I recently participated in my first media interview. Thought I would never do one, but ended up doing two! I met Rob Brown of For Book Lovers Only at a Texas Authors mar
keting event in Houston several months ago. He interviews authors on both TV and radio and has studios in Maryland. I sort of wrote off the whole Idea especially considering I live in Texas. However, I planned to attend a Naval Academy reunion in Annapolis, Maryland and said, ‘what the heck’ and gave Rob a call. He had time on Friday the 20th of October, so we agreed to meet and do two interviews.
The first one was for TV and focused on my non-fiction book, Leaders are Made Not Born. Must admit I was a little nervous, but Rob is a great interviewer and put me at ease. We talked for about 25 minutes and it seemed like only a few.
Then we switched studios (and I changed clothes) and prepared for a radio interview for the science fiction Host series starting with Future Discovered. I knew that there might be a camera in the radio studio, but I didn’t expect multiples! They were focused on different locations in the studio and could be switched by somebody in a control room. Again, the interview was far less painful than I expected and, like the TV one, was over in a flash . . . but was still about 25 minutes long.
Having had this experience, I would encourage others to do the same if they have the opportunity. One word of caution. Before you do one of these and you know it will be a long one, ask yourself what you will do with 25 minutes of audio and visual footage. That length is fine for posting on your website and, of course with Rob, my interviews will be on the For Book Lovers Only website. But placing them on social media probably won’t work … too long. You might ask the studio you use if they can break the interview down into several short segments that people are more likely to select on social media. Or, if you have some editing software (like Adobe Premiere Elements that I have) you can cut out small clips that you can use in multiple places. On my author website you can see the long version of the radio interview and a couple of clips that I made. The same for my leadership business web site.
As most of you know, I’m an introvert. But I’m glad I stepped forward to grab this experience.
Short Clip TV
Short Clip Radio
See websites for complete interviews: www.michaeljfarlow.com and www.wolfleadership.com
Have you done this as well?
