What is your business name? What is your title or position within that business? Holly Hewson, Marketing Director at The Romance Studio
What genres do you accept? Do you work with Indie as well as traditionally published authors? We accept for advertising and review all genres of romance including lgbt. We accept traditionally published, small press and indie.
What types or kinds of services do you offer? We offer advertising on our site, advertising across social media venues, a featured membership for authors, publishers and agents that includes interviews, blog dates, chats, giveaway hosting, special event participation, advertising discounts and more. We also offer design services. We’ll have some new services we’ll announce in the near future.
How do you charge for your services (by the individual service, by pre-designed packages, by custom-designed packages, or some other way)? That’s an interesting question. We have individual services, packages, etc. But ultimately, the client can come to us and we’ll do what’s easiest for them.
What’s the price range of your services? $10 and up.
How long have you been in business? How many clients have you represented? TRS has been around since January 2003 and over the years we’ve handled several hundred authors, publishers and agents. We’re very grateful to have had the opportunity to work with each of them.
What information do you need from authors who hire you? Whatever information we can get to present the book, its author, its publisher in a way that will appeal to their target audience.
Are you a sole proprietor or do you have staff/assistants who help you? Are you personally involved with every client? I’m not the owner of TRS. But we have a small staff of about five of us who work on promotions and run the site.
Why should authors hire a marketer or publicist? Marketing sites can often provide authors with a bigger audience than they can obtain on their own. Often sites like ours will hold big, multi-author events. The advantage of those is that the readers who follow one author may come to such an event and discovering other authors. Newer authors can learn from more experienced authors at such events on how to present their work, what types of posts and promotions appeal to readers. Often authors are busy with deadlines and edits and we can help them spend more time writing, while we handle promotions.
In your experience, which genre or genres benefit most from the services you provide? Honestly, I think we do pretty well across the sub genres of romance. We really don’t have a specialty. An author writes a type of romance, we can find an audience for them.
If there is such a thing as an ideal client, what would that author look like, or what traits would s/he exhibit? I’m lucky at TRS to be the front line. Most of the time, I’m the first person you’ll get to at our site and I like people of all types. I very rarely run across a client that I can’t work well with. All I ask for is courtesy. Good people come in all personality types. <g>
Realistically, what kinds of results can authors expect after purchasing your services? We’ve gotten some really good feedback over the years that our services have helped authors gain sales, gain readers. And if we’re doing that, we’re doing our jobs. What we can promise readers is that we’ll work hard to make sure that they are promoted to the best of our ability.
What questions do you recommend that authors ask when they are considering a particular publicist or marketer? The biggest one would be to ask them how flexible they can be. There’s nothing more important in the promotion of books. Release dates get moved up, get moved back. Cover art can change. If official blurbs or excerpts must be approved by the publisher, those can change. I can’t tell you how many authors over the years have come to us so grateful that we’ll make those changes when they are needed. With the nature of publishing as a business, it’s so important.
What percentage of the bloggers who sign up for your book tours would you say follow through and participate in the individual events? Well, that’s assuming we do book tours and we don’t. Once in a while we participate as a blog tour stop for one of our authors but we don’t coordinate the tours themselves. One thing we’ve noticed, and heard from our readers who are very important to us too, is on blog tours things can be the same, stop after stop. For readers it can be convenient to have different dates so hopefully they can work one into their schedule and attend. Nothing is more disappointing to a reader than a blog tour stop where the author won’t even post or respond to comments. It makes them feel they aren’t important enough to merit a visit. Instead, we do release parties at TRS. The events feature several authors, you’ll never see the exact same thing from one event to the next. They are very well attended and I think our crowd, readers and authors alike, have a really good time. I do. I love to lurk there. Lol
Thank you for the opportunity to talk about TRS. We’re very grateful.
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