The press kit nobody asks for until they do
A press kit sounds like something with a publicist attached. It is not. It is a handful of files and a page of facts, and its only job is to make it easy for someone to feature you.
Here is the situation it exists for. A bookshop asks for an image for the window. A podcast host confirms you for an episode and asks for "a photo and a short bio". A local paper wants the cover and the publication date by five o'clock. A festival organizer needs a hundred words and a headshot for the printed program.
Each request is small. Each one costs you an evening if you have nothing ready: hunting for a cover file at a usable size, finding a photo that is not a cropped wedding picture, writing a bio from scratch because the last one was written for something else, checking which ISBN belongs to the hardcover.
With a press kit, each one costs you a sentence and a link.
What goes in it
The cover, at two sizes. One at print resolution, for anyone putting it on paper — a poster, a program, a newspaper page. A 6 × 9 front panel with bleed is 1,838 × 2,775 pixels at 300 DPI, and something in that range is what print people expect. One web-sized version, around a thousand pixels on the long edge, for the people who are only ever going to drop it into a post. Offering both stops a blog owner shrinking a 15 MB file badly, and stops a print editor asking you for a bigger one.
A mockup or two. A rendered physical book does work a flat cover cannot, especially for a bookshop or a social post. Give one or two, not twelve.
An author photo. Reasonably high resolution, reasonably recent, with a credit line if someone else took it — "Photo: Anna Reid" — because print outlets will ask, and the photographer's permission to use it is not automatic.
A bio in three lengths. One line, fifty words, two hundred. Each of the three gets used constantly, and they are not the same text cut down.
The blurb, short and long. The long one is your back-cover copy. The short one is two or three sentences for a listings page or an event calendar.
The book's facts, in one block. Title, subtitle, series name and number, the ISBN for each edition, page count, trim size, formats available, price, publication date, and the publisher or imprint name. Every edition gets its own ISBN, and the person filling in a database will pick the wrong one if you only give them one.
Two or three quotable lines. A sentence about what the book is, one about why you wrote it, one review line if you have a good one. Interviewers and listings editors will use your words if your words are there. If they are not, they will write something duller.
Your contact. An email you actually read, and how quickly you answer.
In the tools. Mockups renders the physical book from your real print wrap, and the Social Pack makes stills and a short vertical video from the same cover — between them, most of the images a press kit needs already exist as a by-product of finishing the book. Start a book → · about the tools
A page beats a zip file
Put the kit on your own site, at a URL you can say out loud. Something like yourname.com/press.
A zip file has to be attached, which means it bounces off mailbox size limits, gets stripped by corporate filters, or lands in a spam folder without telling either of you. A link never bounces. It also survives being forwarded — the producer passes it to the person who actually makes the graphics, and that person gets the same files you sent, not a compressed screenshot of them.
The larger advantage is that a page can be corrected. If you fix a typo in your bio or add a hardcover ISBN, everyone who opens the link afterward gets the new version. A zip file you emailed in March is still the March version, forever, and you will find out when it appears in print.
Keep the page plain. No login, no form, no "request access". Every barrier between a journalist and your cover image is a chance for them to use a different book instead.
The practical part
Name the files so a stranger can file them. reid-the-long-field-cover-print.jpg tells someone what they have three weeks after they downloaded it. final_v3_NEW.jpg does not, and it will be sitting in a downloads folder next to four other files called final.
Make the images downloadable, not just displayed. An image embedded in a page can be right-clicked and saved at whatever size you happened to display it. Link each file directly so the download is the full-size original, and say what each one is: "Cover, print resolution, 1,838 × 2,775".
Keep it current. A new edition, a new photo, a new ISBN, an award — the kit is where those go first. A press kit that lists two formats when you now sell three is not neutral; it costs you the edition it forgot to mention.
State what people may do with the files. One line is enough: the cover and the author photo may be used in coverage of the book, with the photo credit intact. It saves a round of email.
None of this is interesting work. It takes an afternoon once and then saves you an evening every time someone says yes, which, if the book goes well, is often.
Make yours
Everything here is built into the tools, and they are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Events, signings and selling books in person · Also useful: The author website, reduced to what it needs · Mockups: showing a book that does not exist yet · Metadata: the fields that decide who ever sees your book