Build the trade-review plan
Identify regional media and local review outlets
List the newspapers, magazines, public radio stations, and local book sites in the places you have a connection to, and find each one's route for covering local authors.
Authors often hire help with this: publicity or marketing.
Why it matters
Local media is the coverage most authors can actually get, and it converts to sales and event attendance in ways a distant trade review often does not. It also produces the early clippings, interviews, and audio that make national pitches and award entries look credible. Starting three to five months out leaves time for the slower monthlies.
Your part
- What you do
- Do it. You normally do this yourself.
- Who normally owns it
- Author and Publicist. Author builds the list; publicist pitches where hired
- When
- 3 to 5 months before publication, earlier for monthly magazines (Build the trade-review plan: twelve to six months before publication, before any deadline closes)
Your part changes with your publishing route.
How to do it
The full walkthrough
Regional and local media cover local authors because their readers care about local people. Your hometown paper, the alt-weekly, the city magazine, the public radio station's arts show, the regional book blog, the state library association's newsletter: these are media coverage, not trade reviews. They will not influence a library wholesaler's ordering, but they sell books to real readers, fill event seats, and give you clippings that make later pitches easier.
Build the list from every place you can honestly claim: where you live, where you grew up, where you went to school, where the book is set, where you work. For each outlet, find the books or features editor, check whether it runs reviews, author interviews, or event listings, and note its lead time. Monthly magazines close issues two to three months ahead; dailies and radio move in days.
On every publishing path this is mostly the author's list, because the author knows the places. A traditionally published author should hand it to the publicist and agree who pitches what. A hybrid author usually pitches locally themselves. A self-published author does all of it, and can do it well, since local outlets do not care who published the book.
Keep this list separate from your trade review log. Different model, different purpose, different quotes.
Common mistakes
- Pitching a monthly magazine three weeks before the event.
- Sending the national press release with no local angle.
- Forgetting public radio and community papers, which are often the most receptive.
- Filing a local feature next to trade reviews and quoting it as if it were one.
- Only pitching where you live and ignoring the town the book is about.
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 list of local and regional outlets for each place you have a real connection to, with the right editor or producer named.
- Each outlet's coverage type (review, interview, feature, event listing) and lead time noted.
- A short local angle written for each place: why this book, this author, this town.
- Pitches sent on the outlet's timeline, with monthlies first.
- Coverage logged as media, distinct from trade reviews, with links saved.
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