14 Apr What Does a Book Publicist Cost?

What does a book publicist cost? (and why?)

There’s been a lot of chatter on Twitter over the past few months about how expensive literary publicists are. This is a topic that never seems to go away, and I thought, why not take a little time and talk about what we do, why we do it, and ultimately the elephant in the room, what it costs to do what we do and why.

What are you paying for?

There are dozens of truly brilliant independent literary publicists out there. I can tell you that all of the best publicists have years working in publicity (and sometimes marketing) in-house at publishers both large and small. They know the optimal timelines, the intense workload in-house publicists and marketers have and how to best supplement their labor, how to help alleviate the typical problems that arise, who to speak with to mitigate them, and how to reduce the impacts. Through years of experience and practice they have honed their project and time management skills, communication, close reading and writing skills, connections across the publishing landscape, relationships with editors, agents, bookstores, and the media.

Those years of experience are incredibly valuable. When you pay a freelance literary publicist, you’re buying all of those things: relationships, problem solving abilities, knowledge, and skill. If your book lies outside of the squarely literary space—books that aren’t novels, poetry, short story collections—you’re also paying for research, a large and valuable proprietary media database (these take years to build and constant work to maintain and are not just a Cision subscription), the ability to pull stories out of your body of work that the media will be interested in, editing your original essays and opeds, and how to best time pitching to the news cycle (and when not to) to gain results.

So, what does a book publicist cost?

To get back to that elephant, the answer to what does a book publicist cost? The answer is it depends. Does the person you’re talking to have seven years of experience or twenty? Are they based in New York or Los Angeles or a smaller city or more remote spot? Do they do straight book publicity or do they also do book marketing, expert positioning, influencer outreach and platform building? Are they willing to do smaller segments of campaigns (like just radio) or only full campaigns? What does your project entail? How long is the campaign and what support is available, both from the publisher and the author? Is it a single proprietor or very small boutique firm who takes a limited number of clients or is it a big firm who needs more projects to support a big staff?

At Page One Media (formerly Sarah Russo Public Relations), the duration of the campaign matters less than the work we’re doing. We are often asked if we can trim the timeline of a campaign in order to cut the cost of the campaign. The answer is usually no. And that answer is no because we’re doing the same amount of work—the same number of hours of labor on the project—we just have less time to do it in. The next question we often receive is, can we do a segment of the campaign? Radio, cable TV, and oped placement let’s say. This is also, usually, a no. We’re doing the same amount of work preparing the campaign even if we’re only doing radio and TV outreach. We still read the book, mine the media for contacts and ideas, prepare materials and write bespoke pitches, monitor the news for opportunities to leverage the author’s expertise. That all takes the same amount of time whether we’re pitching only radio or all five major segments of the media (print, radio, TV, online, and podcasts).

Each piece of the campaign rests on the work that comes before it. If our parts of the campaign rest on the work of the in-house publicist who, for whatever reason (over work, being spread too thin, competing title responsibilities), doesn’t achieve the early milestones we need to help garner initial notice for the book, we’re stuck and so is the campaign.

“But,” you say, “I thought you said you support the in-house publicist?” We are very good at and take an incredible amount of joy in supporting our in-house colleagues. We’ve been in their shoes and worked with some truly wonderful freelance book publicists when we were on the publisher side. We know that a close collaboration with our in-house colleagues can make a campaign take off. It’s why we ask all of our prospective clients—at the initial conversation phase—to connect with their editor and make sure that they are happy to collaborate with us. I know, this prompts another question, doesn’t it? Why wouldn’t they want to collaborate with you? If they’re so overworked, isn’t outside help welcome?

The answer here is complicated too. Yes, almost always the publishers we work with are very happy to have our support. As an in-house publicist, I always welcomed the expertise, knowledge, and collaboration of an outside publicist. But most of all, I understood we were on the same team. Equally trying to do the best we can for the book and the author. As far as I’m concerned there was never any competition. Two great publicists can always do exponentially more than one. But sometimes we’re seen as competition. We’re not looking to steal anyone’s thunder but if in-house staff have a challenging work environment or difficult internal politics, they may see our successes in a competitive light, instead of seeing them as something we achieved together.

Just give me a number already, Sarah

You’ve come a long way and I still haven’t answered your question. What does a book publicist cost? The short answer is a lot. You can find lower budget publicists. “Lower budget,” in the grand scheme of things, may still be expensive to you personally. I’ve heard authors say they’ve talked to publicists who charge $5,000 or $6,000 for six months of work. But I’ll caution you with the old mantra: you get what you pay for. If a publicist is only making a $1,000 per month on a book campaign, how many campaigns do you think they need to take to make ends meet? If they live in New York City? It could be six or more campaigns a month. That is also true for larger firms who are trying to keep all of their employees paid. That’s more than your in-house publicist has to work on, so what’s the point of hiring someone who is supposed to devote significant, individualized, and bespoke attention to your book if they have thirty or more projects in a season?

And in the end, that’s what you’re paying for: devoted time and someone who has your best interest and successes in mind. You could pay $5,000 or you could pay well upwards of $60,000. It depends on what the publicist is doing for you, for how long, at what level of intensity, and all of those other things I mentioned above.

So what does Page One Media charge for a book campaign? Again, it depends, every project is bespoke. If we think we’re a good fit for your book we’ll have a conversation with you, talk about budget, and prepare a plan we think does what you need. But I can tell you that for six months of work, with our small but mighty team devoted to publicity, marketing, expert positioning, and whatever we think is going to make your book take off with readers, you’re talking several hundred hours of work at the least. Anyone can call or email the editors at the New York Times Book Review or The Washington Post, but are they taking meetings with them? Do they know what they personally like to read, their kids names and what they are reading, have they been colleagues for years? Can we make someone review your book or interview you on NPR? No, we can’t but with 25,000 books publishing each month in the U.S., we can give you a fighting chance. For that, we don’t charge $10 per hour (what that aforementioned $6,000 campaign is charging).

I’m happy to answer questions on Twitter or LinkedIn or feel free to get in touch if you’d like to discuss what we do and how we do it, send us an email. If you liked this post, we’ll be publishing more of them about the inner workings of publishing, books, promotion, and author platform building. Subscribe to our newsletter to be the first to know when they’re available.

Sarah Russo is the founder of Page One Media (formerly Sarah Russo Public Relations). She’s been working in publishing for twenty-two years. You can connect with her on Twitter @sarahrusso, Instagram, and LinkedIn. You can follow the work of our company on LinkedIn, @PageOneM on Twitter and @PageOneM on Instagram.