26 Oct Why and How We’re Different from Other Boutique Literary PR Firms
Authors don’t always choose us to run their campaigns, but we truly harbor no hard feelings when that happens. It’s incredibly important for an author to find the publicist who seems like the best fit for them and their book. I know that’s not always going to be Page One Media, but a recurring theme we are seeing is that those authors come back to us six or eight months later, sometimes only a few weeks or months after pub date, asking if we can take them on because the company they hired didn’t do what they agreed to do or didn’t do it well.
I’ll say, this breaks my heart. I know we’re not the most affordable campaign on the block, but I’ll ask you, as an informed consumer, to think about a few things and ask some hard questions when you consider hiring a small firm like ours to work on your book.
Is fair compensation important to you?
If it’s important to you that the person who will be leading your campaign is fairly compensated and well treated at work, ask the firms you’re considering about these issues. Consider asking if the publicity team is comprised of contractors or full-time staff. I’ll be honest here, there are just a few literary publicity firms that hire their staffers full-time and don’t just subcontract work to a rotating cast of freelancers. I can assure you, a full-time staffer is going to be far more committed to your project. Most publicity subcontractors are subcontracting their services for a reason. No one willingly agrees to take a minority slice of the fee and if they’re making a fraction of the fee, you can also assume they need to take on far more work to make ends meet.
Do you believe healthcare is a human right? I do, but that’s not the way things work in America. Despite being a very small business and not required to provide benefits, Page One does provide health insurance for our employees, along with contributions to a 401K plan for our team, and other benefits. This may not be an important enough reason for you to pay more for our services and that’s completely okay. In that case, I will encourage you to hire one of the brilliant solo book publicists or firms that are comprised of a partnership. I’ll put a list at the bottom of my favorites; they are all truly brilliant and they each have specialties so check out their websites and see what they do best.
Treating our team like gold aside (because they are worth their weight in gold!), I would love to talk about what makes us different and why I think we could be a smart business decision for your publishing career.
How is Page One Media different?
Marketing maximizes the life of your publicity and there are few book marketing firms out there. We believe in the full circle of promotion here. Publicity is only as good as the marketing standing behind it. We cannot waste one single media hit because attention spans are too short these days. We optimize each campaign with supplemental marketing efforts whenever authors can afford to do so. It’s hard to justify the cost of a campaign for your book if you don’t make the absolute most of it. That includes sharing and archiving each publicity hit on your website, promoting on your social media platforms and ours, and utilizing those media hits to leverage for more. Depending on your book, sometimes marketing is more important, more valuable, and has longer lasting impacts than publicity does. We don’t currently offer marketing apart from publicity but the day we will is not far off.
Events and speaking strategy are critical components of a promotional campaign. Often authors come to us having hired a publicist already and asking if we can book events for them. If events and speaking are important to you, please don’t hire a publicist who doesn’t book events. We agree, they are important and should be a part of an author’s campaign when possible. And no, we don’t book events as a stand alone service.
One size does not fit all. We fundamentally work with two kinds of authors: literary fiction writers and experts who are publishing nonfiction books. The campaigns we put together for them are very different and no campaign is cookie cutter. We put together a bespoke plan for each proposal and a significant amount of time, research, and effort goes into those. I’ll say it’s bad manners to take our plan to another cheaper publicist and ask them to execute on it but I’m sure people still do it. I can promise you, we have relationships with the outlets on your plan and that’s part of what you’re paying for. You take a risk by assuming the cheaper publicist has those connections.
You and your book are the center of everything we do. We read every book before we meet with you. That is a significant time investment on our part that we’re not compensated for. There are three reasons for this:
- We only work on books we feel excited about.
- We only take projects that we think we can do a really outstanding job for.
- We don’t take books that directly compete with each other.
We can’t make smart decisions or a thoughtful proposal for your book if we haven’t read your book. Ask the other companies you’re talking to if they read the book and if not, ask how they build their plan without knowing what your book is about.
At Page One you are hiring a team of professionals. All of our campaigns have a strategy lead (me), a lead publicist and if we’re doing marketing, a lead marketer, and an assistant to support. But everyone on the team knows the books and authors, so even if someone isn’t involved in your campaign, if they are having a conversation with a producer, and you would be a good fit, they are going to have that discussion while the door is open and propose you as a potential guest. That significantly increases your chances of being interviewed or of your book being covered. We also brainstorm as a team. We have found that having multiple brains collaborating on your campaign allows us to optimize every opportunity and stretch our creativity.
The campaign isn’t over when it’s over. We include all suitable books, in a publishing year, in our holiday gift guide or year-end “best of” outreach to media. We will also never ignore an inquiry about you or your book. Anything that comes through after the campaign has ended is managed and dealt with appropriately.
Over the past two years we have built an incredibly powerful campaign execution tool. There are no automations here, all of the work is done by a human with thought, strategy, and creativity behind it. But the campaign manager makes sure that nothing is ever missed and that requests you make, activities, and ideas are incorporated into the campaign, assigned due dates, and are moved forward within the broader scope of the campaign itself.
Timelines and the reality of our work. For fiction books, our campaigns typically cover publicity across print, online, broadcast and podcasts, as well as events, and social media influencer marketing. We can do other things for fiction writers but those are the core areas that most writers are looking for from us. I’ve heard quite a bit lately that you can book a literary publicist only three- or four-months’ before your publication date. I’ll say the best literary publicists are booked 9+ months in advance; as of the writing of this post we have our fiction projects lined up through September 2024. The competition is so fierce for a very limited number of book review spots that if we don’t start outreach 6+ months in advance we don’t have a shot. You should be very wary of anyone who says they can garner book reviews for you with only three or four months of lead time. Even five months is really pushing it and in a perfect world I want seven months or more.
For nonfiction writers we often start well in advance of pub date, sometimes 10 months or more because we’re doing book work in tandem with expert positioning and platform building. We can do a shorter lead-time for nonfiction book publicity work which isn’t as heavily dependent on book review coverage. There are many other opportunities across radio, cable news, online interviews, and podcasts, as well as placing opeds, that allow us to draw significant attention to a book’s release even if we don’t have enough lead for book reviews. But that said, the book reviews are still important and can help with encouraging interviews, so we want that lead time whenever we can get it.
Measurement and misinformation. There’s a lot of misinformation circulating out there. The work literary publicists and marketers do can’t easily be quantified in direct book sales. How do you measure the impact of several most anticipated lists, an NPR interview, or an appearance on cable news? A review in the Wall Street Journal might show an immediate impact of books sold that week but what else was happening that week or the week before that might also have an impact? Is the marketing campaign continuing to utilize that WSJ review so that the sales continue after week one? Talk to the companies you’re considering about how they measure results, what your goals are, what you can expect, and how their work can move you forward toward achieving those goals.
What are you hoping to achieve?
We have a blog post on “Five Things You Should Consider Before You Hire a Literary Publicist” that I strongly recommend you read before reaching out to publicists. It helps outline what you are hoping to achieve. A book publicist and marketer is going to be a big help if your goals are broader name recognition, growing your platform, increasing your lecturing and speaking fees, helping you place original writing, and much more. But if your primary goal is to sell lots of books, your time and money is going to be better spent working closely with your publisher and understanding their positioning of your book, publicity and marketing plans for your book, how their sales team is responding to early reads, and how you can support their efforts.
A public relations firm doesn’t sell books. We’re here to help you garner attention for your work. The selling books part is up to your publisher. Our work can greatly support their efforts and give them fodder for advertising, consumer marketing, selling-in* greater quantities of books to accounts, and supporting attendance at events. Publicity alone can sell books, but it is exponentially more effective at selling copies when partnered with marketing, sales strategy, and wide-distribution. This is why we don’t work with authors who are self-publishing. The support system isn’t there to optimize the work we do to effectively fuel sales. It doesn’t feel fair to charge what we do when the potential return on investment isn’t there.
There seems to be perpetual talk online of what a book publicist costs, what the return on investment is, will you sell enough books to earn back what you paid the publicist? The answer is: it’s different for everyone. But hiring a publicist shouldn’t be seen as a one-off investment in book sales. It has long term impacts that should be felt well down the line in advances for the next books, speaking fees, teaching gigs, as well as in name recognition when those next books publish, whether you decide to hire another publicist to help promote those subsequent books or not. A strong campaign can boost you to a more prominent publisher with a bigger publicity and marketing team to support you and bigger promotional budgets. All long-term goals that should be taken into account when you’re hiring an outside publicist.
This was a long post. Thank you for sticking with me and I hope it was helpful as you work through finding the right team to help support your publishing journey.
Some of our favorite solopreneur book publicists and publicist cooperatives
- Angela Baggetta
- Broadside PR
- Kathy Daneman
- Katie Freeman
- Kelly Hughes (religion and spirituality focused)
- Beth Parker
- Pine State Publicity
- Christian Purdy (nonfiction)
*Sell-in is when the publisher’s sales reps meet with buyers at independent bookstores and key accounts (Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Amazon, Books-a-Million, etc.) and sell the book into each store/account. As opposed to sell-through which is when a book sells to a customer shopping at one of these stores. All books are fully returnable to your publisher if they don’t sell-through.
Sarah Russo is the founder of Page One Media. You can connect with her on BlueSky @sarahrusso.bsky.social, Instagram, and LinkedIn. You can follow the work of Page One Media on LinkedIn, @pageonem.bsky.social on BlueSky, and @pageonem on Instagram.