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.)
April 7, 2008 - Posted by Yen | Miscellaneous | Publishers Weekly | 5 Comments
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For some time now, I’ve closely followed a lot of very informative sites about media and about the publishing industry. Since I find myself quite voluble at times about issues that pertain to my job in the publicity department at a large publishing house, I thought I’d set up a book publicity blog. The purpose of this blog is provide tips, primarily, but also information about publishing / marketing trends that will help book publicists — and hopefully others in media and publishing — do our jobs with greater ease and efficiency. Please note that the opinions expressed on this blog are my own, not those of my company.
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This piece almost tempts me to write something from the journalist’s side of the fence. I should point out that it’s utter folly to send a cover JPEG to a blogger when the book will do, or to belittle a blogger by putting quote marks around review, or to belittle the Lexington Herald-Leader for an author feature. It seems to me that if you’re getting calls or emails back from SOME kind of outlet leading to SOME kind of ongoing publicity, this is much better than praying to the publicity gods for some pie-in-the-sky Today Show/NYTBR feature that’s never going to pan out.
I would love for you to address the specific problems of online authors like myself.
Too true, Ed. The media landscape has a changed a lot over the past decade (when I started in publicity I didn’t own a cell phone and barely used the Internet) which means our mind sets need to change as well. While I would be remiss to not feverishly pursue the pie-in-the-sky opportunities, I also realize — as many of us do — that there are many other outlets out there that we need to pursue (and that we need, period).
On a complete tangent, that mystery publicist should subscribe to a feed for his/her Google alerts so that they don’t end up deleting them from their email.
While I agree that I hate getting them in my inbox, they do often provide valuable angles/opportunities. I have an email account set up just to receive Google alerts so that I can grab the feed and direct it to my feed reader in the folder specific the that book. I never open that email account, but the feed serves me nicely!
Jeff — Good idea. Thanks for the suggestion.