Why would the heir to a tobacco company fortune (R.J. Reynolds Tobacco) turn his back on cigarette smoking?
“Because I watched my father die from cigarettes,” comments Patrick Reynolds.
But why write a book about the family history?
“I didn’t know my father and I really wanted to know him. I had a lot of anger toward him because he never paid much attention to his sons.”
These were just two of the concise soundbites Mr. Reynolds developed in his Los Angeles media training to answer interviewers’ obvious and redundant questions.
As Mr. Reynolds, the creator of The Foundation for a Smokefree America, http://www.anti-smoking.org/ recently recalled, “My publisher hired the media training firm, READY FOR MEDIA to coach me. Afterwards, my book, The Gilded Leaf, about my family history generated the biggest day of sales as a result of a single talk show appearance in Little Brown’s history.”
Here, Mr. Reynolds succeeds in avoiding the most commonly-made media mistake: forgetting to brand… the book title, the company, the publisher, the cause, etc., by name.