Trying to catch a PR wave

(Originally published June 3)

Before the announcement that two unknown writers were going to be published by Simon & Schuster as a result of winning the First Chapters contest, Gather officials were convinced it would get widespread media coverage.

Not me.

Sure, the initial contest announcement got crazy publicity. Six months later, nobody cared.

So I was surprised to get an advance call from the Associated Press. The reporter and I spoke 15 minutes. He told me the story would move Wednesday night.

To help, I sent Simon & Schuster’s publicists a few contacts from my newspaper days. Actually, I sent 38 contacts, but who’s counting? I also called AP bureaus in states I’d worked and contacted any paper that might be interested in a local angle, from the Erie Times-News, where I’d once been a paper boy, to my new hometown’s Knoxville News-Sentinel.

They all said they’d get back to me.

Well, I still had Greater Niagara Newspapers, where I’d been group editor.

They gave me to the intern.

The intern?

I knew what that meant. Over the years I’d given many people the intern. The managing editor knew this. Back when he was in college, he’d been the intern.

So much for the hype.

The kid was a little nervous but soon we were laughing and it reminded me that the only thing I missed about the news business was working with young writers.

Still, the next day I called a few afternoon papers to let them know I’d won before getting back to my day job. I even stopped checking my email for at least 10 minutes.

Then a friend from Montana congratulated me.

A stranger named Suzy asked me a personal question that really should have been blocked by our company’s spam filter.

Finally, this appeared from a friend in Brooklyn:

“I just read it in black and white in the Arts Section of the New York Times! YOU WON!! John asked me what I was screaming about and I told him ‘Terry won’ and he started screaming, too! CONGRATULATIONS!”

I may have screamed myself.

There we were, below Lindsay Lohan and above Maroon 5.

Soon Valerie Fox of Gather emailed that Forbes, the LA Times and the Boston Globe picked up the stories. Two 30-second segments on NBC affiliates in Portland and Bangor even mentioned that I’d been an editor in Maine.

And it just kept coming. Every time I’d do a Google news search, the list grew. The Deseret News in Salt Lake City. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The Boston Herald. Papers across Canada, the United Kingdom and New Zealand. Even Reuters in India. I’ve actually lost track and so have friends who have been Googling as much as me.

In fact, I’ve been online and on the phone so much in the past week it’s now a blur. Still, I do remember one thing pretty clearly. My favorite story was written by Fionna Agomuoh. She’s working at the Union-Sun & Journal in Lockport, N.Y. She’s only 19 and she’s the intern.