My friend, Ariel Hyatt, has been on my podcast a few times but this is a very exciting one because she has a new book about the ultimate guide to music publicity that is just coming out. I remember how it was like with my book too. You really need to get the people to help you push it up the charts and it’s a very exciting stage.

Cyber PR was previously called Ariel Publicity. Her company has been around for 25 years. It started as a traditional PR firm then became a digital PR firm. They also became a marketing company, booking agency and artist management. Today they mainly do digital marketing, social media management, long term marketing planning for artists and a digital campaign running company.

Ariel has written a lot of other books in the past. Her first book was in 2007. The title was “Music Success in 9 Weeks”. It is a primer on how a musician can get up to speed to digital trends. It’s a self-published book with spelling mistakes on every page. It’s where I discovered my love for writing. Since then, I’ve written the “Musician’s Roadmap to Facebook and Twitter” which is now out of print since it no longer applies to the present times. She also wrote “Cyber PR for Musicians” which is basically a digital marketing overview. Then about a year after that, she wrote “A Teacher’s Guide for Cyber PR for Musicians” which was like a companion guide that ended up in a lot of schools and universities. Then she wrote Crowdstart which teaches about launching crowdfunding and how to do it effectively. She wrote it 5 years ago and it’s still rocking and rolling. It’s basically a 30-day roadmap for crowdfunding. Ariel realized it’s time to put out another book. She came back to the music industry and did some research. She found out that there is no book that only focuses on music publicity and gives a full deep dive for PR that is available to the public. She thinks this is the perfect time to create an ultimate guide to music publicity because artists are hopefully coming out of this pandemic and beginning to come back on the road. Many are not going to have extra budget to hide publicists so Ariel wanted to do a guidebook to do PR themselves.

Ariel’s book has a specific section in her book on how to determine if you would like to hire a publicist. For her, it really depends on what you want to do and what you enjoy doing. You can either decide to learn it or if it bothers you so much, you can choose to outsource it.

In the book, Ariel is just really trying to demystify the process. She hopes to provide a system that musicians can follow to get further than figuring all out by themselves. Even those who love promotions also hit walls and this will be very helpful for them. She also has a lot of really helpful quotes from people involved in the music industry such as podcasters, publicists, etc.

What is the difference between publicity and PR? In this age of modern marketing world, they are somewhat interchangeable. Publicity is the practice is creating something like a pitch or press release and putting it out infront of the media. Media has gone from traditional things like newspapers, magazines, televisions, radio to podcasters, bloggers, influencers, etc. PR is public relations. It pertains to everything else that is your audience that does not include the media.

In the book, she also talks about some artists and how they used publicity in their careers. Two artists that stand out are Maya Azucena and Ilyana Kadushin.

Launching the book has been a crazy show. On Amazon, Ariel had 3 author accounts. She’s spoken to a lot of people and no one can help. After 25 people on Amazon responded to her post in Women in Music, she still cannot help. One of them gave her Jeff Bezos’ email address and she is waiting for the problem to be fixed. For Ariel, whenever something like this happens, just know that “Honesty is the best policy.” Know that people will respect you so much.

Right now, Ariel is offering the book for $7 to my audience. We’ll include the link in the show notes.

Links mentioned in this podcast:
profitablemusician.com/freechallenge
profitablemusician.com/quiz
musiciansprofitpath.com
https://www.cyberprmusic.com/ultimateguide-ebook-pm/