What’s a media kit, and why do you need one?

It’s a collection of background information about you and your book for potential interviewers, book retailers, bloggers, editors, and people writing articles about you.

Sooner or later, you’ll need one — and you might be surprised at how quickly that time comes. You don’t want to be scrambling to pull this info together on a deadline, so it makes sense to assemble your media kit early. You can start small, and add more information as you go along.

These days, a digital media kit is more useful than a traditional printed one. That’s good news, because it’s faster, easier, and less expensive to create and distribute your media kit online. Here are some of the things you might want to include:

• High-resolution headshot (photo of yourself from the shoulders up)
• High-resolution book cover image
• Your author bio
• Tip sheet (or sellsheet) for your book. These have a specific format; use mine as a sample.
• List of reviews and awards
• Sample interview questions and answers
• Discussion questions for readers groups
• An excerpt or sample chapter
• Links to your social media profiles
• List of upcoming events
• Press releases
• Links to articles about you and your book (Tip: PDFs are even better than links, because you don’t have to worry about whether the article you’re linking to will be alive forever).

Here’s a link to the media kit for The Coconut Latitudes by Rita Gardner, published by SheWrites press. It’s provided here as an example with the permission from Kaye McKinzie at Quatrain PR, who created it.

Next step: Consider making a video book trailer.

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