The Book Publicity Blog

Anyone who emails me the imprints of all the books listed (or houses if no imprint is available) will win the NPR Books Grid for the prior week that includes, in addition to the information below, interviewer, pub date, imprint, post-interview Amazon ranking, pre-interview ranking (if the book was mentioned on Shelf Awareness and I was able to look up the number before the interview), subject category and interview hyperlink.

TOTAL book stories this week: 21

All Things Considered: 3

BookTour: 1

Day to Day: 1

Fresh Air: 6

Morning Edition: 4

News & Notes: 1

NPR.org: 1

Talk of the Nation: 2

Weekend Edition Saturday: 2

My colleague and I recently interviewed for a new assistant and it occurred to me that in some ways the interviewing process is similar to when we pitch our authors to the media.

For example, one candidate called asking if we had made a decision.  We pretty much had, but not officially, so I wasn’t prepared to engage in this conversation and consequently mumbled something about not having yet made a decision.  (This is why HR makes those calls.)  In that one call, she went from probably not to definitely not.  In book publishing, the publicists act as the HR people, i.e., the liaisons, between the authors and the media and that’s why it’s usually not a good idea for authors to contact the media directly.  (Exceptions exist, of course, like if the author knows the reporter / editor / producer.)

Several other candidates followed up by email, writing short notes or including additional writing samples.  I appreciated this since this is a friendly and unobtrusive way of indicating interest and although obviously not everyone was hired, I was impressed enough to forward on their resumes with my recommendation to others I know hiring for the same position.  Similarly, it can be a good idea for authors (who have the time on their hands) to mail personal notes to media people with whom they have worked / know of — worst-case scenario, the mail is ignored, but the host / producer / writer / editor isn’t put on the spot and perhaps they will read the letter and respond favorably.  It can also be beneficial for publicists to continue to follow up with media contacts as long as they are providing new and pertinent information (and as long as the media contact hasn’t issued a cease and desist).  Although media folk can’t always respond to our pleas — and let’s face it, mostly they don’t — many do file email messages for reference.  (On more than one occasion I’ve had someone respond to a message months after the fact.)

Maybe you won’t be “hired,” but perhaps at least your author will be passed on to the next person.

Teresa Budasi, book editor at the Chicago Sun-Times, notes on The Book Room blog in a post about Harper’s new ecatalogs that she gets so many galleys and review copies that she no longer looks through publishing house catalogs.  I imagine she’s not the only one to do so.  (Last year I came back from BEA with a two-foot stack of catalogs — and those were just from the major houses.)  Of course, on the other side of the fence are the people who request *every* single title we publish.  (Those are the people to whom I send exactly … nothing.)

Sarah Weinman (you know her from the Confessions of an Idionsyncratic Mind blog) just passed along this blog post / query from Sara Nelson at Publishers Weekly about what makes a good (book) publicist.  If you want to chime in, click through to Nelson’s post to comment.

For those of you who promote books that may be of interest to mom bloggers, check out this post from PR Newser.

Sara Pearce is the only person at the Cincinnati Enquirer who should be receiving books.  Although they no longer run book reviews, there are opportunities for features (in some cases).  She took the time to explain in a little more detail:

“We now write about books of local-local interest only, which means it is:

- by an author/illustrator who lives here now

- by an author/illustrator who lived here for a long time (which means at least four or five years) and/or has long-time ties to Cincinnati (grew up here)

- by an author/illustrator coming here on tour

- set here or about here/the area

- something HUGE – like Harry Potter huge - that I could develop a local angle for

I do not review books – no one on our staff does. Staff book reviews were dropped a few years ago in favor wire reviews. I do, however, write a weekly notes column, briefs, features and interviews.

I would like to continue to receive catalogs to look for books meeting our criteria. But please remove us from your mailing list for publicity, galleys and books that do not fall within the parameters above. If you could spread the word around your offices, I’d appreciate it.

Also: I should be the only person at the Enquirer on your mailing list at this point. If a book falls outside my realm, I pass it along to the beat reporters and editors. We’re trying to cut back on the massive amount of mail from publishers and time we spend handling it.

Other people whose names you may have on your mailing list but who should be removed are:

- Jennifer Schwertman (copy editor who was filling in when books beat was empty)

- Margaret McGurk (now a reporter in Local News)

- Paul Clark (A&E editor, passes the books to me, so no point sending them to him)

- Ann Haas (Deputy Features Editor, passes the books along)

- Jim Knippenberg (he stopped covering books years ago)

- Laura Schwed (she left the paper about 6 years ago)

- Pamela Fisher (she left the paper last summer)

- John Wolfe (he compiles calendars, does not need to receive books for touring authors – it duplicates what I get)

- John Johnston (family reporter who does not write about books on his beat and asked me to add him to this note)

- Lauren Bishop (also does not cover books and also asked that I include her name here).

Also II: We no longer have a movie critic (that was McGurk), so please refrain from sending those titles to us if there is no local connection because we are not writing about them.

Important PS: Want a book(s) to come directly to me, please please please ask for it to be marked “special request” or “requested material” or something like on the envelope. Otherwise, our news aides open the books and I’m finding that – sadly – books are getting borrowed/lost/misplaced/stolen.”

Some of you may remember when WIRED EIC Chris Anderson posted the email addresses of PR people whose addresses he blocked because they had emailed him pitches (rather than bothering to look up the appropriate editor).  Late last week Lifehacker editor Gina Trapani created a PR Spammers Wiki that allows entire PR companies to be blocked.  (Some PR people respond to Trapani’s move on PR Squared and The Bad Pitch Blog.)

The good news is that I didn’t see any book publicists / publishing houses on either list.  :)  The other good news is that both editors have been clear about how their publications should be pitched and they’re only exacting revenge upon people who aren’t following the rules.  (Gosh, wouldn’t it be fun if we didn’t send out review copies to people who didn’t follow our rules?  If only …)

Moral of the story is be careful who you pitch.  For us, we’re mostly pitching book editors and producers.  But it can get hazy at publications that don’t have book editors (which is more and more these days).  Do you pitch an arts editor?  Or features?  At some smaller publications, it may be appropriate to pitch a managing editor or an editor in chief.  For those of you who use Bacon’s Online, one trick I use is I export my list into an Excel document, “Find” the phrase “not a PR contact”  (that appears in the “Pitching Tips” field / column) and then delete those records.

In our defense though, it is pretty darn hard (read “impossible”) to be familiar with every publication, blog, and radio and TV show out there.  I know a lot of publicists spend a lot of time doing this; me, I have well over 200 websites (including blogs, newspapers and radio shows) in my RSS reader and scroll through at least 2000 headlines a day.  I have subscriptions to about a dozen magazines and go through probably a dozen more at work. I still come up short.  So to those editors and producers who testily tell PR people to be familiar with the show / publication before pitching, I’d like to say, we try, folks, we try.

Yesterday on the LAT’s Jacket Copy blog, Carolyn Kellogg talked about Newpages.com, a site that provides ”news, information and guides to independent bookstores, independent publishers, literary magazines, alternative periodicals, independent record labels, alternative newsweeklies and more.”

***

Ryan Sholin of Invisible Inkling links to a number of media bloggers.

Recently, some of you have been receiving emails on Friday from Nick Owchar at the Los Angeles Times about books they will be reviewing that weekend.  Holly from Viking Penguin checked in with them and confirms that in lieu of us asking them if a book will be reviewed, they would like us to simply add our names to Nick’s distro.  A little tough for us since the email goes out only a couple days before the reviews are posted, but better than nothing …

Tiffany from Krupp mentioned that WNBC will be launching a 24-hour news channel, similar to NY1.  It’ll air on cable and is scheduled to debut in November.