Alright! Are you excited? You should be! We’re going to start talking about getting press this week. OR doing “PR”. Whatever you want to say to refer to the often soul crushing work that is trying to get attention for yourself, or your product, by using modern media.

I hope you’re excited, (or at least, ready to feign enthusiasm) because PR is one of those things that’s a lot of fun in the concept stage, but once you start actually having to do it, you immediately wish you had made different career choices.

You see, public relations is this bizarre combination of high concept thinking and imagination, along with menial labor, that you wish those creepy robots from “Humans” on AMC were around to do for you. But they’re not. Which is a little strange because, in a totally serious conversation, a PR person once asked me how bubbles worked, and I never forgot that.

There is no way anyone reading this can convince me that this person could not be automated and replaced by an android. Even a malfunctioning one.

I kid. Mostly. But the simple fact is that a lot of PR people are terrible at their job. Which is really bad for you and me, because PR is the engine that drives everything else. Don’t be fooled, there is no such thing (especially when it comes to things and people who have become “Internet Famous”) as some random person posting something, and then that thing blowing up for “no raisin“.

Thinking otherwise is incredibly dangerous and incredibly common. Comedian and budding TV star Tig Notaro is a great example of this. If you read most writeups now about Tig, there’s always something about how she “went viral”, but the reason she “went viral” is never mentioned. You know why? Because it makes the story less appealing than “This thing spread by magic on the Internet!” which is what the press (and PR people) like to tell each other. In the case of Notaro, her standup set announcing she had breast cancer “went viral” because of Louis C.K. tweeting it out to his followers (and to the media who follow him on Twitter, who then went and ran with the story).

If you want to raise your probability of success, you absolutely have to erase from your mind that concept (and belief in the possibility) that something you say or do or your product itself will “go viral” in the magical sense that is often portrayed. It just does not exist.

Cool? Cool.

(BTW: There are plenty of people who disagree, but if you read the books I suggested, you’ll see real quick that the people who actually know what they’re doing don’t believe in “the magic of the Internet” either.)

So now that you know how important PR is, here’s the good news: It’s very easy to get press attention if you know what buttons to push. I once got covered by a local news affiliate for (pretending) to sell plastic bags filled with “Fresh Adirondack Air”.  Sounds hard to believe, right? Well good thing I have the video evidence to show you.

Now here’s the bad news: It’s very difficult to control the story that the press tells about you. Sometimes this is fine, but other times how you / your product / your pitch is portrayed may not be how you wanted, which negates the benefit of getting press in the first place.

Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about using my Liberty comic as our case study.

Getting Press Attention: The Easy Part

There are a lot of ways I can pitch Liberty to the press. It’s a racially diverse cast, which I’ve got a lot of feedback on that tells me people really like that.

Liberty herself is bisexual and multiracial, with her father being Mexican and her mother being a Russian Jew,  and the story isn’t “dark”. It’s not “gritty” or even “mean”. The characters aren’t psychologically damaged or haven’t had anything traumatic happen to them, which unfortunately has been the hallmark for male comic writers when they write women. So there’s a lot going on that’s really good for Liberty and makes it easy to pitch. Especially to the comics press.

The comics press loves telling their readers how progressive they are. (Not a bad thing, but sometimes I wonder how much of it is driven by earnestness and a belief in real diversity vs. the need for pageviews and controversy.)

But how would I pitch Liberty to the mainstream media, whom unfortunately tends to only cover comics in two ways: When it comes to the movies, with a lot of excessive hype and exaggerated excitement, followed by handwringing editorials about “Superhero fatigue” and how superhero films are the end of movies. (Seriously.)

Or when they cover the comics, there’s also some stupid “BIFF BANG POW!” line. Or a line like “It’s not just for your kid living at home in the basement!” More recently, and this is a positive even though it’s phrased in a grating way, you see stories like, “Move over boys! Comics are for girls!” Which, is fantastic, you know! But it keeps things framed in that “LOL Nerds” thing in which the media always puts stories about comics. Don’t take my word for it. Go look at most interviews with Jill Lepore, who wrote a book about Wonder Woman, but spends most of her interviews bashing comics and running as far as she possibly can away from any association with them.

That’s quite a challenge, right? Especially when you consider this: The media tends to have certain boxes for things, and whatever you pitch needs to fit into that box. I’ve showed you here the comic boxes that the media uses for their stories.

I can’t stress this enough: I can NOT pitch something successfully that does not fit in the media’s comic boxes because the media doesn’t understand something that doesn’t fit into their box. There’s a whole host of dumb reasons for this, but none of them are important here. What’s important is that you understand how they think because you will encounter this. What you pitch, regardless of what it is, must be designed to fit into one of their boxes. How do you figure out what their box is? Look at their previous coverage of a product / campaign like yours. You’ll see it immediately.

So what do I do? Let’s address the bad news I told you about, and then we’ll circle back to the good news and the solution to this problem.

Getting Press Attention: The Annoying Part

As I mentioned in an earlier installment of this series, there’s this big club, filled with people who actually make the decisions in this country, and as George Carlin once said about that club, you and I ain’t in it.

If you’re in that club, you can control the media presentation of your story, provided it fits into those boxes. That means you can stop reading here.

You never phrase it in those words, of course. “I’m in the club, do as I say”, but if you want to get some coverage and you’re in with the reporters or the reporter’s boss, you more or less give them the talking points and soon you’ll see your story appear.

This is very sad, but also very true.

And just as a point for history sake, this is ALWAYS the way the media worked, going back to the first newspaper in the U.S. in 1704 that often took the side of the British.

A lot of people forget that some of the first newspapers were total propaganda tools, advancing one cause or another, like bringing us into a war over dubious reasons. It wasn’t until later (when there was money to be made) where the media pretended to take a neutral and ethical position, and even then that depends on how you want to interpret stuff like this. (Great movie by the way.)

In recent years that illusion of neutrality and ethical behavior has gone out the window as people take sides in order to capture page views and ratings from people who are on that opinion/stance’s side.

So in terms of history, the media working the way we all think it does with the tireless reporter making only ethical decisions and railing at the powers that be from their column was very brief. (Just search for “Weapons of Mass Destruction + the New York Times” some time. You’ll see what I mean.)

This is fine. Honestly. If you’re an American, you learn at a young age that greed is the one true religion of this country. It was true way back when the settlers got here and wanted more and more land, and it’s true to this day.

But if you’re not in that club, the bad news is that you can’t control the story. You can make suggestions, and sometimes you encounter a lazy blogger/journalist (more rare than you might think, but unfortunately they do exist) who will just run what you give them, whether to meet a quota of some kind or just because, and you luck out. But that’s not common.

So what happens? If the reporter doesn’t go with what you sent, your pitch could wind up a part of something else, meaning you get lost in the shuffle. Uh oh, right?

For example with Liberty, I can make a pitch about how Liberty as a character doesn’t swear as part of a larger commentary about the “darkness” that tends to permeate comic books these days, but when I look at the story the next day from the reporter, there’s nothing in there about Liberty and her lack of swearing. Instead, there’s a story about women as superheroes, which is totally fine, but Liberty is just PART of the story, receiving just one mention while other characters get more coverage for their lack of swearing. You see, the reporter liked my point, but decided to see how many other characters did the same thing.

Little good that does you.

So you can work, hustle, and slave over an amazing pitch for your product, and you may get super excited about things once a reporter says they’ll cover it, but you might not like the end result, because the reporter controls the narrative. Not you. That’s the bad news.

Let’s swing back to how to handle this.

Push, But Don’t Be Pushy

Next week, we’ll spend more time on shaping the story, but for now I just want to show you the basic mechanics of getting press.

IF your pitch/product gets mangled by a well meaning (or sometimes not so well meaning) journalist, you should move on to the next journalist. Be polite. Thank you the journalist for the writeup, and don’t say anything else. Seriously. Don’t argue. Don’t fight. If you’re mad they didn’t use all the stuff you sent, don’t be. There’s nothing you can do about it. Accept that once you pitch the story, you’ve done everything there is to do.

But. If you put in the work before you send off the pitch, you reduce the chances of your idea / pitch getting mangled or presented in a strange way. Or barely presented at all. How? By doing a few important things:

• On your website (or wherever you’re sharing your pitch / idea online or off), make sure you have your talking points clearly articulated. “This is what my thing does.” “This is what my cause hopes to achieve”, “this is the problem my product solves.”
• Using Liberty again as an example: “Liberty is a fun, action adventure comic book for adults with a diverse cast of characters.”

See? Very simple, clear, and direct. I identify the product, I identify the audience, and I describe what the product is.

As an exercise, I encourage you to try to describe your product/idea/cause in as few words and sentences as you can, with the idea being that you clearly identify the product (Liberty), the audience (adults), and what the product is (a fun action adventure comic book).

These points should be repeated as often as you can repeat them without being obnoxious about it. If you’re doing an interview, make sure to hit these points. The odds are always very good that if you say something often enough, it becomes the truth, and other people will begin to repeat it.

• Make sure you have a press resource somewhere that can be accessed. Usually you see this as a pressroom on corporate websites. This is worth emulating if you have aspirations of being a business or organization, but if you’re an individual pushing a single product (like a comic book), something like what I have here is fine.

The point is to show the reporters you have social proof (other people covering you), and you have as much prepared for them as you can. (Press releases, photos, videos, anything you think a reporter should see should go here.) Don’t worry if you have nothing yet. This isn’t a chicken or the egg thing. Get everything else together, and just add the press articles as you get them.

Again, you can’t control the story, but by giving them as much as you can, you can help guide them and possibly minimize the chance that something stupid happens. Like I said, PR can be soul crushing work sometimes, but you have to do it, and you have to learn real fast to not sweat it.

PR is a big topic, so we’re going to spend some time with it here in this column, but I hope this gives you a good general overview of how this works here.

Image Credits: Liberty comes from … duh. Me. Louis C.K. and the picture of the machinery comes from Wikimedia Commons. Picture of Tig Notaro via Flickr user CleftClips.