Crafting Potent Press Releases That Get You Ink

By guest blogger Nikolas Allen

Despite what the tech pundits will have you believe, there is still a place for traditional media in your art marketing arsenal.

 

 

When you need a potent device for bringing your message offline and putting it on the doorstep of your community, look no further than the press release.

Unlike social media, upon which you can publish anything you want, getting coverage in traditional media has to be earned. That means your press release has to be well-written, newsworthy and of interest to the community of readers.

The following tips and guidelines will increase your chances of getting published with every compelling press release you write.

It Starts With Proper Formatting

To a journalist’s trained eye, if it don’t LOOK like a press release, it ain’t a press release. Adhere to the following guidelines so your press release doesn’t end up in the journalist’s circular file (i.e., trash can) at first glance.

Contact Info

Make sure the recipient knows who you are and how to contact you by placing all your contact info (name, title, address, phone number, email and website) flush left at the top of the page. Make it easy for an editor to reach you if she needs clarification or an additional quote.

Release Date

If your news is ready to go live, write “FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE” in all caps under your contact info and above your headline. If your story needs to be held until a specific date, write “HOLD FOR RELEASE UNTIL (MONTH, DAY, YEAR).”

Headline

Crafting an arresting headline is an art in itself. This is your first chance to grab your reader’s attention, so you need to make it count. Unfortunately, self-aggrandizing hyperbole is not allowed in journalism, so you must you straddle the line between provocative and understated when writing for traditional media outlets.

Limit your headline to one short, punchy sentence and ditch all those “little” words that just take up space. Use title case, which means capitalizing the first letter of all nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. And, no matter how stoked you are, avoid using exclamation marks anywhere in your press release!

Dateline

The dateline indicates where and when the release was written (not where the event will take place) and includes city, state and date of issue. It goes in the first paragraph right before the opening line of body copy and should be formatted like this:

TAMPA, Fla., May 5, 20__ – First sentence of body copy…

Intro and Body Copy

Your press release should begin with a strong introductory paragraph that sums up the whole story you’re trying to tell. Even if readers just skim the first paragraph, they should still understand the highlights of your message.

Your goal should be to inform, educate, and intrigue your readers. Think about your audience and make every effort to appeal to them while also hitting the Who, What, Where, When, and Why points along the way. Feel free to interject quotes from legitimate sources to back up your statements or strengthen your thesis.

Talking about yourself in the third person usually results in sounding like a pompous twit, but it’s mandatory when writing your press release. Remember, there is no “I” in “Press Release,” unless your are quoting yourself, which is acceptable, if slightly meta.

Boilerplate

The boilerplate is the final paragraph of a press release, and can be a brief bio about the artist, gallery or business featured in the announcement. The end of the boilerplate is a good place to include a call to action to visit your website. Once you have a solid boilerplate, you can use it to end every press release.

End or Close

A press release should always end with the traditional close symbol “###” (three hashtags) centered at the bottom of the page. Wow, these journalists are so #oldschool, they were using hashtags before hashtags were cool!

How to Make It Newsworthy

Once you’ve got the formatting down, you need to make sure the content passes the “Why should I care?” test. Your release actually has to be considered “news” and not come off as a promotional puff piece that doesn’t benefit the readers. Some of the following tips and topics have worked well for me and for plenty of other artists when trying to get press.

Community Angle

If your news benefits the community in any way, consider it PR gold. This is especially true when it comes to local newspapers. This could be anything from hosting a local workshop, to offering painting lessons, or producing a public work of art.

Entertainment Options

People look to community calendars and events pages to get ideas of enjoyable activities to partake in, so a press release about an upcoming show at a local gallery will usually be published if it’s written and formatted well.

Human Interest

Generally, people want to read about success stories, so any article using a “local artist makes good” angle can be effective. Same goes for interesting artist profiles, or stories about struggle that end in the artist overcoming the odds and reaching a goal that presented a challenge.

Truly Newsworthy

Once in a while, you may be involved in a project or event that is so different, innovative or new that it truly is considered “news.” This happened to me when I was invited to partake in the first Pecha Kucha event in the northern California area. I crafted a release with the headline, “Is Pecha Kucha the New Karaoke?” which educated and informed the audience about what Pecha Kucha was and highlighted info about me as the local artist who was taking part in this cool new event.

Writing effective press releases takes plenty of thought and effort. However, once you develop a press-release formula that works, you can simply duplicate that formula and insert the new information rather than having to reinvent the wheel each time.

Try crafting potent press releases for use in your art marketing strategy and watch for a notable surge of interest and opportunities from your offline community.

 

Nikolas Allen is a contemporary Pop artist with a background in advertising, music and video production. He is passionate about art and marketing and wrote his first book, Death To The Starving Artist – Art Marketing Strategies for a Killer Creative Career to help ambitious artists reach a wider audience.

 

 

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