The life of a publicist

Louise from Viking Penguin just passed on this link from Publishers Weekly about a day in the life of a publicist.  Who’s the lucky guy/gal who gets to farm out mailings to the mail room *and* takes less than 30 minutes to get to work?!  (That’s a rhetorical question — the piece was written anonymously so I’m not going to probe.)

The Papyrus Files: Cold call voicemails

The other day I had three meetings before 1 p.m. and when I finally got back to my desk to find the red voicemail light on my phone, all I really wanted to do was smash it into the wall.  (It takes 7-13 steps to access VM versus 0-3 to access email — believe you me, I’ve counted.)  Meanwhile, on the email front, I’d answered all my urgent messages and Blackberried an author and producer several times, managing to confirm an interview while on the subway (IRT lines are pretty darn close to the surface) or in my last meeting (even though I was running it).  Needless to say, given my visceral hatred of voicemail, I very rarely inflict that torture upon editors / producers when cold calling (and in just the last few days a couple publicists have mentioned they too no longer leave voicemail when pitching).

So I thought it might be helpful to start a discussion about when to leave a voicemail.  I do, in fact, leave phone messages when a) I already know the person or b) I’m already working with the person or c) I’ve already emailed the person to no avail.  But to call a person I don’t know to tell them about something they don’t know about when they are possibly on deadline seems like a waste of time for all of us (unless you happen to be contacting someone who has expressed a preference for phone calls).  A couple years back I was at a PPA / Publishers Publicity Association luncheon and one of the panelists mentioned that when she gets back from lunch she often finds herself with a couple dozen voicemail messages from folks like us asking if she received a book / is going to cover a book.  A couple more PPA panelists have told us they can either answer our calls or do their jobs.  Think about it — how many times has your cold call voicemail been returned?

In this day and age of IM, live blogging, texting, wall posts, PDAs, Twitter, WiFi and email pushed to cell phones, a cold call voicemail — with no initial indication of who called, when, what the message is or how urgent it is — is akin to launching a carrier pigeon with a piece of paper afixed to its leg.  (Although if I had an actual carrier pigeon land on my desk then yes, I would find it within me to check its message although I would still be pretty annoyed if the message was any less urgent than, say, THE BRITISH ARE COMING!!!)  The point is, you may think it’s easier to leave a voicemail than to type up an email to a journalist, but think about what’s easier for them — having to dial in several codes and listen to a message that may need to be replayed several times or reading the subject line of an email?  I personally loathe having to write down voicemail messages with my quill.  And I’m running out of papyrus …

Old / new media

I’ve been really busy / away these past few weekends so I haven’t been looking through my print NY Times as closely as I should have been doing, so imagine my surprise when I opened the paper Sunday morning to find not only a revamped table of contents on page 2, but also a ToC for nytimes.com on page 4!

Technophile though I may be, I’d have to admit that I think what we’re seeing these days is not so much the triumph of new media over old media, but the mash up of new media and old media — much like Hera and Nicky (the Cylon / human hybrids for those of you who have the misfortune to not be Battlestar Galactica fans).

So the venerable Gray Lady, for example, started an online-only section called City Room. And several book sections also feature blogs: the Boston Globe has Off the Shelf, the Chicago Sun-Times The Book Room, the Dallas Morning News Texas Pages, the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel’s Off the Page, the LAT Jacket Copy, the NYT Paper Cuts and Reading Room and the Washington Post Short Stack.  Former DM-N BRE Jerome Weeks now blogs at Bookdaddy and now-retired Philly Inky BRE Frank Wilson continues to blog at Books, Inq.  On the other side of the coin, many bloggers have made inroads into the print community. When Wilson retired, a slew of lit bloggers who have reviewed for that publication posted fond farewells. Or Carolyn Kellogg, the blogger behind Pinky’s Paperhaus, now has a regular gig with Jacket Copy.

What does this mean for book promotion? More flexibility. Our media contacts who once were limited to only one medium can now bring their writing to multiple audiences. Happy Monday.