25 May Kindred Literary Spirits: Sarah Russo Meets Cassie Mannes Murray
It doesn’t happen nearly often enough for my liking, but that may be because I’m an introvert. But I had the great fortune to digitally meet Cassie Mannes Murray, the founder and director of Pine State Publicity several weeks ago. It was serendipity that put us together. She wrote a newsletter on one of our favorite campaigns from this winter, WOLFISH by Erica Berry, which was led by our publicity manager Laura Di Giovine in conjunction with Christopher Smith at Flatiron Books, with a very healthy serving of help from Erica and her agent!
Cassie praised our campaign, and I couldn’t resist reaching out to say thank you. One thing led to another, and Cassie asked if we could have a conversation for her newsletter, to which you should absolutely subscribe. We went right ahead and did that and the result is a winding conversation about literacy in America, publicity and marketing for books, authors, and experts, the corporatization of education, book advertising, author SEO, opeds vs. book reviews, and so much more. If you’re interested in publishing, both in principal and in practice, Cassie’s newsletter should not be missed.
Below is a short excerpt from that interview and then I hope you’ll click through to read the rest.
Cassie Mannes Murray: Sarah, I am thrilled to chat with you after finding out that Page One Media is the team behind publicity for Erica Berry’s Wolfish. Because that s a publicity campaign I deeply respect, hearing more about your work has me feeling a bit like a fangirl.
The goal of our Pine State newsletter is to always make book and literary publicity a little bit less opaque and a little bit more fun, and it’s very clear to me that Page One is successful in both of those endeavors. Since publicists are often hidden figures behind the success of a book, I’d love to initially hear more about you and your work at Page One Media.
Sarah Russo: Hello, Cassie! Thanks so much for this question.
I founded Page One Media three years ago, after I left Oxford University Press where I was the global head of audience engagement. I led a big team of marketers, publicists, and communications professionals across twelve time zones from New York to Hong Kong. I think we did really exceptional work but as many in-house publicists and marketers can attest, we were the party of no, all day long, every day. It often didn’t matter if it was a good idea, it was usually going to be met with a no. I was really tired of telling authors no, so I started a company where we could be the party of yes!
We believe that collaboration with our authors and in-house colleagues is the best path to success and that has never been more true than during the Wolfish campaign. Our amazing colleagues at Flatiron, Erica and her brilliant agent and most especially our lead publicist on the campaign, Laura Di Giovine, made this campaign come alive and that partnership is everything. We love having a group of bookish, nerdy brains puzzling through the best ways to find the particular readers for a book and I think that’s what we do best. There is so much competition in the marketplace for readers. In 2022, only 27% of Americans reported reading more than ten books per year but most people read between one and five (we won’t mention that 17% who read no books, which I think is a gross underestimate because only about 80% of Americans can read at all and 54% have a literacy rate below the 6th grade level). So as publicists and marketers we have to recognize that the group of Americans who are reading are supersaturated with books (we publish about 360,000 annually in the US, that doesn’t include self-published books).
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.