Trying to get (more) influencers (again)

Well I’m still here and still trying to get influencers (actually, anybody) to read Falling. I have a folder on my system I’ve proudly and simply called ‘Emails from famous people’, and it contains copies of emails from celebrities, actors, authors and others of particular note from my years as a journalist. It’s by no means the extent of the high profile people I have contacts for (I’ve already tried the rest of them), and almost every one of them I looked at prompted me to think ‘no way will he/she/they even remember me, let alone be interested’.

But if there was one thing I said to myself when I started publicising Falling, it’d be to not be shy about approaching people because you never know who might respond to it, in the spiritual as well as the communications sense. How many times have I heard artists, directors or writers talk in interviews about some incredibly random and tenuous connection that put their work in front of someone who loved it and made their name?

So I duly emailed Avi Lewis (yes, my definition of ‘famous’ at that point was almost anybody I’d ever interviewed), Emma Tom, Greg McLean, Kevin Kelly (and can you believed he replied?), Max Barry, Nikki Gemmell (who replied saying she was far too busy with homeschooling kids because of COVID-19, but she couldn’t have been lovelier about it), Naomi Wolf, Paul Davies (similarly responsive and kind, although he said he currently had three similar requests in his inbox and was working on his own forthcoming book too), Peter and Michael Spierig, Robert Connolly, Robert Wade, Roger Donaldson, Russell Mulcahy and Sue Maslin.

Next stop is Leigh Whannell, newly hot after the release of his rendition of The Invisible Man. I figure it might be a good time to make the approach because I’ve interviewed him before (so he might recognise my name), and with the movie long since released and his press responsibilities all done and dusted, he might have some free time. The only missing link is an excuse to talk to him, which will be an interview for a story, which means I have to think up a story I can interview him for, which – let’s be honest – is what I do.