Build the outreach lists
Build a media list by topic and audience
Make a list of the specific outlets, sections, and people who cover your book's subject or audience, organized by what each of them actually covers.
Authors often hire help with this: publicity or marketing.
Why it matters
Coverage comes from fit, and fit comes from knowing who covers what. A short list of fifty well-chosen contacts with a reason beside each one produces more than a purchased list of five thousand. The list is also the record of who was pitched, so the follow-up plan and the tracking item later on this checklist have something to work from.
Your part
- What you do
- Do it. You normally do this yourself.
- Who normally owns it
- Publicist and Author. Publicist builds the campaign list; author builds and keeps the long-term list
- When
- 4 to 6 months before publication, before pitches begin (Build the outreach lists: six to three months before publication)
How to do it
The full walkthrough
A media list is a spreadsheet of outlets and contacts that might cover the book, with a column for why. It is built from the book outward: who writes about this subject, who serves this audience, who covers this region, who reviews this genre. It is not a list of every newspaper and magazine, because most of them will not cover most books, and pitching them anyway wastes their time and yours.
For each entry, record the outlet, the section or show, the person (by name, with the role they currently hold), the best way to reach them, what they have covered recently that resembles your book, and which of your topic angles fits them. That last column is the one that makes the pitch specific.
Traditionally published authors usually have a publicist building a list for the launch campaign. Ask what it covers, then build your own for the outlets the publicist will not reach: local media, subject-specialist publications, newsletters, and the outlets that matter after the campaign ends. Hybrid and self-published authors build the whole list and should start with the outlets they already read.
Keep it current. Journalists change jobs constantly, and a pitch to someone who left a year ago is a pitch to nobody.
Common mistakes
- Buying a generic media database and pitching everyone on it.
- Listing outlets without a named person or a reason.
- Ignoring local media, which is the most likely to say yes.
- Pitching the same contact the publicist pitched last week.
A template for this
Local media pitchA short pitch to a local newspaper, magazine, radio station, or community site that leads with the local connection and makes coverage easy.
When to use it: Use this when you are writing to an outlet in a place where you live, grew up, work, or set the book, ideally three to six weeks before publication or a local event. Send it to the specific editor or producer who covers books, arts, or community news. Do not use this when the local connection is thin. Without it there is no story here, and a general outlet is a different pitch.
What done looks like
- A spreadsheet with outlet, section, contact name, role, contact route, recent relevant coverage, matching angle, and status.
- Entries grouped by audience or topic so each group gets its own pitch.
- Local, regional, subject-specialist, and newsletter contacts alongside national ones.
- A note of what the publisher's publicist is covering, to avoid duplicate pitches.
- Contacts verified as current within the last month before pitching.
Ask your publisher
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Sources and last checked
- Official source
- No single official page for this step.
- Last checked
- Not checked against its source yet.
- How confident we are
- Verified