to get a feel for how that feels. These are everyday things from Shape Magazine to Men’s Health to Washington Post. we do HAROs as well for our clients because the clients don’t have time to do it. They’re quick hits. I do think that people should have a base before they come to me.

TAC Nicole | Book Marketing & PR
 Book Marketing & PR: The best thing for people to do is to build their own base before coming to a publicist.

How would you define having a base? What are some potential elements that, that would look like where somebody would come to you and would be like, “Yes, you’re ready for us?” 

First thing’s first, when you’re setting out on this quest to get yourself PR, you’re going to connect with reporters and journalists who are in your genre. Bad etiquette to reach out to people that write about crime and yours is about avocados. They don’t mix well. You have to do your homework. The base I’d say is like getting mentions and then the mentions turned into feature stories. You have to look at media trends to see what’s trending. I had a client that had a book about paleo and it was just not popular then. Paleo is popular now. It’s very difficult, but to build that base, you have to get certain publications. What we’re doing is we’re taking those smaller publications.

I don’t mean smaller, but it could be a Shape Magazine. We’ll take that and do more feature-type stories for you on a bigger base. We’re looking for the big guns. You want the doctors, you want Dr. Oz, you want the Today Show, all of that takes time. I’ve had people come to me and they say, “I want to be on the Today Show,” and they don’t have anything. That’s an unrealistic expectation about what is and what isn’t. We’ve had authors that have been on tons of stuff, but guess what? They release their book during the election and they didn’t get anything because it was bad timing. Everything has a rhyme and a reason. If you look at things, the timing is crucial. Preparation on the backend and building up that base is also crucial.

Let me ask you too about this other element. I know this is something that I saw evolve into your business in the time that I’ve known you. This other element of social media strategy with the traditional media PR that you’re doing. Can you explain a little bit more about the dynamics of that relationship and how that can become a synergistic kind of a useful relationship or maybe how that adds complexity that is a pain in the ass or both? 

It’s one more thing. You think about all these things that you have to do. Someone said to me, “You’re not on TikTok?” I said, “No, it’s one more thing that I don’t want to have to log into and do.” For me, that’s okay. We have experts that are on TikTok and they’re doing very well. I’d say social media is important. I’d say everybody is on Instagram. Facebook and Instagram are one of the biggest. Having a platform and being able to be seen and creating content. I do always say content is king. The more content that you have, the easier is going to be to maintain all of these things that you have to put stuff out on.

Your social media, your Instagram, your Facebook, having a blog is genius. If you’re an author and you have a blog and you can talk about different things that relate to your book, great. That’s another way that you can utilize that content and put it into motion into social media. I’d say having a platform is great. If you don’t know anything about social media, you probably should find somebody, even a college student that can help you with social media and putting into motion. You have to do it in a way that’s going to look good. It’s going to have a feel, it’s going to feel similar to the book or your branding. These are well thought out. People tend to miss on that where they’re like, “I don’t need the social media,” but that’s poor people get the most attention.

Reporters that we know are looking at social media for ideas. You have to start somewhere. Building a base, as you do in PR, you have to build that base with social media. You don’t have to do it every single day but have some consistency. Maybe it’s three times a week where you post. It’s super important for authors to have some kind of platform. One expert that we worked with and didn’t even have a website, but he had a podcast that was successful.

For anybody who wants to get an agent and a book deal, everything you’re talking about is essential. You won’t get past square one with an agent. The platform is what demonstrates your ability to reach people and you can’t sell books if you can’t reach people. 

The other thing too, you also resonate with the community. You want to be able to build a community as an expert or an author. To have that community is everything because those are the people that are going to buy your book. You want to start to build a community so that it expands and then you get more book sales. My dad wrote a book and he’s like, “Why isn’t anybody buying this book?” You don’t have any social media. You don’t have a website and you don’t have a community. You haven’t dived into your community to investigate why someone would even want to have a relationship with you. It’s all about building relationships.

It also reminds me. I came out of journalism as you probably know. I still have some friends who are in journalism. Every reporter has to have a Twitter account as a part of their job now. One thing I’ll throw in there is that you can build a relationship with a reporter on Twitter by simply sending them a message, maybe telling them that if you come across an article that they wrote that you thought they did a great job, reporters get little positive reinforcement.

Content is king

Even us reaching out to a reporter and mentioning, “That story that you did on such and such resonated with me.” It means a lot.

As long as it’s genuine, they will notice and be warmer to your ideas, especially if what you’re commenting on is relevant to the story that you complimented. I’m curious, tell me more about social media. How do you integrate your social media strategy with your traditional media strategy? 

That all is dedication and skill.

I know it has to be different for every client. Give me an overview of what does that looks like. 

I’m going back to content is king. Let’s say you have a book idea and you’ve plucked out probably twenty ideas that are relevant to the book, the news media cycle and things that you can talk about. The biggest thing is being able to outline six months of a timeline of what your social media plan would be in conjunction with a book. There’s a media calendar. We all have stories that the media does and covers at certain times during the year. Your topic of expertise might fit into some of those stories. Also, coming up with that timeline. The biggest thing is being able to have that content and the timeline to coincide with a book launch, leading up to a book launch or after a book launch. I do think that it’s super important in the scope of everything that goes along with being an author. It isn’t just about like, “I’m going to release this book.” There are so many elements to make it a success. Even successful people have struggled with all of the things that you and I are talking about. It’s a lot of work.

It is and I don’t think it’s possible to be big that you don’t have to worry about these things.

If you’ve got a good book, you have good ideas, you have good, you can also pull from your book. Let’s say they’re ten great ideas and pull from that and put stuff out that way. You have to plan. The thing is people think that that’s a lot of work, but guess what? It is a lot of work.

If it were easy, people wouldn’t need to hire a publicist.

They wouldn’t have you either. You know the market’s well, Robin and I always trust your expertise on that when I’m like, “Can you give me advice in this area?” You always come to the table with great advice and you have great advice for authors as well. It’s a lot of work and People are like, “Do I have to do all that to write a book? I can’t just write a book and put it out.” You can if you don’t want anyone to buy it.

One of my agent friends said wisely, “If you write a book and no one reads it, did you really write a book?” That what you’re starting to point towards here, and this is definitely worth discussing. A lot of aspiring authors, whether they admit it to anyone else or even to themselves. There’s a fantasy running in the background. It’s like, “Somehow, I’m going to put out my book. I’m going to throw it up on Amazon and it’s going to catch on. I’m going to sell 100,000 copies or a million copies and go retire and live in the Maldives.” This is not how it happens.

TAC Nicole | Book Marketing & PR
 Book Marketing & PR: You want to be able to build a community as an expert or an author. These are the people that are going to buy your book.

A lot of people that I talked to think that Robin. I’m like, “That’s the expectation thing.” The reality is no.

Even people who are multiple New York Times bestsellers over a number of years, nobody gets a pass. Everybody has to still be thinking about how are they going to maximize the visibility of the current book. How are they going to get the word out and create those hooks and make sure that people are paying attention? 

Not only is it the author doing their work, but it’s also the author hiring people to help them even gain that visibility, credibility through PR marketing. PR and marketing are different. We work together with the marketing team and many of these book calls with authors and the book publisher. They’ve hired us separately from the PR department from the book. They have thousands of books that they’re promoting at the same time. We’re working with the marketing department too. The marketing department is listening to our ideas from the PR side and they’re making suggestions from the marketing side. We’re working together to make this thing bigger than it is. It takes a village.

You brought up a couple of things that are worth pointing out in distinguishing here. One is that there’s another false hope that the publisher will be solely responsible for promoting the book. What you’ve described of the publisher has a PR department and they participate in helping to promote the book. However, every author I’ve worked with, many of whom you’ve worked with has also hired their own PR firm and especially the successful ones, the New York Times bestseller level ones. 

It’s never like, “I’m doing the PR.” “No, you’re doing the PR.” We’re working together to help make this author successful. We also have a specialty. There’s probably a reason why the expert has hired us to help in conjunction with the book. Usually, the book publishers are great. The PR teams are like, “We welcome it because you’ve got contacts probably that we don’t have.” I’ll give you an example. We were working on Dr. Terry Wahls’ book and it was a revamp of her old book. She had new information and new data that was put into the new book and they were doing a new cover with a slightly different title. It was number 66 on the Amazon bestseller list. The PR department I’m sure had connections at the doctors. We were able to pull in an amazing segment where I took a woman who had MS.

She virtually went from not being able to walk doing Dr. Wahls’ protocol in the book and getting back to her fitness routine. It was miraculous. I took that. I had her do a video testimonial. I sent it over to the producer with information about the book. We got a 25-minute segment on the doctors, which is unheard of. The publisher said, “This is amazing. We would have never been able to pitch this. Your idea, your creation and your collaboration with Dr. Wahls and Lisa made this happen.” Her book went from number 66 to 5 or something on the Amazon list.

I want to clarify that because this is not a category on Amazon. This is all of Amazon, which has over six million books on it.

That’s the perfect storm. For instance, with that account, they got first for women. It was a great collaboration. They’re busy. They have a lot of books that they’re looking after. I can remember I went to Boston one time and sat in this publisher’s office. While I was waiting for her to come in, she was the publicist. I was looking at all the books and I was thinking, “Those are all the books she’s probably done in her career.” She walked in, I said, “This is impressive. Are these the books that you’ve done in your career?” She said, “No, those are the current books I’m working on.” That was an eye-opener for me, that was early on. That’s when I knew for an expert to invest in themselves to do PR, they were doing a service for themselves.

You said another thing that would be worth having more of an explanation because it sounded like one of those things that I’m thinking, “This might sound obvious to someone like Nicole who works in publicity,” but maybe not so obvious for our readers. You said PR and marketing are different. I’d like you to explain to our readers how they’re different.

There are going to be trolls and haters that will pull your book down everywhere. You have to move along.

For me, what I’m doing is I am helping you expand your reach, your credibility, the awareness of you. I’m putting you or your book in front of people. I’m pitching reporters’ ideas around you like editors, journalists, producers. A marketing team is not doing that. The marketing team is putting together all of the backend work of like, “This is the plan. This is how we want to do it. They’re doing the online marketing.” They’re more concerned with the ROI, the book sales and that kind of stuff. I’m not concerned with that at all. My thing is, I’m telling your story to the world so that they know who you are. I’m helping you build that legacy. I’d say that’s the biggest difference that I talk about.

I don’t know exactly what people do in a marketing job, but I know that there is a big difference. When I get on these calls with the book publisher, their marketing team and the PR team, we know we have two different sets of job things that we’re doing. The marketing team does like to hear, “We went to The Doctors on Friday. It airs on whatever date,” because then they can take that and put that into their marketing and sales reports to report back to the company or to complete their reports on their end.

They can say, “As featured on The Doctors.” We’re giving them ammunition, the ads for Facebook and social media. Let’s cover this one last point because that makes me think of something else. I know that since the advent of social media especially how it’s become such a big force, that a lot of shows are looking for guests who already have a strong social platform themselves. Can you say a little bit more about that and what you’re seeing? 

That’s true. Even book publishers want to see that you have a community that cares about what you’re saying and what you’re doing. I’d say on the whole of producers, a lot of producers that I know they will ask me, “Can I see their social media? I want to look at the type of content that they’re putting out there.” They want to look and see who’s responding and who’s writing comments below. If they don’t see any interaction, then they know that this person doesn’t have an engagement level that could help sell a book. It’s important to see what your engagement levels are when you’re doing social media. That takes a social media pro. I am not one. I do have a social media pro on my team.

He could tell you way more about it than I could. I’d say for the basics of it, it’s super important. They look at that stuff. On the other hand, I remember I had a woman come to me for a book and she had a large social media following. She didn’t choose us as a PR firm, but I did hear from the publisher afterward that they were disappointed because she had a large social media following but didn’t sell books. It’s a catch 22 sometimes where you get hired for the job to write the book, because of your social media following, and then the sales aren’t there. There are some experts that every time you post something to your audience about a sale thing that you have, they don’t like it. It’s tough. You have to build it so that they do like it. They do want it and they’re clamoring for more.

That’s something that publishers are trying to navigate too because there could be that presumption that a big social following would translate to book sales. A lot of times people who are spending a lot of time on social media might not necessarily be book readers. There could be issues just with the delivery method that would get in the way of book sales. Not to mention several other factors, how they like to get content, how they like to engage with the author. One thing I haven’t seen a lot of evidence of is social media ads being necessarily effective with book sales. Have you seen anything? 

Honestly, I had one guy who had a big social media following, and then he came to me with a title and I said, “This is a great title. I got to introduce you to this book agent that I know.” She said, “I love it. Let’s do it.” I don’t know a lot about it.

There’s nothing like a referral from somebody who’s read the book. The more readers you have, the more referrals you can get.

Also, the thing that makes something strong is reviews. Honestly, when you go on Amazon and you read about something and you read that someone took the time to put a review out there about what they read. It’s important because that’s what makes a best seller too. Lots of people writing, enriching things about your idea in your book. That’s what determines me buying a book, literally go and read the reviews. They’re authentic. They’re not fake reviews. It’s good to say to your friends like, “Read my book and post your review,” but be careful. You want to have authentic authenticity. People don’t want to be fooled and they don’t want to fake things. You have to be careful about that. I definitely think that matters too. There’s a lot of things that matter in the book campaign.

You can find out a lot about a book by reading a good review. You can tell sometimes when there are trolls out there who seemed to make it like their part-time job to leave bad reviews. It’s obvious because they’re not well thought out. They’re mixed in with several five-star reviews.

TAC Nicole | Book Marketing & PR
 Book Marketing & PR: Reviews are part of what makes a bestseller.

There are going to be trolls and haters everywhere. I was looking at Lindsey Vonn, the Olympic skier who had a book out before. People were trolling her and saying nasty things about her in a bathing suit. I’m like, “This woman isn’t as an Olympic athlete.” I’d like to see that 60-year-old woman who’s saying she has a better body. For me, you’re going to have a mix and there’s going to be haters. You have to move along.

Let’s end on that. Anytime we put anything out into the universe, especially into the PR universe, there’s going to be all kinds of reactions. How do you coach your clients to whether the good and the bad? 

I would say first off, addressing things right away. You don’t want to wait for weeks to address something that’s a big deal. If you got something that came in that’s pretty hefty, I’d say consult with somebody who also does crisis management to come up with a good response. I feel like even the companies out there that have addressed things right away and have admitted to something or said, “This is wrong. We should correct this. We’re going to try harder and work better at it.” Thinking twice about when you’re putting something out there.

If it’s groundbreaking and it’s going to shake the media, be prepared to have your rebuttals on why this is groundbreaking and it should be well thought out. Don’t ever post something just to post it. That’s where authors and experts get into trouble is when they’re doing mindless stuff. Your reputation matters and it’s hard to correct it once you’ve tainted it and turned it the other way. To keep it super positive, thinking about your community and who’s reading your books, who’s going to buy your next book? You’re better off posting something that’s good versus posting something to post it.

What I’m getting is you want to address something that needs to be addressed but doesn’t do a hot-headed instant response. 

Even when responding to reporters or responding to a journalist, you don’t do things in a hurry. You take the time and you dedicate the time for a response positive or negative. That’s where the exposure comes from. Journalists like someone who’s put the time and energy into it and answered the questions the way that they asked the questions versus the question that was asked, not a different question. They will ask you back if you give them what they want. They’re looking for stuff for their readers. Honestly, they care about you, but they don’t care about you. They care about wanting to fulfill something for their readers.

Nicole, this has been valuable and informative.

I’m happy that we have this relationship that we have because I feel like I learned much from you and I hope you learned stuff from me too.

It’s wonderful to have you and to have you as a friend. Thank you for being with us.

Thank you.

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About Nicole Dunn

TAC Nicole | Book Marketing & PR

Who she is… Nicole Dunn is a former Senior Level Television Producer who started DPM around Health and Wellness after seeing a lack of positive health coverage in the media marketplace. She has over thirteen years of producing television and twelve years in public relations. In 2018, Nicole was nominated as L.A. Business Journals “Women of Influence honorees for 2018”, and is the Los Angeles Chair and writer for Forbes Business Council. She was honored in 2017, for the “Distinguished Alumni Award from Mount Ida College in Newton, MA.” In 2020, DPM was awarded Best Event/Social Media by PR Daily for the “Wellness Your Way Festival” with Kroger/Grammy Nominated Singer Jewel. In December 2015, PR News nominated DPM for an honorable mention, 2014 PR People Awards at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Excellent track record of producing television, which produced a Team Daytime Emmy Nomination for “Split Ends.” Member of NATAS, ATAS, Public Relations Society of America.

DPM is… the place where health and fitness enthusiasts find their voice.

Grateful for… her supportive husband, darling Poncho (pseudo child puppy), and her rockstar DPM team.

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