How to Talk About Your Book During an Interview
Back when I was a teenager, I used to work at a sandwich shop with a really nice kid named Rob. Rob was a television fanatic. It wouldn't surprise me to learn he'd gone on to be a tv writer. Every shift, he would tell me about what he'd been watching. It would take an entire four hour shift for him to convey the plot of a half hour sitcom. I loved the kid, but it was tedious.
Lots of writers have the same problem as Rob when it comes to talking about their stories. I talk to a lot of writers about their books, both on the consulting calls that I do, and also in pre-pandemic times when my colleagues and I would go to festivals and conferences. If you feel like you're struggling to talk about your book, you are not alone. Eighty percent of the writers we speak with have a hard time conveying the essence of their book in a concrete, concise way.
How to talk about your book in a way that makes people want to read it
If you're an NPR listener, you've heard about “driveway moments,” stories that are so compelling, that if you're out driving around and you get home, you can't turn off the radio. You sit in your driveway and listen to the end of the story. We want something that's really compelling, or somebody that's really fascinating to listen to, and we don't want to turn it off. That's what readers/listeners are looking for.
The first question you need to ask is: Who’s the ideal person to pick up this book? What do they want? Creating an ideal reader persona is one of your best marketing tools. With that in hand, you’ll know who you’re trying to reach and how to talk to them.
Now you can prepare for an interview with your ideal reader in mind.
Second, realize that readers want the story behind the story when they're listening to writers talk about their books.
They don't want you to tell them the entire plot of the book. Your plot can unfold much more beautifully in the pages of your book than on a podcast. Instead, talk about things that support the book. Tell listeners why you decided to tell this story, how you decided to tell it, and what you learned in the process.
Three mistakes to avoid
1. Rambling
Need I go on? You want to have concrete topics to talk about and talk about them succinctly.
If you have a tendency to ramble, then practice what's called a button. It signals the end to your anecdote. After you’ve explained a bit on one topic, you simply say something like, “And that's why I wrote the book,” or “And that was the key lesson for me.” You're giving yourself a conclusion and buttoning up that part of your talk so that you can move on to something else.
2. Lack of practice
Another thing I see is people winging it. If you haven’t practiced talking about your book, you're going to want to try to convey too much or mention pieces that need more explanation and backstory. You really need to practice and gain a certain amount of confidence in what you've chosen to tell about your book and find a way to deliver it that feels natural to you.
3. Only talking about your book.
The other mistake I hear is people who are only talking about their book. A good conversation does not only try to get you to buy a certain book, but it also explores topic areas that are fascinating in and of their own right. It's not always about steering it back to buying the book.
How to prepare for an interview
Know your log line. Whether you're traditionally or independently published, you should have a compelling one sentence encapsulation to convey an idea of why someone would want to read your story. That's called a log line. You need it for agent pitches, you need it for your jacket copy, and you need it for doing interviews. If you don't have a log line, you want to spend some time really distilling everything about your story and making one. There's lots of good material online about how to write a logline and what should be included.
Study your jacket copy. If you have a book, you have jacket, or back cover, copy. Study it. Practice it. That alone will give you a really good guide as to what to talk about for your book.
Ask your readers. Your fans can tell you the parts of your book that stand out for them: what they remember the most and what they found the most enjoyable when it's fresh in their mind.
Study other authors. Listen to writers giving talks and figure out what they're doing. Imitate what they do well and think about what you think they could be doing better.
Write down all the reasons you wrote your book. Why did you write it? Does anything in your book tie to current events? That's crucial, especially for podcasts or shows with a news hook; they always want something that can be tied to current events.
Even if you're writing a historical novel, is there something about that period of history that has a parallel in modern times? Talk about that.
Steer the Interviewer. Your interviewer is going to do a fair amount of tee up. They're communicating things about the book before you even get a chance to talk. That's not always the case, but it's certainly the case on a syndicated, well-known program like Marketplace or Fresh Air, where they're going to do a good job of setting the stage for the reader or the listener as well.
As the author, you need to take seriously the communication you have with the person that's going to interview you ahead of time to make sure that they have enough background information, and they have the right slant on the book, so that they're asking you the right questions and they don't go off on some random track that isn't what you want to focus on. The kind of pre-work that you do as the interviewee is pretty important.
That happens in two places. One is your pitch. In your pitch, you should be giving them the angle that you want to talk about because it's a good fit for that particular audience. The other place is in your media kit. Your media kit is going to give them a description of the book and you can even suggest interview questions, which is a big time-saver for the influencer on the receiving end.
Those are two places where you have a lot of leverage. Every interviewer is different in how much pre-work they're going to do and how much communication happens. But you always have those two leverage points to help you.
Write yourself a script. Write down answers to some of the most common questions and then practice them. Then, you can do one of two things depending on your natural inclination: you can throw the script away because now you've internalized it, or you can keep a copy of it handy during the interview so that you can reference it.
Our new White House Press Secretary in the United States has a binder on her podium. When someone asks a question about a certain thing, she flips to that page of her binder that's organized by topic. She has a prepared statement that she delivers. So even people who are professional speakers and communicators rely on scripts. You don't need to feel bad about doing it as well. Especially if you're new to all of this, it can give you a sense of confidence.
What if you get stumped?
What if the interviewer asks you a question and you have no idea how to answer? Create some stock answers such as “That's such an interesting question. I haven't thought about that before. What prompted you to ask it?” Turn the question back on them. It's going to help you think of an answer, or at least redirect the conversation and gain you time. Of course, it's always fine to say, “I don't really know,” and maybe it'll get cut and maybe it won't. You can also point them to somebody who you think would know.
The other one is just a straight redirection: “I don't know, but what I was trying to really do or say, or the important thing to me was….” Or, “I don't have an answer for that question because this is where I was focused…” is always another way to redirect the conversation effectively.
If you want to find a wealth of amazing author interviews so you can learn from the best, just go to the archives of Fresh Air. Of course, those authors have the advantage of Terry Gross being an amazing interviewer. Not every interviewer you encounter will have the skill level of Terry Gross, but you can still learn by the responses of her guests.
For example, here’s a bit of Terry Gross interviewing Ursula Le Guin. Le Guin is trying to encapsulate part of why she wrote one of her books:
Gross: One of your best known books, The Left Hand of Darkness, was in part about gender. And it took place in a world where people were androgynous. You have an essay about your thoughts on androgyny in your new book. Why did you want to write a novel in which the characters were androgynous?
Le Guin: Well, I wrote it in 1967, uh, which is really when I think when feminism was beginning to, to kind of come alive again, and people were asking questions, like what, what is the difference between men and women? You know, really how much is biological, how much is culture? And so on, all those questions. And one way to ask those questions is to, actually my way of doing it, mainly is to write a novel about it and sort of set up a situation in which women turn into men, turn into women, monthly as it were, and, and see what happens.
She's taking the cultural context and she's saying I was exploring it for myself, so I wrote a novel to explore what would happen and the deeper meaning of these things.
One of my clients, Ron Lieber, wrote The Price You Pay for College. He's done press and interviews that focus on college admissions and merit aid and helping people understand this complex topic. Recently David Brancaccio from the Marketplace Morning Report interviewed Ron, talking about how much college costs as a tee up for Ron. It’s the biggest money decision we make, and it's often driven by too much emotion and not enough data. Then:
Brancaccio: Ron Lieber immersed himself in this world. He writes the New York Times column Your Money and his book out today is called The Price You Pay for College. Hey, Ron, how are you?
Lieber: It's a thrill to be back. Thanks, David.
Brancaccio: Now you wrestled with this in this book; you try to be financially rational. You urge people to figure out what they want to pay, how to get the best deal, but you and the college-bound kid are up against insane social pressures.
Lieber: It's absolutely true. And what I was trying to do for people is to help them have the most emotionally intelligent college shopping experience they possibly could. Right? Because if you get in touch with the feelings that can affect you in this particular process, things like fear and guilt and snobbery, then you'll have a better sense of the ways in which you might be fooled, tricked internally into spending more than you need to and more than you want to.
Notice they're not talking about what happens in the book in the opener. (Though, if you’re writing nonfiction, you can take a deep dive into a particular issue in the book during an interview.)
This is similar to reading a news story where you have the lede. The lede is the first thing you read and if it's compelling, you read the rest of the article.
With preparation, study, and practice, you’ll be able to talk about your book in a way that will perk up the ears of your ideal reader and have them eager to join your mailing list and buy your book. Just like writing, interviewing well takes patience and practice, but it’s all worth it when your book has the impact you want it to have in the world.
If you want to learn more about pitching influencers and doing interviews, you definitely want to join the Happily Ever Author Club. It's a monthly membership for all things book marketing, with loads of resources and weekly calls with me. Check out the details here.