Member Monday: Meet Susannah Greenberg!

Erica and Hannah: Congratulations on the recent creation of your Blog Talk Radio program, ‘Book Buzz with Susannah Greenberg: All About Books.’ Can you tell us about your goals with this radio program?

Susannah: I wanted to provide a showcase for author and book news and to do it in a lively and engaging way. So, now I can do my own show and have conversations with authors and book publishing professionals and then share them with others. And because it’s archived on the internet, you can listen anytime and share it across social media. So, for example, you can find an interview from my show Book Buzz on Facebook or LinkedIn and listen there as well. You can also e-mail the interview. So accessible, so shareable! Being able to search for and listen to the interviews wherever you want online is very important. And with this show, I reach the potential reader directly and I can use the interview to generate interest from other media, journalists and producers, in authors and others I’m representing.

Erica and Hannah: We are all very excited about the upcoming Digital Marketing and PR panel. What sorts of topics will your panelists discuss?

Susannah: This will be a great panel with insanely smart innovators in the new marketing and publicity for books, and I’m pleased to have organized this group and be on the panel with them – Kelly Leonard of Hachette, Iris Blasi of Hilsinger-Mendelson, and Lydia Hirt of G.P. Putnam’s/Riverhead. Soon Digital Marketing and PR will be called simply ‘marketing and PR.’ This is how the industry is evolving. All PR and marketing is going to have to rely on the major social media – Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, Goodreads, and other emerging media such as Pinterest. The players may change over time – that is, which are the dominant social media – but the role of social media is now critical to all PR and marketing. Merging the world of books and social media is still very much a work in progress though. This panel will look at our progress and the challenges facing the book industry in the fast-changing media landscape.

Erica and Hannah: You list young adult fiction among your specialties. How is digital marketing changing these days for young adult fiction?

Susannah: YA is a thriving growing category among books now, with books like The Hunger Games dominating best seller lists. I think book bloggers and Twitter, as well as social reading sites like Goodreads, are very influential among YA Readers and writers. YA Author John Green created a huge community through vlogging, video blogging, a stellar example of innovative use of social media. Young Adults were never reading the New York Times Book Review to begin with, so the new media are creating new channels to reach young adult readers directly. Having said that, traditional media, like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and NPR, are still important and influential, and so a successful media campaign has to integrate both traditional and new PR and marketing tactics. So, with new media, publicists have twice the work to do to get the word out, but more than twice the opportunity to connect books with readers.

Erica and Hannah: What is your favorite social media platform to work with?

Susannah: That’s a tough question. As a publicist, I favor the one that reaches the biggest audience, which is Facebook. But as a consumer of social media, I’m intrigued by the new, and so I think other consumers must be as well, so I’m always watching for the next thing. For example, Pinterest is a new and wildly popular social media site where you pin images of your interests onto virtual bulletin boards, creating your own categories of boards. It’s quickly addictive and a lot of fun and very easy and intuitive to learn to use. And, not surprisingly therefore, it is quickly becoming an influential marketing and PR tool.

Erica and Hannah: What is your favorite word?

Susannah: Don’t have one in the abstract, but it is always a challenge and joy to find the right words to say what you want to say, isn’t it?

Iris Blasi

In her new Blog Talk Radio show, Susannah has done an interview with Iris Blasi, a member of the upcoming Digital Marketing panel. Blasi is the Digital Media Coordinator at Hilsinger-Mendelson. Formerly, Blasi was associate editor at Union Square Press, and worked for Random House, NBC, and The Idea Logical Company. Her writing has appeared in outlets including The Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine, Dow Jones Newswires, Publishers Weekly, BUST Magazine, The Jewish Daily Forward, Bitch Magazine, and BookPage.

To hear the interview with Iris Blasi, click here!

For more information on Susannah, follow these links!
Blog://bookbuzzbysgpr.blogspot.com/
Facebook: Facebook.com/SusannahGreenbergPublicRelations
Twitter: @suegreenbergpr
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/susannahgreenberg
Radio Show://www.blogtalkradio.com/bookbuzz
Pinterest: //pinterest.com/suegreenbergpr/