The Latest Truism: A Good Publicist Is Hard to Find
Judging by reports of empty cubicles in publicity departments at several large publishing houses, it seems the latest truism in the book biz is this: a good publicist is hard to find. While entry-level publicity jobs have always had precipitous burn-out rates, it seems that larger workloads, tighter media markets, and the promise of dot-com riches have combined to make the candidate pool as shallow as ever. And it doesn’t help that the publicist’s lot — described by one veteran as a service job akin to being “hairdresser to the stars” — has grown even more brutally unsatisfying in recent years.
“For the people in the trenches, the job has gotten harder,” says Jacqueline Deval, publisher at Hearst Books, who was previously publicity director at Morrow. “You used to say, this tour will book itself. Today, there’s nothing that books itself.” Because the media market has contracted, long gone are the days when you could blithely send an author on a 15-city tour and book a full day in each market. So as publicists work harder for each title, consolidation has resulted in more titles on everyone’s plate. All of which is compounded by the brunt of accumulated dissatisfaction that gets heaped upon you-know-who. “The publicist is the last great hope for the book and the author,” Deval adds. “There’s a lot of pressure put on junior people who often haven’t had much training. There’s a lot of acting out on them.”
Pamela Duevel, former publicity director at Pocket (she left when she had a daughter, and is now pursuing a writing career), adds that where books should be prioritized, editors tend to push for a campaign for every title, particularly when one is doing poorly. “It’s a way to save face and present an image to the agent and the author that the publisher is doing something,” she says. “But it drains the resources of the publicity department.”
The upshot? “Our biggest problem has been people leaving to go into dot-coms,” says Carol Schneider, dvp publicity for the Random House trade group, who just hired for two positions, one of them from S&S. “It’s partly glamour, and it’s partly rock-bottom economics.” Indeed, it seems that while cash obviously matters, there’s another factor driving the talent drain. “I’m not seeing floods of entry-level people the way we once did,” Schneider says. She notes that Random’s entry-level salary increase and other “enrichment programs” are aimed to keep the recruitment and retention gears in motion. However, “You have to believe in what you’re selling, and I think that’s easier in book publishing,” she says. As a cautionary tale, she mentions a publicist who once left to work at a regular PR firm. Schneider happened to be in the offices of a national morning show when the same person called — to pitch Mr. Potato Head.
Of course, there’s no such shame at One Potata Productions, the publicity firm Diane Mancher launched eight years ago after she tired of the routine as a publicist at St. Martin’s. She advocates the independence of the freelance life, which has been luring many in-house publicists with the promise of making more money with less experience. “All of my staff came from in-house positions,” she says, “and they left because they felt they couldn’t give the projects they were working on the kind of attention they were worthy of.” Similar frustrations lured away Marian Brown, a former publicity director at Basic who has been freelancing for a year and a half. “You can take on different projects without getting bogged down in the administrative and political complications that a full-time directors’ position would entail,” she says of the freelance life. And, says Caroline O’Connell, who has owned her own book-based public relations firm since 1984, most in-house positions call for three years of working experience, which limits the pool significantly. By contrast, she says, “I hire people right out of college and train them, and then the salaries aren’t sky-high.”
It may be well to note in closing that though the work can be punishing, publicity positions do offer rewards for those who stick with the book business. “Publicity trains you to think hard and nontraditionally about what you’re publishing,” says Hearst’s Deval. “I call on my publicity background every day.”
