Why the Press Release Isn’t Dead, Especially If You Wrote a Book

Every so often, someone proclaims that the press release is dead. For indie authors, the truth is the exact opposite. Now that readers are asking ChatGPT and Gemini to guide them to their next great read, it matters more, not less.

That’s what PR veteran Pam Perry argues on the debut episode of EIN Presswire’s video podcast, Heard on the Streets. She’s spent 25+ years placing authors and speakers on CNN, NPR, and Essence, and Publishers Weekly once dubbed her a “PR Guru.” Her focus now is the jump from SEO to what is called GEO, or Generative Engine Optimization. Or, as the episode frames it, “SEO gets you on page one of Google. GEO gets you inside the answer ChatGPT gives.”

🎧 Listen to the full episode: Heard on the Streets with Pam Perry

So what does that mean for a book? Ask an AI tool for “a good new memoir about starting over.” It won’t go rummaging through your Instagram Stories. It pulls from material that’s been published, indexed, and vouched for somewhere credible, which is exactly what a good press release becomes once it goes out. Do it right, Perry says, and “you become a source for ChatGPT, you become a source for Gemini, you become a source for Claude.”

Most authors overlook how long a release keeps working. A tweet is buried by the next morning, but Perry says a release sticks around: “A lot of times we post things and they’re not really going to be found a month from now. But if you write a press release, you’ll find it a month from now.” Your launch-day post is gone by dinner; the release is still surfacing in searches well past your pub date. “I don’t understand why people don’t do more of it,” she says.

And skipping it costs more than it used to, because AI is becoming how readers look for their next book, and plenty of authors barely register within it. As Write Publish Sell explains, these tools can only recommend what they can actually find. And as Author Media points out, a bare author site, just a headshot and a Buy button, gives them nothing to chew on. A release is one of the quickest ways to get real, credible details about your book onto the open web, where the AI models can reach it.

One extra move doubles the payoff. On The Creative Penn, author-marketing expert Thomas Umstattd Jr. calls your book’s own web page the most important place to teach AI what your book actually is. So make that page beat your Amazon listing: the full description, the tropes named outright (“enemies to lovers,” “grief memoir,” “small-town second chances”), comp titles, a short bio, real reader reviews. Then aim your release at it. The release lands the coverage; the coverage and the page together hand the AI plenty to quote.

None of this makes a release magic, let’s be straight about that. A Meltwater review of over 8 million AI citations found press releases were just 0.2% of what the models cited, against nearly 38% for earned and news media. One release won’t carry the day. But it’s often the spark that lands that earned coverage in the first place, and GEO-minded writing can reportedly lift AI citations by as much as 40%. For an author with no publicist and no budget, that’s a lot of reach out of a single document.

A few of Perry’s habits port straight over to author life. Write for a fifth grader, not an algorithm; plain, warm copy lands with people and machines alike. Say the important thing first, since AI leans on your opening lines to decide what you’re about. And stretch every asset: one launch note can feed a blog post, a newsletter, a handful of social clips, and your bio.

Then there’s trust, which no model can manufacture. Perry can spot a copy-pasted ChatGPT release “a mile away.” It’s “too robotic, too repetitive,” it forgets the live quote, and, she laughs, “they have the m-hyphen still in there.” What rescues a release is you: a real quote in your own voice, the honest reason you wrote the book. ChatGPT “wouldn’t know your why,” she says. “They’re just going to spit out the facts.”

So don’t retire the press release. Just write it for three specific readers: the human, the search engine, and the AI engine now deciding whether your book even shows up.

Sources & further reading

• Heard on the Streets: PR Pro Pam Perry on How To Build Your Brand In The Age of AI, EIN Presswire (the podcast)
• About Pam Perry, Pam Perry PR
• Does Press Release Distribution Affect AI Search?, Meltwater
• AI Is Now a Book Discovery Engine, and Many Authors Are Invisible In It, Write Publish Sell
• Does ChatGPT Recommend Your Book?, Author Media
• Book Discoverability in an Age of AI: GEO for Authors, The Creative Penn