09/07/2020 - Adventures With Publicists

I hired a publicist for my second novel – Confessions of a Gentleman Arachnid. They worked miracles, to be honest. They got me a couple of good reviews for an incredibly niche book. These reviews didn’t translate into any actual sales, because book publishing is a capitalist nightmare and it’s almost impossible to achieve any level of real success in this or any other industry.

So, I decided after that experience not to hire another publicist. Fast forward to 2020 and I have a cosy mystery due to be published later in the year. The publisher and I have been working to source reviewers and, after a lot of googling, we have a list of 20 reviewers. 20 is a pretty terrible number, given only a third of that number might ever read the thing and even fewer than that might actually review the thing. So, I reached out to a publicist with the brief of ‘find us more reviewers, nothing else’. That means the publicist wouldn’t be making us a press release or media kit (we had that stuff already), they wouldn’t be doing follow ups with the reviewers…

Anyway, so the publicist wrote back and said: “Yeah, we’re in the middle of a plague, all reviewers are completely swamped. Our professional opinion is you should delay the launch.”

There are a lot of people in the fiction industry whose entire business model is to take money from fresh, naive writers who believe their first book is going to be a bestseller. There is an endless supply of such people. I have book publicists on this lists. So, when a publicist talks to me and doesn’t immediately say “Whatever you want, give us money and we’ll do it for you.” I listen. The publisher and I have delayed the launch.