How Not To Get Publicity
Written byPosted on September 12, 2006
Filed Under Author Publicity
98% of the publicists I’ve had the pleasure to work with have been extremely friendly and considerate. I appreciate their efforts to get books to me in time to review them and for interviews. I am respectful of their position and they are respectful of mine. I realize they are under the gun, that they are often underpaid and just barely getting by, and that getting their authors out there in a crowded marketplace can’t be an easy task.
Recently, I called back a publicist who didn’t follow through with me about a possible interview. I had emailed and telephoned her about it, but I hadn’t received a reply in a week. And I figured that if she really wanted to get her author out there, she would have contacted me in a timely manner or responded to my email.
Meanwhile, other publicists, perspicacious enough to understand that I needed to get my interview times nailed down a few weeks in advance so that I could plan out my prep time (The Bat Segundo Show is, after all, something I labor very hard over), set up interviews and got the books to me immediately.
Now when I called this publicist, I had already lined up about seven interviews over the next ten days. That’s a lot of books to read. And my policy is to never talk with an author unless I have read her book(s). Otherwise, what’s the point? This may seem an archaic position for some folks to parse, but the point of all this is to do serious legwork and to give a damn about what you’re doing.
Now I try to be as courteous as possible. And where some journalists might have disregarded the publicist, I called this publicist back to tell her that I was unavailable. I explained to her in very polite terms that I was extremely sorry but that I was overextended. Instead of giving me a chance to launch my goofy “We’ll always have Paris” routine, this publicist took great offense to my courtesy call, claiming that she did call me back and suggested that I was the discourteous one.
“Well, I didn’t hear from you in a week. And I called and emailed you. If you had talked with me last week when my slate wasn’t so full, we might have nailed this down.”
The publicist huffed and puffed at me and then demanded that I reschedule another interview at the last minute — one that she hadn’t been involved in setting up. I told her that this was unlikely, given that I had moved several things around to make this particular interview happen, which I had confirmed twice already.
Now I’m thinking that maybe this publicist was having a bad day. As an interviewer, I’ve often found myself regarded as some intellectual equivalent to a bartender or a cab driver — treated like an invisible man, if regarded at all. I don’t mind this. If anything, I find this amusing and it affords me a great opportunity to observe.
But when there’s an immediate assumption that I am expected to interview an author, when a publicist cannot understand that I am juggling about six thousand things and cannot devote all of my attentions to her author and that I have a life I’m managing on top of this, what kind of message does this send to me? Or another journalist? For an author wanting to build word of mouth, how can this be good for them? If you’re an author, do you really know your publicist?
I’ve been turned down by many authors and I certainly don’t take it personally. The least one can expect from a publicist is the same kind of professional courtesy. And maybe a few more Casablanca references.
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Books To Jump Up and Down Over
Beyond Heaving Bosoms by Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan. The famed writers behind Smart Bitches, Trashy Books have written a very funny and thoughtful volume about romances, both Old Skool and New Skool. Here is a book that any smug and humorless literary manboy beating his flabby passive chest over Banville or Bolano should probably read pronto, if only for the distant possibility that he might get over himself. While the Choose Your Own Adventure segment at the end caused me to have a very disturbing dream involving Shelley Long (don't ask), Sarah and Candy did have me rethinking many of my own misperceptions when I wasn't busy laughing. They're not afraid to take on the New York Times Bok Review or even the groupthink within certain sectors of the romance community.
Alice Fantastic by Maggie Estep. This wild and highly enjoyable narrative involves two sisters (presumably, the third one was still being rented out by Chekhov), a hippie ex-junkie mother who lives with seventeen dogs, a murder, gambling, and libidinous Hollywood actresses who live in Woodstock. But this is the wonderful Maggie Estep we're talking here. And what seems at first like a quirky yarn becomes something unexpectedly moving about connectivity. What I love about Estep's work is the way that she'll juxtapose an extremely astute observation (now that you mention it, why do cab drivers always have somebody to talk with on the phone past midnight?) with an often outrageous story development.
Generosity by Richard Powers. It doesn't come out until September 29th, but Richard Powers's latest will have anyone committed to books reconsidering their literary fervor. I foresee some animosity from the vanilla critics hostile to idea-driven novels, but book bloggers, YouTube chroniclers, and MFAs would do well to plunge into this chance-taking narrative, which introduces vital questions about what the reader's relationship is with media, scientific dissection, and "creative nonfiction." Are we rats fleeing to happy cities? Or can we find the humanism within the purported plague?
Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon. Lennon is one of the most underrated fiction writers working today. Much as On the Night Plain proved that Lennon had a lot more in the toolbox than heartfelt (and often very funny) suburban satire, this slim but fascinating volume juxtaposes 100 small-town anecdotes -- arranged by category -- in a manner that reads, at times, like Nicholson Baker's passions for minutiae and, at other times, Stewart O'Nan's concern for psychological detail. The result is fiction that makes us wonder about whether one person's subjective view of particulars can entirely be trusted. This book never found a publisher in 2005. But thankfully, Graywolf has released it in the United States, along with Lennon's latest novel, The Castle.
Wonderful World by Javier Calvo. This wonderfully raucous volume has been completely ignored by the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. But it's probably one of the most delightful reading experiences I've had this year. Calvo cavalierly mashes up multiple genres and manages to mix up familial subtext with larger-than-life, almost cartoonish characters. (Indeed, one might argue that one mobster's penis is a character of its own in this sprawling novel.). This is not an easy thing to pull off, but Calvo makes it work. And it's helped immeasurably by Mara Faye Lethem's idiom-specific translation. (See longer post.)
The Means of Reproduction, Michelle Goldberg This thoughtful book tackles the complicated (and little discussed) subject of reproductive rights from numerous angles, which includes a number of unpleasant but necessary ones. The upshot is that there isn't a quick fix solution for declining birth rates and fundamentalist abuses. Just about every political faction has contributed to the friction. But you'll want to read this book anyway to refamiliarize yourself with the topic, but also to understand just what's occurred during the past several decades to get us where we are today. (See also podcast interview with Goldberg.)
I agree, it is up to the publicist to be professional!
I wonder if situations like this then cast an unfavorable light on the author? It would not surprise me to know that most or at least many authors wouldn’t know how their publicist works or their reputation in the biz.