F&Gs

As if I haven't already had my share of late nights getting Everybody I Shot Is Dead off to the printers, here I am again. It's after 1am and I am in front of my computer printing F&Gs. What are F&Gs? They are something my soon-to-be-PR firm will need.

That's right, I'm hiring a PR firm. On Starart (my last book) I did the publicity myself with the help of friends and a full time assistant. And we did a pretty good job. I did some TV (Merv Griffin, for one), lots of radio (K-Earth and KMET), had a full page feature in Playboy, among others, and also had lots of newspaper features, reviews (all good, btw) etc. But these days there's just way too much ground to cover for the little engine that could. So I made what I hope is the wise decision to go in further debt for the book and bring on a real PR firm - one that is very well connected with everyone in the media and although they can't make any promises, I'm confident that we will get results. I'm really looking forward to the experience of having a PR team working with me on getting the word out there and am planning to sign the contract tomorrow and go out with guns blazing...

There's a few important deadlines that need to be met immediately. And that's why the publicist needs F&Gs asap. F&G is short for "folded and gathered." They are what you give the press for reviews before your book is printed so you can get reviews and/or features in publications that have long lead times. The F&Gs need to include The first one we need to hit up is Publisher's Weekly. There are a trade magazine that goes out to all the bookstores and if you don't have a review in PW you are pretty much dead in the water. They are also the first review (usually) that you see on a book's Amazon page. And they have a three month in advance of the release date deadline. So, figuring they will get the F&Gs by August 1, I am setting the official book release date as November 1. Not to worry...the people who order[ed] from my website will receive their books earlier.

So the F&Gs are basically just the text from the book plus a selection of a few photographs. But knowing that first impressions are everything, I'm printing out all the text pages just as there appear in the book with the photographs. Then I'm going to include one color spread and one black & white spread from the wet proofs in each of the five F&G packages that the publicist has requested. The whole thing is turning out to be a lot of work because there are 80 pages in the book that include text, and I'm printing double-sided which means I have to pay close attention to what I'm doing.

It's now 2:34am...I think I need sleep and will have to finish the remainder of the pages tomorrow.

zzzzzzzzz........