So you’ve started a company, and you have big ambitions for it — but you don’t have a PR budget to match.

Should you blow your marketing budget trying to get featured in The Wall Street Journal? Throw a party and hand out discount coupons to attendees? Or skip PR and marketing all together and trust that word of mouth will be sufficient to let potential customers know about your business?

The answer, says PR expert Hope Katz Gibbs, is none of the above.

“The simple fact is that many small-business owners can’t afford to hire a PR agency,” Gibbs realizes. “So they need the most affordable, least time-consuming way to promote their business.” That’s why she penned PR Rules: The Playbook—The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Supersizing Your Small Business With the 8 Steps to PR Success.

Available on amazon.com, this 176-page, interactive guidebook offers her trademark 8 Steps to PR Success, which any small-business owner (SBO) can immediately put into action.

“Being quoted in the news is not enough to generate the buzz a company needs to grow,” insists Gibbs, a journalist-turned-PR specialist, who has helped hundreds of business owners increase their visibility since founding Inkandescent Public Relations in 2001.

Packed with easy-to-follow tips that SBOs can start implementing immediately, suggestions from experts, and thought-provoking exercises, “PR Rules: The Playbook” is that most essential of tools: a hands-on primer for how to create and manage a strong PR and marketing campaign.

Now, every entrepreneur who wants to take a DIY approach to PR can take a page from Gibbs’ playbook.

Beautifully crafted with hundreds of illustrations by award-wining designer/illustrator Michael Gibbs, the book’s three sections present the same techniques that the Inkandescent PR team uses so successfully with clients:

• Part 1: Understanding the PR Playing Field. What’s the difference between PR, marketing, advertising, social media, and sales? Eight well-known experts in each industry explain the tools of the trade.

• Part 2: The 8 Steps to PR Success. Discover how to create a stunning website, master the art of newsletter writing, get in the news, and more — with hands-on exercises you can play with, master, and apply to your own business.

• Part 3: Case Studies and Inkandescent Insights. Learn from eight successful entrepreneurs, including the Life is good, Inc., co-founder Bert Jacobs; Tony Award-winning playwright Ridley Pearson; Chemistry.com questionnaire creator Helen Fisher; and Fast Company magazine co-founder Alan Webber, a 2014 candidate for governor of New Mexico.

There’s more.

“PR Rules: The Playbook” also provides insights into what it means to grow a small business while managing your emotions.

“This is something women in particular can benefit from, as they tend to base their decisions on EQ, or emotional intelligence, as well as IQ,” Gibbs suggests.

“The difference between a successful PR campaign and one that falls flat is finessing the tools with style and grace while knowing what to do each day to maximize your visibility,” she concludes. “The result: your business glows, and grows.”

PR Rules: The Playbook—The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Supersizing Your Small Business With the 8 Steps to PR Success, by Hope Katz Gibbs and co-author Kathleen McCarthy, is 176 pages and available for $24.95 from www.PRRulesPlaybook.com.

About Author Hope Katz Gibbs

Journalist, publicist, author, and entrepreneur Hope Katz Gibbs — founder of The Inkandescent Group, LLC — has helped hundreds of entrepreneurs, educators, authors, and small-business owners increase their visibility through her PR and book publishing services.

Gibbs has won awards for her feature articles and columns, which have appeared in The Washington Post, USA Today, The Miami Herald, Costco Connection, and dozens of other business, education, and general-interest magazines, newsletters, and blogs. Read her clips at HopeGibbs.com.

A University of Pennsylvania alumnus, Gibbs entered the PR business in 2001, when she put to work her graduate studies in educational leadership at The George Washington University and became the director of communication for the City of Fairfax Schools in Northern VA. Soon after, her PR client list expanded to include the international futurist think tank Social Technologies, based in her stomping ground of Washington, DC. “PR Rules: The Playbook,” was the first book published through Inkandescent Publishing Company. Learn more at InkandescentPR.com.

See the bios for co-author Kathleen McCarthy and illustrator/designer Michael Gibbs.