Half the Battle: An Interview with Ayelet Durantt, Senior Marketing Director at Random House

"I am such a believer that when someone says, “I'm not a big reader,” it’s because you haven't read the right book."

Source

This week, I talked to Ayelet Durantt, Senior Director of Marketing at Random House. I first met Ayelet through working on the campaign for Hanif Abdurraqib’s THERE IS ALWAYS THIS YEAR. Did you feel like that book was everywhere? That’s in no small part because of Ayelet’s inspired and dogged work.

Ayelet gives some detail about how she thought about that innovative campaign below, along with a wealth of information about book marketing broadly speaking. Read on to learn about:

• The difference between book marketing and publicity

• What levers a book marketer can pull to get attention for a book

• What a no-money book marketing campaign can look like

• How authors can help their marketers do a great job

• Why working at the Barnes & Noble at the mall by your parent’s house in New Jersey is excellent training for a job in book publishing

❦

So how did you get into publishing, and then into book marketing?

When I graduated from college, I didn’t have a job so I moved back home with my parents. After not getting anything for weeks, my mother said, “Enough is enough. You need to have a job.” A new Barnes & Noble just opened by my parents in New Jersey. I worked at that Barnes & Noble for two and a half years in the children's department. I did story time! It was a really great experience.

I was young when I graduated and I wasn't in a crazy rush to start my career. A school friend was working at Simon and Schuster and told me there was an opening in the children's division and she asked if I was interested. They filled that position, but then there was an opening in the adult side, at Pocket Books, for a publicity assistant …

So you hadn’t previously thought about working in publishing?

Like most people who don't work in publishing, I didn't really know what it meant to work at publishing. I understood what editors did, but I didn’t know what anybody else did. I got an interview for the publicity assistant job at S&S at Pocket, and I ended up working in publicity for four years. I loved it. I loved the people that I worked with. I loved being surrounded by books and reading things early, months before they came out, and being able to talk about books with other book-loving people.

How did you transition from publicity to marketing?

Simon and Schuster was expanding its marketing teams, and they moved me over. I said I didn’t know anything about marketing, but it turned out having bookstore experience was really helpful. That plus my publicity experience was enough to get me started in marketing.

When I moved over to Crown in 2012, it was in a dual marketing and publicity role and it felt like the best of both worlds! It also allowed me to be one-stop shopping for authors. But after a few years they made me choose and I chose marketing. I love that it lets me be really creative and find new things to do with each campaign. I love publicity, but it is formulaic in the way an episode of “Law & Order” is formulaic – you know the levers you need to pull for a successful campaign. For marketing, it really can be different every single time. Also you don’t have to wake up at 5 in the morning to go with authors to morning show interviews!

I want to help readers understand the difference between publicity and marketing, but let's start with how working in a bookstore helped set you up to understand how to do marketing.

As a bookseller, you understand how people shop for books and what they look for and how they look for it. You'll get people who come in and say, “I'm looking for that book that was in the New Times Book Review. It has a red cover.” Readers don't always know the title or the author. They know they heard about it. They know it’s supposed to be good and interesting and it's about a cat.

When people come in, they go straight to the display tables. What are you putting in front of them, and what is that package, and how does it look, and is it eye-catching? Is there something about the cover design, about the title, the font, the author's name, that is actually going to make them pick up the book? Because once they pick it up, that's more than half the battle.

You learn people need to see a book over and over again. That’s what they mean when they say, “I want the book with the red cover.” That's something we talk about a lot in marketing.

And people want to hear recommendations. Booksellers are on the front lines, and they can make recommendations and that carries a lot of weight. I am such a believer that when someone says, “I'm not a big reader,” it’s because you haven't read the right book. We need to find a better book for you, because if you find the right book, you're going to love it, and you're going to want more.

How is thinking like a bookseller similar to thinking like a book marketing person?

I think you need to be able to really distill what a book is about very quickly, very succinctly and in an emotionally compelling way.

So let’s get into the difference between publicity and marketing.

There are two ways you can think about it. Publicity is media, it's interviews, it's events, it's book reviews. Marketing is everything else. That's the easiest way to explain. But I also like to say publicity is free. You could say you pay for marketing, but it always ends up being more nuanced than that.

Before we get into the nuance, what goes into the “everything else” bucket?

A lot. it's your website, your social media, other people's social media. It's influencers, advertising partnerships, cross-promotions, giveaways, sweepstakes, organizational outreach. It's coming up with pre-order incentives.

Of course, it varies by publisher. At Random House, we have an academic marketing team and a library marketing team, so I also work with those teams as well.

You mentioned marketing is what you paid for. But I could imagine authors hearing your list and thinking, “You pay for that stuff?”

No. And that's why it’s important to emphasize, “It’s all these different things.” And also to encourage authors and say you can have $0 and have an amazing marketing campaign.

Authors know how important marketing is, and sometimes at the deal making stage, they ask, “Can the marketing budget be part of the deal?” [Ayelet vociferously shakes her head no when I say this.] And I have to explain, that's not really something publishers do, or if they do so, it’s very, very rarely a deal point. And we know that marketing budgets are often quite modest, so let's talk about the marketing that doesn't cost money, but does work, because that's often where authors and publishers can get creative. What are some things that aren't advertising that actually move the needle?

I'll say first that even some ads are free because you can do an ad exchange. You can give something and get an ad in return. You can give a publication a free excerpt, and they'll give you an ad for free. You can write something for a newsletter, and you’ll get an ad in exchange. You can speak to an organization, and they'll give you an ad in their company’s publication. So you could even include advertising because you could have no money and still have, in theory, an ad campaign.

But what I really like to tell authors when I think about no-money marketing, remember that the publisher acquired your book for a reason, and so you yourself are really bringing something to the table, and you yourself and your book are really valuable without anything else.

So what is it that made us want to get your book? That's where we're going to put a lot of our marketing attention. If you are somebody with a tremendous social media following, we're going to put a lot of attention there. Are you somebody who does incredible charity work? Then that’s where we’ll put our attention there. Many years ago, I worked with Scott Harrison, who is the founder of Charity Water, for his book THIRST and we came up with this incredible pre-order incentive with the help of an anonymous donor—-again, we were leaning into what's most valuable about him, in that he's this entrepreneur and he knows how to get people to do something in a non-creepy way. Every book you pre-ordered unlocked clean water for one person. It’s emotionally resonant and you're leaning on his work experience. That's something that didn't cost me any money, and actually didn't cost the author any money either. We were able to develop this campaign that really leveraged “What made that author valuable?” Or you could have somebody who has a literary debut …

I was going to ask you next for this kind of example. Most authors don't have big social media platforms and worry that means there's no way to market their book.

So let's say, this is your debut. You are a writer, there’s no other day job, and you don't have a platform. Some of it is being out there and saying, “I'm going to start supporting other authors. My book's coming out in a year. I have no problem spending the next six months, before I am even talking about my own book, publicly supporting other authors. I'm going to follow them on social media. I'm going to post about their books. I'm going to give recommendations about them. I'm going to show up at their events. I'm going to join cohorts for authors whose books are coming out spring 2026 and I'm going to be more involved in the literary community where I live. And now I have more weight to me, because I have a book deal, and I have an actual book that's coming out myself.”

And hopefully you feel encouraged and inspired. Maybe you don't want to be on social media. Not everybody wants to be on social media, especially these days. But do you have a website? Do you want a website? Do you want to work on your SEO? Do you have a beautiful place to drive traffic to? Or maybe you want to go to a book festival and network.

That is the beauty of being published, because then you have all of our—the publishers’---connections. We have influencers, and we can reach out on your behalf. We can create assets to share on our social media. We can create book club kits. We have relationships with booksellers, but you can form relationships with your own local booksellers. Are you going to your local stores? Do they know you? Are you going to your local library? Do they know you and know you have a book coming out? There's plenty of homework you can do by being part of your local community.

So if you’re an author with a book coming out, how can you be a good collaborator with your marketing team?

A lot of it depends on the author and their appetite for marketing and it depends on the type of book they’ve written, but for first time authors, it's getting comfortable with the fact that people are going to be reading your book, and you, as the author, need to know how to talk about it.

One of the things I tell my authors is that you can control how you talk about your book, and you have to practice it.

Big time. Not everybody knows how to talk about their book, especially when it's like your baby. You're so close to it. But how do you give a one sentence answer summing up your book? If you asked me to tell you about my kid and I only had like a sentence to tell you, that's not enough! You're not going to fully understand my kid from one sentence.

But I do think it's really important to remember that with your book, you know it's coming. So it's not like you wake up one day, and you have a kid and you have to name it. Take time to work on it.

Pregnancy is a very good analogy, because your book will start showing up on retailer sites about nine months before it goes on sale. So you have a good amount of time.

Let’s get into the nitty gritty of a particular book we worked on, which was THERE’S ALWAYS THIS YEAR by Hanif Abdurraqib. It was such a successful and fun marketing campaign—a total dream. Can you talk about some of the things you did for it?

I first started working with Hanif for the paperback of A LITTLE DEVIL IN AMERICA. I inherited the paperback very close to publication. I was coming into it totally new. I didn't know who Hanif was, so let's just go back to what it’s like to show up at a bookstore, where I would have said, “The book with the wolf wearing a jacket.” That's who Hanif was to me. I wouldn't have been able to tell you anything more than that.

But, again, that speaks to having a book has an amazing package. So Random House is an analytics team, and we were able to learn a lot about his readers, both from the hardcover of LITTLE DEVIL and then from a paperback. I think there may have been a line in the report about how people would read anything he wrote even if it was a cereal box or a phone book. And so when I got to work THERE’S ALWAYS THIS YEAR from the ground floor, I had a lot of hopes and dreams and a certain way I wanted to approach it.

For Hanif specifically, I want to call out his community of readers and fans and followers are so dedicated and I just sort of felt like I want to make sure we are doing the most with that, and I want to make sure that we are bringing his community to the forefront and recognizing what makes it so special. For the paperback of THERE’S ALWAYS THIS YEAR, I asked Hanif he would do a written Q&A on his Instagram. In the past, I’ve had authors solicit questions from their followers and then answer them in a video series. For Hanif, I wanted it to be written, since his words are so powerful. The events Hanif does for his books are like a sacred space, but not everyone can see him in person. This would let his fans have that feeling of intimacy by asking a question, but then everyone would get to savor the answers. The whole thing came out great.

And what makes Hanif amazing is the quality of his writing, so I'm going to showcase that. I'm going to pull as much of his own words into what I'm doing as possible, because that's what's most valuable. I love when readers post pictures of their favorite passages highlighted and underlined and I thought: why can’t we do that too?

I know you also want to talk about the mural.

From the time Hanif posted a picture of the mural in his neighborhood, which is just so stunning but also showcases the beauty, once again, of Hanif’s words, I wanted to find a way to use it in our marketing campaign. The mural had the energy I wanted to bring to A LITTLE DEVIL IN AMERICA. The title comes from a powerful quote, but not everyone is going to recognize it immediately. And the pop culture in the book spans decades, and knowing that Hanif has a lot of millennial readers, I wanted to make sure they knew there would be a lot for them in this book, so I called out Fresh Prince and Beyonce in the ad copy.