There’s something romantic about the idea of the book tour: visiting different cities, giving talks and readings, answering questions, meeting the people who read your work (and, perhaps more excitingly, the people who are now going to start reading it). It’s almost a rite of passage for many career authors, and is one of the best ways to both connect with and grow your readership.

However, it can also be logistically complex, financially burdensome, and highly time- and energy-intensive. For early career authors especially, the investment is not always clearly worth the return. There’s something paradoxical at work here: touring is important for building your audience, but it typically works best if you already have an existing one.

Fortunately, today’s authors have the opportunity to reap many of these benefits without needing to burn money on gas–or even leave the office at all, if they so choose. Virtual book tours can be an excellent way for emerging authors to kickstart their careers and for established authors to share their work with a broad, diverse audience.

The Digital Coffee Shop

Libraries, coffee shops, and indie bookstores are not the only places where today’s readers gather. Online spaces have become increasingly central to how readers both discover and engage with the work they love, and entering these spaces is one of the most powerful ways for today’s writers to reach their audiences.

Content creators on platforms like YouTube and Substack are some of the most influential voices in today’s literary scene. Collaborating with these creators can be truly transformative, and, in many cases, is directly supported by the platforms themselves.

For example, Substack allows for cross posting and guest posting, allowing creators on the platform to leverage each others’ audience for mutual growth. If you are not on Substack (which you should be, but that’s a different post altogether), you can still participate in Q&As or interviews with Substack creators, as well as getting them to review your work. Substack’s subscription-based format means that audiences tend to be highly engaged, ensuring that you are getting your work in front of readers who already trust the publication. It’s a level of advocacy that’s hard to come by anywhere else.

YouTube is another particularly powerful platform for authors. Landing an interview with a prominent creator or getting your book reviewed on a relevant channel can provide an excellent boost in exposure, with reusable video content to boot. TV interviews are still powerful, but in today’s media landscape, YouTube channels are often the ones that people tune into first.

The Role of Podcasts

One of the limitations of the traditional book tour is that it tends to center on spaces where the people we think of as “readers” usually congregate. However, there are far more readers out there than just the people with library cards or silk-screened tote bags. Let’s say you’ve written a memoir about your entrepreneurial journey or a groundbreaking guide to making flower arrangements: you might not be able to arrange a reading in a corporate office or a garden center, but you can still enter those spaces through the power of podcasts.

There are plenty of podcasts out there that are devoted to interviewing authors specifically, but there are orders of magnitude more shows that explore special-interest topics and are more than happy to interview authors who write about those topics. Familiarizing yourself with these kinds of shows can be a profoundly powerful way to reach engaged audiences who may not be passionate about reading as such, but are passionate about reading into the topics they care about. There are already podcasts out there for nearly every niche interest under the sun, and tapping into these is one of the most underrated, underutilized strategies for authors today.

Associations and Specialist Communities

Webinars and other online gatherings are another excellent way for authors to get their work in front of engaged and interested audiences. There are numerous professional, cultural, educational, and interest-based organizations that welcome author visits, both in-person and online. While we often associate webinars with an exclusively corporate audience, the format itself is highly flexible and used by organizations of all different kinds.

Like the other formats discussed above, webinars and other events hosted by associations and specialist communities allow authors to connect with the audiences that matter rather than just “readers.” This approach focuses on conversation rather than promotion, helping bring the book’s themes to life in a way that truly lasts.

Going Beyond the Bookstore

There is still plenty of value to be gained through the traditional book tour. Gone are the days, however, when that was a writer’s only option. The proliferation of online spaces dedicated to books–and to the myriad interests and experience that we write books about–provides authors of all kinds with unprecedented access to engaged audiences.

Whatever stage you are at in your writing career, going on a digital tour, whether alongside a traditional one or instead of it, can help you get your word out there and get known for your passion.

There was a time when convincing clients that podcast appearances had any value at all was an important part of my job. These days, however, hardly anyone needs convincing: in a world in which the top podcasts command listenership counts that rival and even exceed network TV, I’m more likely to find myself defending the value of a TV spot. Podcasts are just that powerful. The right appearance can be positively transformative for thought leaders and brands.

However, what the “right” appearance actually amounts to is not always a simple calculation. When it comes to building genuine, lasting authority, biggest does not always mean best.

If you want to use podcasts to get known, the best place to start is by getting to know the podcasts.

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The Real Value of Chart-Topping Shows

Most clients’ initial goal when it comes to podcasts is, understandably, quite simple: they want to get their message in front of the biggest possible audience. This naturally means–or so the logic goes–that they ought to be seeking out the biggest possible shows. If you’re an entrepreneur, you want to be on Diary of a CEO. If you’re in psychology or medicine, you want to be on Huberman Labs. After all, numbers don’t lie.

And, to be fair, they don’t. They just don’t tell the whole story.

There’s a crucial fact that these numbers omit: when it comes to building authority, what you really want is to get in front of an audience where your message will actually land. If only a vanishingly small percentage of those millions of listeners will actually engage with your work, is it really that much of a victory?

One of the things that podcasts allow brands and thought leaders to do, more effectively than almost any other medium, is to actively shape conversations. Podcasts allow you to get your message not just in front of listeners, but in front of communities. This is where real, deep, ongoing engagement comes from.

And this is where the value of targeting niche opportunities becomes clear.

Get In Where You Fit In: The Value of Niche Podcasts

Let me establish this right off the bat: 2k monthly listeners is nothing to sneeze at. Our number-crunching brains immediately see this listener count and think “Well, this show must be 1000 times less impactful than this one with 2 million listeners.”

When it comes to podcasts, the calculation is actually not so simple. One of the beautiful things about the current podcast landscape is that, for every major category we think of, there are dozens, even hundreds of sub-categories to drill down into. There is “Entrepreneurship,” yes, but then there are mindset- and wellness-focused shows for entrepreneurs interested in self-optimization. There are tech-focused shows drilling deep into the specific tools that entrepreneurs are using in their industries. I can’t say I’ve confirmed this myself, but I would not be surprised in the slightest if there were a show out there aimed at left-handed brown-eyed Gemini entrepreneurs in the heavy manufacturing industries born between the years of 1970-1989.

And if you’re a left-handed brown-eyed Gemini entrepreneur in the heavy manufacturing industry born between the years of 1970-1989, this latter show would provide even more direct value than a general-interest entrepreneurial one. These are the kinds of conversation that lead to ongoing industry connections even after the mics have been turned off.

A long-running show with a consistent audience frequently delivers much more tangible results than a popular show that is an awkward fit. Even better if that show has an engaged Patreon community or other associated social media groups: these help ensure that the conversation remains ongoing and leads to real connections that drive genuine business value.

Keeping The Discussion Going

None of this is to say that it isn’t worth shooting for big-time opportunities. They can be transformative if you land them.

However, it’s crucial to remember that even much smaller opportunities can be just as transformative. Highly targeted appearances that deliver actionable insights to an engaged, niche audience translate to the kind of authority that truly means something to your audience. Niche podcasts allow you the joy of nerding out alongside others who are in the know while also making a meaningful mark on the conversations that mean the most to your audience.

This is when authority becomes impact.

When I started in PR, the press release was a big thing.

Early in my career, working for other agencies and companies, I learned a very traditional version of media relations. A client had news, so one of the first things we did was send out a release. It would typically go through a distribution platform and be sent to hundreds of outlets categorized by industry. From there, it was regurgitated and spit out into the mysterious world of press release distribution.

At one company I worked for, we treated standard media pitches in much the same way. We were taught to create several different angles, build targeted media lists and aim to send 3,000 non-personalized emails (!) in one day (!!) through a PR database.

In response, we would reliably get a fair number of responses from journalists that read something like this:

TAKE ME OFF THIS LIST!

Now, there were some solid hits that came out of this method. Mass pitching could get good results, particularly back then. But certainly not at the volume you might expect after emailing 3,000 people.

I found the whole thing frustrating and, frankly, a little invasive. I mean, think about it: what would you even do if you got 3,000 responses? Clearly, we were expecting a large percentage of those pitches not to land. Even at the time, when volume was very much the standard practice for many PR agencies, it seemed like a strange approach.

Clients asked about volume too. How many pitches will you send every month? And, of course: How many placements can I expect?

Needless to say, I eventually moved on from that company. The approach felt spammy and non-strategic to me.

And today? I think it would be an even worse idea.

Spray and pray had its moment

Even five or six years ago, mass emailing was still very much a thing. It even has a name: spray and pray. To me, that isn’t really PR.

The media landscape has become far more fragmented since then. There are still many staff journalists, but freelancers are playing an increasingly central role. Many publications have closed or consolidated. Smaller local media have disappeared. Audiences themselves are spread across more places.

At the same time, PR databases have made it incredibly easy to get journalists’ email addresses. This is both good and bad. It’s good because it allows me to find the right contact for a story. It’s bad because every single one of my competitors can also access that exact information.

Journalists can receive more than 100 pitches a day. So if you’re sending the same generic email to hundreds or thousands of them, how exactly are you going to stand out? Moreover, if a journalist starts associating your name with generic outreach, so that they end up ignoring you when you send them a truly tailored pitch down the line?

Today, I believe much more strongly in carefully curated outreach, relationship building and pitches created for the journalist, their beat and their audience.

It takes more time. The lists are smaller and the stakes of each pitch feel higher.

And in my experience, the results are much stronger.

Please don’t tell a journalist how wonderful you are

The self-promotional pitch is probably one of my biggest pitching bugaboos.

PR is earned media. You’re trying to offer something valuable, educational, useful, interesting, or genuinely newsworthy enough that it earns its way into the media.

That means your pitch shouldn’t essentially say: I’m wonderful. I’ve done this and this and this. I’ve made a million dollars. I’m very successful. I’m sure you’d love to interview me.

A journalist can see all of this and still ask a very simple question: Why? What does all of this have to do with the value you can provide to my audience?

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pitch a product for review. Of course you should, if there’s a legitimate reason for that publication to review it. You have a product you believe matters or solves a problem for their readers. The journalist decides whether it’s worth covering. That’s earned media.

But the pitch has to provide value to the publication and its audience, not just value to you because you want publicity. There’s a big difference.

And perhaps don’t pitch dog food to the weatherman

Research matters. I’ve seen pitches sent to people who have absolutely nothing to do with the subject. If you’re pitching a story about the best dog food, why are you sending it to the Weather Channel or the local weatherman?

You’ve got to know who you’re pitching. Does this journalist actually cover the beat? Have they covered this type of story before? Does this particular angle make sense for them?

This doesn’t mean spending six hours researching every journalist before sending one email. But it does mean taking enough care to know that you’re pitching the right person.

And while we’re here, nothing says I’ve carefully selected you for this story quite like:

Hi, First Name.

It happens.

Someone sets up a mail merge, doesn’t have the contact’s name or doesn’t check the system properly, and off it goes.

Hi, First Name.

Bye, media placement!

A pitch doesn’t have to be three sentences long

I don’t subscribe to the idea that every media pitch must be incredibly short. Sometimes you need enough information to explain the story properly. But there is a difference between telling a story and pure info dumping.

Journalists are busy. They’re getting a lot of pitches. They shouldn’t have to work their way through your life story before figuring out why you’ve contacted them.

I feel similarly about subject lines. I’m not against something corny. I like a good play on words or a pun when it fits. Around the holidays or for the right story, why not? But cleverness shouldn’t come at the expense of clarity.

A journalist should be able to look at the subject line and have a pretty good idea whether the email is relevant to them, and whether it’s a story rather than a sales pitch.

And I don’t send attachments. Ever. I provide a hyperlink to supporting information, images, or other materials. I don’t want a large attachment contributing to the email ending up in spam or giving someone another reason not to open it.

About those guaranteed placements…

This one really gets me.

There are companies that will tell potential clients: We can get you into Forbes for $1,000. We can get you into another major publication for $1,500.

And the client gets excited. Of course they do. Who wouldn’t want to say they’ve appeared in a major publication?

But if you’ve purchased a guaranteed placement, that’s not the same thing as earning editorial coverage. It’s paid placement. Of course, there are legitimate reasons someone chooses to buy sponsored or paid media. That’s fine. But it should be called what it is.

The problem comes when paid placement is sold or understood as though a journalist or editor independently decided the person or company was worth covering. Those are two very different things.

AI can make PR stronger — or more mediocre than ever

I love AI. There. I said it. I use it as a strategic partner, particularly for research and brainstorming.

What topics are becoming important in a client’s industry? What’s relevant right now? What might the best PR mix be for this particular client? What angles haven’t we considered?

And definitely — definitely — learning more about the journalist.

I have access to tools like Muck Rack, but sometimes AI gives me much greater insight or helps me make connections I might have missed. And it saves an enormous amount of time.

For me, that’s where AI gets really interesting. It’s like having another partner at the table.

This, however, is not a partnership:

Hey AI, write me five pitches.

Copy. Paste. Send to 500 people.

This is spray and pray taken to the extreme.

This is basically reinvented spray and pray, only now it can be done faster.

I prefer to write pitches myself or have our team write them. AI can help us research, brainstorm angles, check something, polish it and even think about how an angle could be personalized for a particular contact.

But the thinking and the voice still need to be human. Otherwise, it’s just laziness at scale. AI can strengthen good PR, but it can make mediocre PR more mediocre than ever.

Sometimes the journalist who clicks doesn’t bite

We’ve become very good at watching what happens after a pitch goes out.

Opens. Clicks. Repeat opens.

And I admit it: I still get excited when I see that a journalist has opened a pitch and clicked through to the supporting information. They clicked! And then...nothing.

Meanwhile, another journalist opens the email once, doesn’t click anything and ends up covering the story. That still surprises me.

It’s also a good reminder that we can read far too much into our own data.

An open is an open. A click is a click. Neither is a media placement.

Ultimately, journalists respond because they see a story. Maybe it’s a human-interest story that’s genuinely right for their local beat. Maybe it’s a new technology that could change an industry. Maybe it’s an unusual angle backed by strong data.

A good subject line helps. Timing helps. Relationships help. But there still needs to be something that’s actually worth covering.

Before you hit Send

If someone new joined Mackasey tomorrow and was about to send their first pitch, I wouldn’t tell them to worry about how many emails they were going to get out that day.

I’d want them to ask three things:

1. Does this journalist actually cover this beat and this angle?

2. What value could this story provide to the journalist’s audience?

3. Is it actually newsworthy?

If you can’t answer those questions, don’t hit Send yet. Three thousand pitches won’t fix the wrong story, and neither will AI. This is where the human element of earned media comes in. If it doesn’t interest you, how can you expect it to interest a journalist and their readers?

The angle is everything. Clarity and authenticity speak much louder than volume.

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I’ve been in PR and communications a long time. Long enough to remember when landing a client in a major publication was the win. One placement could change the trajectory of a business, and honestly, of the publicist’s year too.

That still matters. Very much so.

But media has changed enormously over the past few years, and so has the way people communicate and become known.

There are now so many ways to get noticed. You can talk up a storm on ten podcasts, post your best advice on LinkedIn, get quoted in industry articles and mainstream news, write an op-ed, publish a thought leadership piece, send out a press release, and watch your name turn up all over Google.

And you can do every bit of that and still have a visibility problem, because being seen isn’t the same as being remembered, and neither one is the same as being known.

The desire to count everything

PR has always been hard to quantify. For years the industry tried to prove its value with impressions, shares, likes and advertising value equivalency. If a publication had ten million monthly visitors and your client was featured there, that was supposed to mean ten million people read the article intently.

They didn’t. Maybe a small percentage did. Maybe a meaningful percentage did. There was never any real science to it.

Now there’s even more to count. Media mentions, interviews, podcast appearances, LinkedIn impressions, Substack subscribers, search rankings, engagement, share of voice, domain authority. And the newest one, whether ChatGPT knows you exist.

We do need to count. Clients need to see results and know whether the work is doing anything, and no sound strategy survives without numbers behind it. But it’s possible to get so busy counting that you lose sight of what the counting was for. Multiple media mentions are wonderful. So is a bylined article in a major publication, a large following, ten podcast appearances, a first page Google result.

Then someone sees your name for the fourth time and still can’t say what you do.

The more useful question isn’t how many hits we secured this month. It’s what people are starting to know you for.

You can be everywhere and known for nothing

I see this more often than you’d think.

A company wants publicity, so they start doing PR. The founder talks about leadership on one podcast. Innovation on another. AI in a contributed article. Work life balance on LinkedIn. Sustainability in a media interview. There’s a press release about a new product in there too.

Technically they’re doing everything right. They’re visible. Six months later, ask someone outside the company what that founder is known for and you’ll get a blank look.

That usually isn’t a PR failure. It’s a positioning failure. The problem was never that nobody saw the content. It’s that nothing stuck.

Good PR is repetitive

This is one of the less exciting truths about becoming known. You have to repeat yourself.

Not word for word. Please don’t do that.

But the core ideas need to show up again and again. If you want to be known as the person who understands why small businesses struggle with client retention, you can’t weigh in once and consider it handled. That conversation is happening constantly, across formats and outlets, and your name should keep appearing wherever it’s happening.

You don’t need to suddenly have opinions about workplace culture because someone told you that personal branding requires content diversification. You’re allowed to have a lane.

Lanes are powerful. The people we think of as highly visible usually aren’t known for fifty-seven things. They’re associated with a handful of ideas, sometimes only one. That isn’t a limitation, it’s the whole mechanism.

The media still matters

Every so often someone announces that traditional media is dead. It’s been remarkably energetic for something that’s been dead for about twenty years.

A credible placement still does something a self-published post can’t. It’s earned. A third party is vouching for you, which means you aren’t the one doing the promoting, and that carries a kind of trust you can’t manufacture on your own.

What doesn’t work as well anymore is treating media relations as the whole plan.

A strong interview leads to a podcast invitation. The podcast sends people to your website. Your website leads them to something you wrote. That article gets them to subscribe to your Substack. Months later they see you quoted somewhere else, and this time they recognize the name and know roughly what you’re about.

That recognition is the thing worth building.

And now there’s AI

As if we needed more acronyms. We’re talking about AEO, GEO and whether brands turn up in AI generated answers.

It matters, and I think it will matter more. But the underlying principle hasn’t changed as much as people believe. If you want search engines, journalists, AI systems and actual humans to understand who you are, there has to be enough credible, consistent information out there about you.

What do you know? What do you talk about? Where have you been quoted? What have you written? Who else treats you as credible?

Reputation is becoming searchable in a much broader sense than reviews.

Getting known is cumulative

This is the part companies underestimate. There usually isn’t one magical piece of coverage that changes everything, though occasionally there is, and you should enjoy it when it happens.

Most of the time reputation builds slowly and then compounds. An article. Another one. A podcast. A journalist who remembers you from last time. A LinkedIn post that lands. An introduction. A speaking invitation. Someone searches your name and finds enough credible material to conclude that you know what you’re talking about.

Eventually you stop introducing yourself from scratch every time. That’s the point where visibility turns into reputation.

So what do you want to be known for?

Before worrying about how many pitches went out this month or whether your last LinkedIn post got 847 impressions, I’d start here. Not where do we want to appear, but what do we want people to think when our name appears.

Once that’s settled, the rest of the strategy gets much easier. Media coverage matters. Podcasts matter. Thought leadership matters. LinkedIn matters. Your own content matters. None of them, on their own, make someone known. They’re the pieces. Built well and pointed in the same direction, they become a reputation.