It’s harder than ever to break through the crowded media landscape to get coverage for your upcoming book release. But one great way to do it—and to literally create your own publicity—is to pitch articles and essays that you yourself can write, tied to your book release.

Novelist Andrea Bartz (The Lost Night, The Herd) has been extraordinarily successful at this, and for good reason: She’s also a longtime freelance journalist and former magazine and online editor. In this conversation, she spills all of her secrets, from how she comes up with ideas to which publications to target and how to write the pitches themselves. She also shares the magical email wording that gets editors to respond to your follow-ups.

Resources:

• Andrea Bartz
• The Lost Night
• The Herd
• Sometimes I Exploit My Sexuality and I’m Not Sorry, by Andrea Bartz
• Look, I’m a Self-Promoting Woman. And I’m Not Apologizing for It. by Andrea Bartz
• How I Found My Literary Agent by Andrea Bartz
• 7 Novels About Parties Gone Wrong by Andrea Bartz
• Characters in Literature Who Drink Too Much by Andrea Bartz
• The Real Winner of Last Night’s Debate: The All-Female Moderating Team by Andrea Bartz
• Translating Seinfeld by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong
• What Would Sex and the City Look Like in 2018? by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong
• A Lot of Old Sitcoms Don’t Hold Up. ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show’ Does. by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong
• The book-coverage-friendly PopSugar
• Pitch examples from The Write Life
• Pitch advice from Writer’s Digest