Speaker 1: My name's Katie Guest, I'm a freelance reviewer, editor and journalist and for seven years I was the literary editor of the Independent on Sunday newspaper.

Speaker 2: I'm Phil Miller, I'm the arts correspondent for The Herald and I write arts news stories, features and columns. I'm also a novelist, my debut novel The Blue Horse came out last year.

Speaker 1: My first advice to any author would be to read the publication you're pitching to, know the sections you're thinking about being in, know why you want to be in that section and what you have to offer it. Think like a journalist a little bit, they want a story and they want something that stands out so if you're pitching to me cold you need to get my attention by being a little bit different, having something new to offer and something that my readers want to hear about that they haven't read about a thousand times before.

Speaker 2: Working in the news side of things I'm looking for someone who knows their story so they can tell me their story in a very short and concise way that will interest me or interest the general reader. Arts news stories are not read by a cultural audience, they're read by the people who are just opening the paper looking at all the stories going on so it has to jump out and if you know what your story is that helps the journalist tell the story too.

Speaker 1: Just be aware that journalists are often on deadline, a daily news journalist will be on deadline in the afternoon, don't ring them up and expect to have an interesting chat about your life and work when they're trying to get a paper out. A weekly journalist will want information ahead of time so they can talk to their editor about it, a monthly magazine journalist will have a completely different way of working.

Speaker 2: That's a very good point, don't ring any news journalist at five o'clock and say have you got a moment. An email is always good but these days everyone seems to have these clutter folders where emails from people we don't know go into and we miss them so I would say be a little bit persistent without being annoying, follow up but there's other ways to get in touch with people. Journalists now have Facebook pages, we're all on Twitter, journalists are addicted to Twitter. I've done a couple of stories where an author has got in contact with me through Twitter. I would also say don't despair if you can't get a story in a national newspaper, there are local newspapers, magazines, blogs, even student newspapers now have good book reviews and stories about writers.

Speaker 1: It's also useful to think about every different section of a newspaper or website or magazine. If you have an expertise in something that happens to have hit the news this week, contact the comment desk and offer to write a piece about it, insist on having a book puff at the end of the piece, tell people what you're knowledgeable about, think about the diary, the gossip column, did something funny happen at your book launch, was there someone famous there, are you and a group of authors getting together to do something unusual. It's not just the books pages and the news section that can get you to the public's attention so think about the whole package.