PR Rules: The Playbook — The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Supersizing Your Small Business
August 2021: A Note from Hope Katz Gibbs, creator, Inkandescent PR + Publishing Co. — It’s hard to believe that it has been seven years since we published PR Rules: The Playbook. Having sold hundreds of copies, and given dozens of talks on the topic of mastering the art of PR, I am thrilled to continue sharing the insights I’ve gleaned as an award-winning journalist and publicist at my firm, Inkandescent PR + Publishing Co.
As anyone who has built and grown a business knows, your organization is a work in progress. From managing a team to coping with a pandemic, the key to success is your ability to be nimble, flexible, and open to possibilities.
That is very true at my company. When I founded InkandescentPR.com in 2008, my mission was to help small business owners get more visibility so they could shine and grow their big ideas. In January of 2010, I launched BeInkandescent.com as a business magazine for entrepreneurs. In the next few years, I also created a podcast network, InkandescentRadio.com, and launched our YouTube channel Inkandescent.tv. By August of 2014, I was ready to share what I knew about PR, marketing, advertising, social media, and sales with the world — and that’s when we released PR Rules: The Playbook.
Fast forward to 2021. Having survived the coronavirus pandemic, a divorce, and a move from my 30 years in Washington, DC to the west coast, I have made more shifts. The company is now focused on supporting women with the launch of Inkandescent Women magazine.
Scroll down for the intro to the book, which I hope will speak to you in important ways! Please let me know if you need help publishing and promoting your book and your company: hope@hopegibbs.com.
PR Rules: The Playbook
So you have started a company and have big ambitions for it, but you do not have a PR budget to match. Should you blow your marketing budget trying to get featured in The Wall Street Journal? Throw a party and hand out discount coupons to attendees? Or skip PR and marketing altogether and trust that word of mouth will be sufficient to let potential customers know about your business?
The answer, says PR expert Hope Katz Gibbs, is none of the above. The simple fact is that many small-business owners cannot afford to hire a PR agency, Gibbs realizes. So they need the most affordable, least time-consuming way to promote their business.
That is why she penned PR Rules: The Playbook The Entrepreneurs Guide to Supersizing Your Small Business With the 8 Steps to PR Success.
The 178-page interactive guidebook offers her trademark 8 Steps to PR Success, which any small-business owner can immediately implement.
Being quoted in the news is no longer enough to get a company the visibility it needs to grow, insists Gibbs, a journalist-turned-PR specialist who has helped hundreds of business owners increase visibility since founding Inkandescent Public Relations in 2001.
Packed with easy-to-follow tips, expert suggestions, and thought-provoking exercises, PR Rules: The Playbook is a hands-on primer to help you create and manage a strong PR and marketing campaign.
Every entrepreneur who wants to take a DIY approach to PR can take a page from The Playbook.
Beautifully crafted with hundreds of illustrations by award-winning designer/illustrator Michael Glenwood Gibbs, the book has three sections:
Part 1: Understanding the PR Playing Field. What is the difference between PR, marketing, advertising, social media, and sales? Eight well-known experts in each industry explain the tools of the trade.
Part 2: The 8 Steps to PR Success. Discover how to create a stunning website, master the art of newsletter writing, get in the news, and more with hands-on exercises you can play with, master, and apply to your own business.
Part 3: Case Studies and Inkandescent Insights. Learn from eight successful entrepreneurs, including the Life is good, Inc., co-founder Bert Jacobs; Tony Award-winning playwright Ridley Pearson; Chemistry.com questionnaire creator Helen Fisher; and Fast Company magazine co-founder Alan Webber, a 2014 candidate for governor of New Mexico.
She concludes that the difference between a successful PR campaign and one that falls flat is finessing the tools with style and grace while knowing what to do each day to maximize your visibility. The result: your business glows and grows.