What do Elvira, The Food Network's Bobby Flay, and comedian Tom Green all have in common? They all started out on public access television.
PBS affiliate KTCA even picked up a program called Mental Engineering that started at SPNN, the public access channel of Saint Paul, Minnesota.
With more than 700 stations throughout the world, public access television is the easiest way for any author to get on the air virtually anywhere. (For a list, go here: http://budurl.com/nzx8). And if you create just one video, it will get multiple plays.
My local community television station, CTV of Santa Cruz (www.CommunityTV.org) will air a half hour or one hour show a minimum of ten times in the first month. If you create something short, they will air it even more often.
And they have three different channels: one for government related programs, one for educational material, and one for general material. So any work that can deemed educational in nature, which would include anything in the self-help or how-to categories, and probably even children’s books, will air on two stations.
The kicker is, they have to air anything of a non-commercial nature that any resident of Santa Cruz County brings to them. All you have to do is fill out a form and make sure your video meets their technical requirements.
And here’s the secret sauce: I can bring them ANY video—by anyone. So you could live in Zimbabwe, send me a video, and if I bring it to CTV, they will air it.
And if you bring my video to your station, at least in the U.S, they will put my show on your channel. So if you can get enough friends, relatives, clients and/or subscribers to bring your video to a community television station, you could literally have a national show.
You could easily create seven shows—or get one show to air in seven cities.
There’s another reason this is important. Video is already the future of the internet. According to Business Week, as far back as last November there were more video views than searches: 12.7 billion viewings as opposed to 12.3 billion searches.
So you should be making videos anyway. Why not use the same videos to air on your local TV station? Plus, your chance of getting a video on the front page of Google is 45 times greater than the odds of getting your text page on the first page of a search.
For this strategy to be fully effective, you need to have a reason for people to come to your Web site after they see your show. You could give away a special report, or fr/ee chapters of your book -- or if you are a children’s book author, you could give away some coloring book pages with images of your main character.
(By the way, this is a killer strategy for children’s book authors. Do a show reading your book, and get it to air everywhere. Or team up with two other children’s book authors for a show, and use everybody’s connections to get the
show on the air in as many locations as you possibly can!)
Once you know a show will air, call up the bookstores in the area and make sure they carry your book.
You could even promote a bookstore appearance this way -- then tape your appearance at the bookstore and put that on television. Some of these shows air for years—which could mean continuous sales for your book anywhere your show is on.
And if you dream of getting your own TV show, community access could be a good beginning. If you make the leap to a major cable or broadcast show, you wouldn’t be the first.
As a publicist once said to me, “Things lead to things.”
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Check out Mahesh Grossman's blog at http://www.authorsmbablog.com. You can also sign up for his free e-newsletter there.
