By Sandra Beckwith  on Build Book Buzz:

When Irish children’s author Avril O’Reilly sent a tip sheet to media outlets throughout Ireland, she had immediate success that included newspaper and television exposure for her book, Kathleen and the Communion Copter.

In her tip sheet, O’Reilly offered parents advice for selecting just the right Communion gift for little girls. While her book is fiction, she was able to find a nonfiction nugget she could use to create a tip sheet that offered the media useful information they could use immediately.

What’s a tip sheet?

As Avril learned through our work together, a tip sheet is a type of press release that offers tips or advice in a bulleted or numbered format.

Like a press release, it’s written like a news story so that a media outlet or blogger can run it as is. No additional research or writing is necessary.

Media outlets, especially newspapers and magazines, like tip sheets because they can pull just one or two tips to fill space. They also run them as submitted or use them as a starting point for longer feature articles.

Radio stations like to share the advice in snippets or, like TV talk shows, build author interviews around the tip sheet topic. In fact, several years ago, my tip sheet on how to get a good holiday gift from a man was the basis of my appearance on the “Home & Family” TV talk show.

Bloggers run them as new posts because tip sheets save them the time it takes to write something helpful themselves.

When done right, tip sheets showcase a nonfiction book’s content or a novel’s theme or message while getting the book title in front of the book’s target audience.

Find out more at:

Book Publicity Tip Sheets