How Do You Publicize a Book?

Have you always wanted a career in publishing? Do you already have a career in publishing but are curious about how other companies function? Over the next few months, we’ll be sharing roundtable discussions with full-time Catapult staff members from various departments. This conversation is a discussion with Catapult’s full-time publicity team: vice president, associate publisher, and senior director of publicity Megan Fishmann (MF); assistant directors of publicity Lena Moses-Schmitt (LMS) and Sarah Jean Grimm (SJG); publicity manager Alisha Gorder (AG); and publicist Selihah White (SW).

We hope you enjoy learning more about how the publicity team functions at Catapult, how they each became publicists, and their recommendations for breaking into the industry.

*

What has your professional journey been like, and how did you arrive at becoming a publicist?

Lena Moses-Schmitt: I sort of fell into publicity by accident, though I’m very glad I ended up here! I always imagined that if I worked in publishing I’d work in editorial, probably mostly because I had a very limited (slash nonexistent) understanding of the other departments in publishing.

The first time I became aware of what a publicist does was when I interned at NPR my first year out of college. As part of my internship, I commissioned and edited book coverage, so I ended up working a fair amount with publicists at publishing houses—fielding their pitches, requesting reviews or essays from their authors, receiving and looking through review copies, etc. The other half of the internship was soliciting and editing news-driven opinion pieces, but I was way more drawn to the books part of the internship. I remember thinking that publicists seemed to straddle the best of both worlds—they worked in interest of books and authors but also had to think about how to situate those books within a wider news/current events cycle and literary/cultural conversation. After I interned there, I went to get my MFA in creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University, where I worked as the lead associate editor at the literary journal there (Blackbird) and also organized and ran a first-book prize. When I graduated, I applied to media jobs but also editorial, marketing, and publicity jobs in publishing and ended up getting a publicist position at University of Texas Press in Austin, where I worked for two and a half years before joining the publicity department at Counterpoint/Catapult/Soft Skull in 2017.

I’m really glad I ended up in publicity—I love that it’s relatively fast-paced and that I get to work on a bunch of different kinds of books and authors at once. And I also love that publicity can engage those same editorial muscles, in terms of how to think about the book from different angles, how to situate it for a specific publication, and how to fit it into different narratives so that it reaches the biggest audience possible. At the end of the day my job is, essentially, recommending books to people—something I’ve always loved doing.

Sarah Jean Grimm: My entry into publicity was semi-accidental as well—the industry can be rather opaque from outside! I think most people understand the author-editor relationship, but the work of the production department—designers, copy editors, marketers, publicists—isn’t depicted often (at least not in the pre-Younger days). So, like most people entering publishing, I assumed editorial would be the right path for me. Just by luck and decree of the job market, I wound up in a publicity-and-marketing internship while I was in grad school, and I was hooked for all the reasons Lena laid out. I also loved that the publicity side of things is so inherently celebratory. Publicists are poised at the end of a long road—from finding an agent to selling a book to seeing it through edits and production—and our task, distilled, is just to help authors find their readers. It was something of a eureka moment for me when I realized that I’d already been doing a version of publicity in my free time, through an online poetry magazine I’d founded with one of my best friends. The editorial and publicity impulses are actually kindred—you’re finding writers you believe in, supporting their work, and sharing your excitement. I feel called to that specific mission and to working in the service of books in general.

Megan Fishmann: All the kids want to get into editorial at first, myself included! I started off interviewing anywhere that had to do with writing/books (literary agencies, The New Yorker, Teen Vogue) and was lucky enough to finally get hired as an assistant publicist at Random House. I hit the ground running, assisting on some big-name campaigns: Jane Fonda, Elizabeth Strout, Curtis Sittenfeld, David Mitchell . . . It was a dream experience (truly wild!) to be able to work on such incredible books with legendary authors. After three years, I briefly left publishing to pursue my own MFA at the University of Virginia and “cheated” on publicity by working on the editorial side for literary publications such as VQR, Zoetrope, and Narrative, along with freelance book reviewing on the side. Ultimately my heart remained with publicity and being a “literary tastemaker” (as I prefer to call us publicists) to voices from around the world. In 2013, I was hired by Counterpoint and Soft Skull to run their publicity department. A few short years later we were acquired by Catapult, and I was promoted to associate publisher, helping to oversee publicity (among many other things) for all three imprints.

Alisha Gorder: I, too, imagined I would work in editorial! Mostly because, as others have touched on, roles in other departments were simply less on my radar. Even now, when I say I work in publishing, most people assume that means in editorial. Can’t blame ’em! I don’t think I understood what a book publicist was until I started a marketing-and-publicity internship at Tin House (because I wasn’t hearing back from the editorial positions I applied for). But I enjoyed the work the job seemed to entail and, from there, went on to work as a publicity assistant at Timber Press before moving over to Counterpoint/Catapult/Soft Skull, which is when I really found my stride as a publicist. I love how creative and research oriented the job is. It’s challenging, for sure, as a decent amount of pressure is placed on a book’s publicity campaign (understandably so)—but there’s nothing like finding the exact right reviewer for a certain book and seeing that pay off in great coverage we then get to celebrate alongside the author.

Selihah White: I got my professional start in entertainment marketing, where I assisted in the implementation of publicity and marketing campaigns for film and television. While in college, I interned at Universal Pictures in the special-projects department, helping plan premieres and other promotional events. While I was there, I did an informational interview with a publicist that piqued my interest. After becoming a part of her professional network, I went on to intern in the publicity department of two entertainment-marketing firms in Los Angeles. In 2016, I moved to New York and enrolled in a master’s program with NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication to pursue some intellectual curiosities and explore other career paths. During grad school, I became immersed in New York’s literary scene, attending book events and volunteering at literary festivals. Around that time, I connected with a publicity director at Penguin Random House, who ended up referring me for a publicity assistant position at Penguin Press. I eventually found my way to Catapult/Counterpoint/Soft Skull in 2022.

I think I gravitated toward publicity because I am an unabashed fangirl and this line of work really allows me to embrace that. My obsessiveness is valued and is perhaps my greatest asset when it comes to championing books—I relish the opportunity to speak passionately about the way a sentence or passage made me feel; I love the fact that I’m encouraged to fall down rabbit holes and pore over writers’ entire bodies of work. I feel very fortunate to be in community with talented writers, editors, and producers who all play a critical role in connecting books (and ideas!) to readers.

What’s your specific position at Catapult? Can you give us a general overview of your position and/or describe what a standard workweek or workday looks like?

LMS: My title is assistant director of publicity, and I also help organize our internship program (with Sarah and Alisha), so alongside my publicity duties, I’m usually managing one of our remote interns and helping to oversee the intern-hiring-and-training process a couple times a year.

Essentially, our jobs as publicists is to make sure our books get media coverage—whether it be a review or an author interview or a blog post or an op-ed by an author. For example, if you see a book reviewed in a magazine, or if you hear an author on your favorite podcast or radio program, chances are there was a publicist behind the scenes who was emailing and pitching an editor at that magazine, or a producer at that podcast, for months about that book and then helped to arrange all the interview logistics and make sure the book got to the right people. So it’s a lot of building relationships with media contacts and getting to know what kinds of books those individual people like and are looking for, as well as getting a feel for the personality of each outlet. And we also have to think about how a book might fit into a wider cultural conversation or news cycle.

There are five of us in our department, and we each oversee publicity campaigns for one or two books a month. At any given point, we’re each actively working on about eight to ten books, but they’re all in various stages in the publishing process. Right now, for example, I’m still fielding requests for a book that came out in August, doing a lot of follow-ups and arranging media for my September book, and actively pitching October through March. I’m also just starting to pitch a book that comes out in April and am beginning to put together publicity campaigns for May and on through the summer. So it’s kind of like we’re living in multiple time periods at once!

A typical day (and week) involves a lot of email. On any given day, I might choose to focus really heavily on one or two books, which might mean spending a lot of time pitching those titles to different book reviewers, critics, editors, and producers, as well as researching new contacts to pitch. When I do media research for a particular book, I’m thinking about what sorts of angles that book offers and what other kinds of audiences I can reach beyond the big list of folks we pitch regularly, just so I can cast as wide a net as possible. Sometimes we’ll have virtual meetings with editors and media contacts, to pitch them our books “face-to-face”—I’m located in our Berkeley, California, office, and before the pandemic, we would travel a couple times a year to New York and Washington, DC, and arrange a whole week’s worth of those meetings in person, but that looks different now. We’re all also in regular correspondence with authors: giving them media updates, passing along reviews, arranging interviews, and occasionally brainstorming about book excerpts we can try to place or original essays we might try to tie to the book’s publication. And just generally cheering them on!

Essentially, our jobs as publicists is to make sure our books get media coverage.

AG: And I’m publicity manager! My workday/week looks very much like what Lena described. As she mentioned, I help oversee our internship program and currently manage one remote intern. I also handle paperback outreach for our books (outlets that cover paperbacks are sadly limited, but I try!) and pitch monthly roundups to media (for example, “Books to Read for Pride Month,” “Women-in-Translation Month,” etc.), which gives us (yet) another excuse to nudge outlets about what’s out or will be soon.

MF: My duties as associate publisher are numerous (including, but not limited to, reading manuscripts to provide editors with feedback if we want to purchase a book, approving copy for book jackets, giving cover feedback for every single cover, overseeing our awards program, and much more), but as the publicity director, one of my biggest responsibilities is working with our three editors in chief (EICs) to determine the publication date for a book. We’re always thinking well in advance (I just signed off on the Fall 2023 season), and I have to look at assigning pub dates from many different angles. Am I publishing a translated novel during National Translation Month? Am I making sure two debut novels about cats in space aren’t coming out in the same month, let alone on the same day? And since we firmly believe that the more time a publicist has dedicated to a book, the better, how do I ensure that we publish a set amount of titles each month so the publicity team can devote all their efforts to their individual titles?

I also work on the publicity campaign of one title per month, on top of checking in with the team about their amazing efforts for their own campaigns as well. The team and I also meet weekly (on top of separate one-on-one meetings) and Gchat often, brainstorming ideas about what else to do for a title or who else we can pitch at a specific outlet. Finally, one of my favorite things to do as director is to pitch books in person (well, mostly over Zoom now) to members of the media, whether it’s for a magazine, celebrity book club, or radio show. We all try to do this as much as possible, mostly because it’s so nice to actually catch up with the media we’ve been emailing for years on end and share what we’re excited about and what we hope they’ll keep an eye out for!

SJG: Lena described our roles as assistant publicity directors perfectly, so the only thing I’ll add is that maybe the world needs more debut novels about cats in space!

AG: Sarah, yes. Can you imagine how many email opens we’d get with that as the subject line? “DEBUT NOVEL ABOUT CATS IN SPACE LANDING FALL 2023.” Record-breaking numbers, I’m sure. Make it happen, people!

SW: I am a publicist here at Catapult/Counterpoint/Soft Skull. In the simplest terms, I’m tasked with overseeing the media strategy for my assigned books to ensure that they garner as much visibility as possible. As my teammates mentioned, this entails maintaining a vast and ever-changing Rolodex of media contacts, which includes journalists, editors, producers, and freelance writers. I’m constantly doing outreach to newspapers, magazines, radio shows, podcasts, book clubs, and any other venues that readers turn to in order to learn more about books and authors. My responsibilities are constantly shifting depending on what stage of any given campaign I’m in, but a typical workday will almost always include reading, mailing books to the press, pitching books and authors to the media, and researching media contacts to add to our databases. I’ve also been working more closely with Megan on building relationships with celebrity book clubs and pursuing partnerships that raise the profile of our imprints. I’m really grateful to work on a collaborative team where everyone is equally invested in the success of each other’s titles—we pitch each others’ titles whenever an opportunity presents itself. We also designate space in our weekly meetings to help each other brainstorm pitch angles.

How does Catapult determine which publicist works on a particular project?

MF: When I map out the pub dates for a book with the EICs (well over a year in advance), I am also thinking about the team. Every member of the team has our own independent strengths. Some of us are really great at getting publicity for poetry; others gravitate toward narrative nonfiction (although I think this team is personally great at everything they work on). Some of the really big books will take two publicists to work on, so I try to keep that in mind as well. For the amount of books we publish a season, I try to create it so that, on average, one publicist works on one title a month (sometimes we have two but we do our best to avoid that, in order to give each book as much attention as possible). I create a tentative schedule of what I think assignments will look like, but I don’t have it completed until after we internally launch the season. It’s during that meeting that the rest of the team gets to hear about the upcoming books we’ll be working on and, following launch, they’ll submit to me the books they’re most personally excited about, along with anything they might not want to work on. I’m of the firm belief that a publicist will do a better job on a campaign when it’s a title they really care about. It can get tricky if a title gets selected by multiple publicists (it happens!), but overall I try to make it so the team is always working on at least a handful of titles they’re extremely excited about. Sometimes our assistant directors will weigh in on assignments at this stage, to help point out something I might be missing (for example, we try to have each publicist work on books from all three imprints). It’s great to have them point out something I’m not seeing and to make sure each publicist is perfectly matched to the best book for them.

What does the timeline look like for book publicity? At what points in the process do you interact with other departments—and what does your relationship with the authors of the books you are promoting look like?

SJG: Publicists are often involved in the publication process from the very beginning. We’ll sometimes read manuscripts that pique our interest, or that our editors are excited about, and offer our feedback. Once a book is acquired and being edited, the whole company comes together to “launch” it. People from every department read the material and contribute ideas about positioning, from possible blurbers to effective promotional strategies and directions for the cover design. Publicists then begin talking about those books and spreading early awareness in media meetings, which we take throughout the year. We’re usually working in at least three seasons at once, with each of our books in a different phase of its journey. We strategize with each other about which media outlets and individual contacts will be most interested in covering each of our books, and we follow up with them diligently, right through a book’s publication. We also communicate about all of this with our authors from the start of their campaigns, and often well beyond the scope of a book’s publicity cycle, depending on what sort of media opportunities continue to arise.

First and foremost, we are our authors’ dedicated cheerleaders, and it’s our job to help them find their audience. They’re at a vulnerable stage of the process; they’ve worked and worked on something for years in relative privacy, and it’s about to be available for mass consumption and critique. We try to shepherd them through this part of the process with care and sensitivity. I feel lucky to be in that position, to be trusted not only to spread the word about someone’s work but to help celebrate their wins and support their careers, even from afar. I still keep in touch with authors I met years ago at other publishing houses. If you feel a genuine connection to someone’s work, that can be a true foundation for a friendship.

First and foremost, we are our authors’ dedicated cheerleaders, and it’s our job to help them find their audience.

What would you recommend for folks interested in breaking into the publishing industry and specifically pursuing publicity as a career?

LMS: I would recommend a few things! First, read a wide variety of books that are being published right now and pay attention to where they got reviewed, who interviewed the author, etc. Obviously I love reading, and that’s why I work in publishing, but the truth is that even the books I read for fun help me be a better publicist because if I work on a similar book (what we call a “comp title”), I’ll already have a sense of which outlets and critics might be interested in it. If you’re specifically interested in working in publicity, it helps to regularly read the news, read books criticism, read magazines, read literary journals, listen to podcasts—you name it. Being familiar with a ton of different publications will help you start thinking about how different books and writers might fit into the conversation.

I also recommend getting involved in the literary community in some way—maybe there’s a literary journal where you can volunteer as a reader, or maybe one of your favorite writers has a new book coming out and you want to review it (or interview them!), or maybe you want to start attending events at your local bookstore or anywhere virtually (or maybe you want to start your own reading series!). I have complicated feelings about social media, but it’s a great way to get involved with the literary community and get a sense of what people are reading and talking about, as well as a way to make connections with other writers and people in publishing. (It’s also an easy way to spread enthusiasm and champion the work of writers you love—which is half the work of being a publicist!)

AG: In addition to seconding what Lena said—informational interviews!—I think it can be super helpful, especially starting out, to talk to people in the industry about what their day-to-day is like, to get a sense of what people in different departments do and what might be a best fit for you. There came a point in my career (before I joined Counterpoint/Catapult/Soft Skull) when I was considering trying to transition over to editorial, and so I set up coffees and phone meetings with a few editors at different imprints. A number of them were writers, and the question I found myself most often asking was how they found time to write outside of their editing jobs, which held up a mirror to own priorities: to maintain a healthy work-life balance and to protect my time and brain space in a way that allowed me to focus on my own creative work. I ended up choosing to stick with publicity, but it was those conversations that really helped clarify that decision for me.

SW: I completely agree with what Lena and Alisha said. I certainly would not have gotten my foot in the door without an informational interview. This piece of advice is probably more geared toward maintaining your sanity in the industry than anything else, but I want to stress the importance of building community with other like-minded publishing professionals and familiarizing yourself with the issues going on around you. The nature of this work often requires that we work in solitude, and it can feel incredibly isolating at times, especially as many of us now work remotely. It helps to know that you are not suffering alone. I feel very lucky to have found my people in this industry—I can always count on them to support me and encourage me to advocate for myself.

Do you have any advice for authors who work with a press or publishing house that may not have a publicist directly assigned to them—or that may not have much marketing and publicity resources available at their press?

MF: It can be difficult for authors because they don’t always know what’s going on behind the scenes. Sometimes it can feel like nothing is happening for the book when the various departments are doing everything they can to make the book stick! I think word of mouth is so important here. If you’re a writer, make sure to go shop at your local indie and introduce yourself! Tell them you have a book coming out: Local bookstores love to support their fellow local authors. Same with the library: Make sure you support them and they in turn would love to support you. Also, preorders help! It can be hard to brag about yourself, but you wrote a book and that’s amazing! Take the time to send one to two emails bcc’d to everyone you know, saying it would mean the world if they would preorder or order your book—make sure to link to all the affiliates, local indies, Amazon, B&N, Bookshop, etc. And if you choose to be on social media, there can be a beautiful supportive community of fellow writers out there. I really believe the good part of social media is watching these authors cheer each other on, going to their events, buying their books, and retweeting positive reviews. The more you put into the community/getting the word out there, the more you will get in return!

What’s something about the industry (or your position) that you wish were more transparent and/or better understood by those outside of it?

AG: This is specific to my role as a publicist, but one thing that comes to mind is how much about publicity can be outside of our control. Maybe this is, in fact, obvious, and I’m on the defensive (ha!), but I can love a book with my whole heart and do everything possible to pitch it, and it still may not—because of timing, current events, other reasons I’m not aware of—get the coverage I hoped it would. I can imagine that in other roles, even within the industry, there is a more direct correlation between the amount of work put into something and the outcome. Sometimes I can see the correlation—I might pitch a freelancer who ends up placing a review, for example—but other times, that cause and effect is not so clear, which makes the question of what a “successful” campaign looks like a tricky one. I find it helpful to have a conversation with the author about their specific, perhaps more niche, dreams for the book—and if I were a soon-to-be-published author, I’d be asking myself this too. If we can’t, no matter how hard we try, convince team Oprah to pick your book for her book club (everybody wants Oprah!), what are the podcasts, the hometown papers, the literary magazines, etc., that would count as smaller, but nonetheless meaningful, wins?

SJG: This is such a good point, Alisha. It can be frustrating when your enthusiasm for a book doesn’t catch on in the way you hoped it would. I’ve had campaigns where dozens of freelance critics confirmed their interest and said they hoped or planned to review the book, and seemingly every “yes” eventually faded into a “no.” It’s helpful to remember that it’s a highly competitive landscape for critics too—due not only to timing and current events but also how many paying outlets are out there and how much space they grant to book reviews. We pitch as exhaustively and creatively as we can, but a book’s success—however you want to define that—is still partly alchemy. More pitches don’t necessarily guarantee more reviews, and more reviews don’t necessarily guarantee more sales. There’s another ingredient, and publicity can feel a lot like spellcasting for that reason. (We do joke about sacrificing goats, though none have been harmed so far in the making of Catapult books.) But as much as we love to cast a wide net (to use the beloved jargon), we also really want to avoid throwing spaghetti. We have to think about our relationships with the media holistically and pitch them as the individuals they are—that is, I’m not hounding the same person about six of my books in a single week. My pitches are entries in an often years-long conversation I’m having with each reviewer, and the hope is that they’ll trust me enough to give my email their attention. But at the end of the day, maybe there are cases where we need to give the goat thing a shot.

• 0