01 Mar What Are the Differences Between Expert Publicity and Book Publicity?
**This piece was written at the request of Laura Portwood-Stacer for her wonderful Manuscript Works newsletter and a version of it was published there on March 1, 2023. If you are working in the nonfiction space, her work is invaluable and you should give her a follow on Twitter or buy her book The Book Proposal Book: A Guide for Scholarly Authors published by Princeton University Press .**
We field a lot of inquiries from authors each week to work on their books. Many authors come to us too late for us to be of service to their book specifically, so we talk about expert publicity campaigns. What they are and how they can help an author’s book and the author more specifically. Here, I will outline the differences between an expert publicity campaign and a book publicity campaign, how to know which is right for you, and when to reach out about working with a publicist on each type. Let’s start with traditional book campaigns.
Book Campaigns
Book promotion campaigns typically start anywhere from six to twelve months in advance of publication date. During a longer campaign we are building audiences for our authors, especially first-time authors but also authors who want to expand their reach. A debut author doesn’t typically have an audience built yet, and if they do, they don’t always know how best to access and leverage that audience to sell books without boring them or alienating them. The long-lead publicity work starts early, but first, we coordinate the initial stages of building a platform: a website, starting a newsletter, and social media strategy.
Once the groundwork is laid for an author’s digital platform, we can start the work of publicity outreach to the media. We like to start this work as early as possible because we’re in direct competition with every other book being published that month (usually about 30,000, yes, really). The earlier we start the more we have a jump on that competition.
Glossy magazines, for example, (think: The Atlantic, Harper’s, Fast Company, Vanity Fair, etc.) start scheduling excerpts and feature coverage eight months or more in advance and book reviews at least six months in advance. Space is at a premium in these magazines and a book isn’t read and a review written overnight. Also, think about their production schedule. Magazines are like books; they are bound by supply chain issues, paper shortages, and printer delays in similar ways to books. They need to be put to bed in time to print and be on stands mid-month of the month in advance of what’s printed on their cover. For example, the May issue is in stands April 15th.
If your book is very long, 500 pages plus, or on a complex topic, you must take that into consideration as well. These types of books aren’t read in a night, reviewers will need more time with them, finding a qualified reviewer for certain topics (hard sciences, economics, philosophy or theory) can be a challenge. We need to give editors and then the reviewers the time to do that work if we want reviews.
Most publishers have galleys ready about six months in advance. For lead titles that timeline can extend to nine months or more in advance. For long lead excerpts, we can get the work started with bound manuscripts or PDFs before galleys are ready. We like to start drafting materials and building the galley list about three to four weeks in advance of galleys arriving. With all of that in mind, we recommend getting in touch with an outside literary publicist a year or more in advance. My colleague, Poppy Hatrick, wrote more about the publicity timeline in this post on our website.
Book publicity encompasses the usual book reviews, at the trade magazines, newspapers, literary outlets, and online publications. It also reaches radio and for a lucky few TV. Podcast interviews are factoring in more and more, and any publicist you hire should have a robust podcast database. Many of our book campaigns also have a complement of influencer marketing with outreach to key book and subject area influencers on Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok (we do this work in our expert campaigns as well).
To make this long story short, if you haven’t reached out to a literary publicist eight months or more in advance, you may not be able to choose from the best freelancers out there, whose schedules book up very early.
Expert Campaigns
What can you do if you’ve missed the window to hire a publicist for your book launch? Or what if your book has published already and the campaign didn’t go as you had hoped? You may feel like there is little you can do but if you are an expert in your field (and we have space in our schedule) we can usually help.
Creating an expert campaign for an author isn’t rocket science but I like to think that we have an excellent method that we use to help leverage an author’s expertise to put them in front of the right journalists and producers and gain notice for the author, their work and book. The long lead book campaigns we do, often interweave expert work into them. We want book reviews and interviews, like any other publicists, but we want more than that for our nonfiction authors.
Things like a regular cadence of published opeds, being quoted as an expert in articles, interviews that use an oped or news of the day as a launching off point or managing to land a regular column for the author. If book sales were slow out of the gate, increasing your name recognition in the media and having your book mentioned and cited regularly will help with sales. There are no things that can completely course correct a poor book launch, but if you need to publish another book in the future, those low sales can be an impediment and we should work on finding ways to keep your book relevant, in the news, and steadily selling.
I got my start at trade publishing houses—Knopf, Doubleday, FSG—but was lured away to Oxford University Press is 2006 to help their PR team expand its reach into general interest media as their Associate Director of Publicity. It was still early days in what was being called “new media” at the time. OUP had recently launched the OUPblog and the social feeds out of the publicity team. We were engaging audiences in the digital space before most other publishers had even thought about it, all the while, we were expanding our reach in the media space, and growing our owned media (the blog, a podcast, and YouTube channel). Authors can utilize these methods too.
Blogging increases SEO to an author’s website and that is one way producers and journalists can find an excellent source for their shows and articles. To do that an author needs to be writing in the short form and talking about their work. Video is king right now, taking advantage of platforms that prioritize video in their algorithm (we strongly recommend LinkedIn) can help build visibility.
For many years we have recommended Twitter as the best space to get in front of producers but for anyone who isn’t already there, I wouldn’t recommend trying to start on Twitter until we see how things shake out over the next several months. There are numerous communities on Mastodon for journalists, writers, and academics, and LinkedIn is a great place for professionals, media, and academics of all types to connect. If you do a podcast or radio show, place an oped or essay, or have contact with a journalist as a source, always follow their social media and connect on LinkedIn.
The second part of our expert work sits squarely in the media space. We want to be placing opeds in high profile outlets for our authors, booking them radio and podcast interviews, and when big news works in our favor booking TV interviews as well.
In 2019, when I left OUP, after my second tour of duty there as the Global Head of Audience Engagement for trade books, our team was routinely increasing our publicity hits over 100% year-on-year. How could we sustain that level of growth? Because we didn’t think of publicity as a finite thing, limited to books coverage. Every one of our authors was a resource for the press and we became a central space where media could reliably come for an expert in almost any subject area they needed.
This is what I am now in the process of building at Page One Media. In three years our small but growing team has worked with 64 authors on campaigns ranging from book publicity to platform building to expert positioning to marketing campaigns to influencer marketing and sometimes all of them together. It’s work we’re really excited about and that we think few others are providing in a holistic way across the full circle of marketing.
What Are the Differences?
The biggest difference between a book publicity campaign and an expert positioning campaign is the timeline. Book work has a very specific timeline and a firm end date (if you sign up for our newsletter, we’ll email you a free copy of our book campaign timeline). Books, even nonfiction books that fit into current events, are considered arts and entertainment coverage. Largely seen as relevant within the first six weeks after publication. It’s a very short window to make some waves in the literary coverage community.
Expert work, we can do at any time. Some of our authors stay on with us in a retainer capacity long after their book campaign has finished (some for years). We continue to place opeds and book interviews. We can keep our authors in the public eye between books and help them grow their followings, advise on talks and speaking fees, make arrangements for book sales at those events, read their next book proposal and advise on the PR and marketing sections. Both book campaigns and expert campaigns run a minimum of six months—we’ve found this to be the time frame in which we can get things running smoothly and consistently and start seeing significant results.
How Do You Decide What You Need?
If your book is fiction, memoir, or self-help, start thinking about publicity and marketing early. As early as you reasonably can because building a platform in these spaces takes time, connections, and consistency, and publicity results can be less reliable. Having a solid platform to market from is vital. Think of it like writing and schedule at least a little bit of time for that work each day.
For nonfiction writers and experts especially, it is also important to start thinking about promotion early. In both circumstances, start talking to publicists a year in advance and get to know that person. It’s a commitment on both sides and trust is needed along with a lot of hard work from both parties. An author’s relationship with their publicist is much like the one they have with their agent. They work very closely for a long period of time, have to like and understand each other, and often become friends for the long term (read this lovely piece by Ann Pachette about her long-time publicist Jane Beirn).
Sit down and write out your top five goals. What are you hoping to achieve with the publishing of this book. Is it a necessity for tenure, do you need to sell enough books to assure your next book deal, are you looking to raise your profile within your industry or build a business using your book? Do you want to write full time? What is it you need this book to do for you? And then you can have an informed discussion with a publicist.
I recently wrote a post on creating your ideal reader avatar. A marketing tactic that can benefit anyone selling anything. Thinking about the reader of your book is a sure-fire way to understanding how to reach those readers. If you can combine those two things: understanding your goals and understanding your reader, you will have a very strong foundation for starting conversations about promoting your book with both the in-house team and freelance publicists and marketers.
Sarah Russo is the founder of Page One Media. You can connect with her on Twitter @sarahrusso, Instagram, and LinkedIn. You can follow the work of Page One Media on LinkedIn, @pageonem on Twitter and @pageonem on Instagram.