Rational Optimism: An Interview With Book Publicist Michael Goldsmith

Every writer I’ve ever met spends the run-up to their book’s publication anxiously awaiting news from their publicist. I hope this interview will make that wait a little less mystifying.

An agent friend once whispered to me as we entered a holiday publishing party, “Inevitably someone here owes me an email, and inevitably I owe someone else an email, and we will all spend the whole night avoiding each other.” Now every time I go to a book event, I can’t help but see each person as a character in a drama called “Waiting to Hear About a Thing.”

“Waiting to Hear About a Thing” could have been the title of my book; so much of the business of being a writer involves not writing but waiting. This is most acutely the case when it comes to book publicity. Every writer I’ve ever met spends the run-up to their book’s publication anxiously awaiting news from their publicist about media coverage. My years as a book publicist were spent anxiously awaiting responses from the media while knowing the author, editor and agent were anxiously awaiting that same news from me. Being an agent also involves a lot of waiting, but being a publicist is even worse. (I hint at why below.)

Waiting is an act without action, one that offers you no control and thus plenty of anxiety. I think a bit of this anxiety could be mitigated if more authors knew how book publicists go about booking media, what a typical timeline looks like, and how an author can best help the process. (I can reassure you the answer isn’t becoming a BookToker or throwing money at publicity gimmicks. No tour bus needed at this time!)

For my book, I interviewed some of my favorite publicists to get into this. This week I share an interview with Michael Goldsmith, Senior Publicity Director at Doubleday (and delightful social media presence). This is a long interview. Here are some things I cover so you can decide whether to read or skip:

• The typical timeline for a book publicist campaign, e.g. when you should first meet with your publicist, when national media typically gets booked, when you should consider pivoting in your message because it’s not landing

• What a publicity director does versus “just a publicist” and how that affects their respective relationships with media (NB: just because the publicist assigned to you is relatively junior, that does not mean your book won’t be pitched to top media)

• No publicist can guarantee you media bookings but they should be able to promise you clear and regular communication. Michael details what that might look like.

• What are some benchmarks for success, and how might you define your own?

Yours with thanks,

Alia

❦

I’d love to give readers a sense of what a book publicist does all day. What would a pie chart of your week look like?

I’m the Senior Publicity Director at Doubleday, which means that my life is split into a bunch of different buckets. Maybe a quarter of my time is spent on management. I have four publicists reporting to me. We have weekly team meetings and weekly one-on-one meetings, where we're sharing information, all sorts of housekeeping stuff, but I'm also keeping fairly close tabs on the status of all of their projects and campaigns. That's one aspect of management.

What do those meetings look like? What do you talk about?

At a weekly team meeting we’ll typically look at one or two titles on the publishing horizon, from three to six to nine months out from publication. It's an opportunity for us to harness the collective brainpower of the team beyond the individual publicists who are working on their respective books, and for everybody to spitball ideas about media targets and strategies, content ideas, all of the sort of granular elements that go into a book campaign. Our one-on-one meetings are an opportunity for me to connect with everybody about the status of their individual campaigns.

So while you're not necessarily the assigned publicist on a given book, as someone who is top management at Doubleday, you're meeting regularly with the media to pitch every book on the list. Can you explain?

I want to cultivate a culture where all of my staff members have total access to all of the key stakeholders and national media. Realistically, though, if you are the senior books producer at a national morning show, you just don't have the bandwidth to maintain relationships with every single publicist in the industry. Those people tend to silo some of their work to individual points of contact in publishing teams, which means that I will often serve as a proxy representative for the entire Doubleday list when I'm talking to key media contacts. In addition to those relationships, I and some of my other colleagues on my team meet on a seasonal basis with some of those most consequential national media personnel. I'm in the process of doing this right now, for instance, for our Summer and Fall lists. [Note that we spoke in October.] On a weekly basis, I’m reaching out to the New York Times, Washington Post, People etc, etc, to set up meetings to pitch across the list beyond just the titles that I individually work on.

Can you walk me through the timeline from start to finish? What is the lifecycle of a typical title?

As a general benchmark, I like to initiate my active work on an individual campaign about six months ahead of publication.¹ That is generally what will predicate the official kickoff, the introductory meeting with the publishing team where we walk the author through the broad strokes of our campaign.

By then I’ll be thinking about promotional materials for a book. I'm also thinking a lot about comps. Comps are, for those who don't know, an industry shorthand for comparative titles. I’m considering audiences who are going to be the readers of the book and then reverse-engineering. Who are the authors and books that those readers may have previously encountered?²

How much of it is research that you do and what is the author's role here?

Authors tend to lead the charge, along with agents. A lot of the comp conversations start as early as the proposal phase. When an author is selling a book, we're buying it with a good understanding of what the marketplace for that book is going to look like, which has been informed by an author's ideas and an agent's plan for how to sell it. That’s trickled down to me on a publicity level and informs the call lists that I'm putting together for media outreach.

I tend to draw much broader comps for my own purposes. I want to cast as wide a net as I possibly can for who the reviewers, critics, editors, and producers are who have enjoyed similar works. I also get specific. Let's say I'm working on a nonfiction book that's a narrative social history of some political conflict in a particular region of the country. That gives me the opportunity to drill down on the regional media that serves the people who live within that community, or look categorically at folks that have dealt with social issues with a similar resonance that have been published elsewhere. If I'm working on a book that has to deal with women's healthcare access and post-Roe America, there's a robust media ecosystem of journalists that specifically focus on that topic.³

Putting together the press materials and the outreach lists is one of my favorite moments of the job. It's the first opportunity to take a book out to the media. Once you've done all this work, you position it in the way that you want it to be positioned, developing a narrative of why it's important, why it's appealing, why it's being published, and sharing that message with the people who are going to be most receptive to hearing it. Getting emails back from people who want to read the book, I suspect it's akin to the process of being an agent and taking a proposal out to editors that you've worked really hard on. Drafting your proposal, putting your list together, and getting enthusiasm from folks, that's really the serotonin rush that you love.

Those emails are the best emails. The silence is the worst part.

Yeah, but I will say, as a publicist, you become very used to the silence.

I think you deal with more silence than I do, because editors have to get back to me. I have to go to the same people again, and again, and again, and they can't just blow me off. And I think that's something authors don't realize, too, the pure volume that a booking producer on a morning show is dealing with in terms of pitches. They just are not going to get back to everyone.

I often share the anecdote of being in the office of a former editor of the New York Times Book Review, and sitting across from her desk. The computer screen behind her was open to her email inbox, and it was just moving like a stock ticker. The emails were flowing in faster than they could ever be read.

It’s a whole perspective to maintain. Rejection and silence don't necessarily mean that a book isn't worthy, or the publicist efforts are in vain. Sometimes it’s just a consequence of the material conditions of our industry. And it means that you have to get creative and find other ways to communicate. We keep an ongoing drumbeat, maintaining these conversations in people's inbox and using any sort of excuse we have to go back to them. If I get a new blurb in, or a new pre publication quote, or a new national media hit booked, I’m going back and continuing those pitch sessions. But also, when you get somebody to respond to you, and you have their attention for thirty seconds, you jump in with any other relevant conversations that they should be paying attention to at the same time, Or you ask them, “Hey, do you have two minutes to jump on the phone?” so that you can capitalize on their awareness in that brief window. It’s about being strategic and proactive in meeting colleagues in the media where they are, in terms of acknowledging their very busy schedules and lives.

One of the things that authors get anxious about is this scenario: they meet you, the publicist, six months before publication. You are then actively pitching their book, but an author may not get confirmations about media you’ve booked until fairly close to publication. I know this is very hard to answer, but can you give a sense of when things get booked, on a timeline between that first meeting and pub day? What does that look like?

No two campaigns look exactly the same. I've had debut novelists who've had four reviews confirmed three months before their book’s on-sale date. And I've had authors who are very well established and credentialed, beloved writers, who don't get any reviews confirmed until two weeks before the book goes on sale.

My personal philosophy is to strive to be as transparent and communicative as I can. And what that means to me is being very forthright with authors and agents about who I'm communicating with in the media and what kind of feedback I'm getting, in real time. I know some publicists or some publicity teams have different cultures around sharing those kinds of provisional bites. For good reason, I think. It’s not always super helpful to let the author know, “Hey, we have an interest from someone who's not going to be able to make the commitment,” to get their hopes up for something that perhaps ultimately doesn't come to pass. I lead with and often note when a books producer at “Fresh Air” said “Yeah, send me a galley.” I try to couch that information with as much helpful context as possible, to let them know that this is by no means a guarantee of coverage. “You know, this is a fairly common occurrence. This is part of their process for evaluating books, and won’t very often translate to having an interview with Terry Gross.” I hope that comment from me assuages some of the anxiety that publicity operates in a black box. We’re trying to put these, I think very warranted, author anxieties at ease with whatever information we capture when we have it.

I prefer your method. It's my ideal. But I want to explain to authors that if that's not the method, there's nothing untoward happening.

It’s very common that publicists tend to not share every single piece of information. I hope it’s clear that I think internal communication with the author is super helpful. But my time is also a resource, and one that can be deployed to the detriment of other kinds of work that I can be doing. Not to imply that publishing is a zero-sum game, but everyone is operating within very real parameters of X number of hours in the day, Y number of books on their list. And if my putting an author at ease is going to come with consequences for the more important task of getting something accomplished for their book, that's a calculation that everybody has to make for themselves.

In the initial meeting with you, the publicist, what makes for a good meeting? What should authors ask? What should authors be ready to share?

I tend to think of those meetings as ones that really require no preparation from the author. In a perfect world, the author has already taken the time and energy to fill out an author questionnaire⁴ prior to this conversation. I know different publishers have different timelines and best practices for doing that kind of data collection for authors. But to my mind, that is the most helpful thing – going into an introduction with a publicist having invested time and energy into an author questionnaire. It’s a legitimate and valuable resource and worthy of an author’s time and attention. Filling it out avoids the necessity of a publicist having to pull out information from somebody on the spot in the context of a sixty-minute meeting. I'd much rather have metabolized, in advance, an author’s thoughts, their angles for pitching their book, markets where they have relationships that might help with event strategy, or provisional ideas they may have for original writing they might want to pursue. So that's one thing authors can do.

The only other thing would be to come into the conversation with an open mind, and an acknowledgement that not every book campaign is going to look the same when it comes to benchmarks for success. Some authors are going to care only about selling X number of books, and that's going to be the thing that, for them, establishes the book’s business success. Or some authors may say, “I want to get on NPR.” And that's the thing that's going to qualify, for them, that the book campaign is successful. Or, “I want to be on bestseller list X, Y, or Z.” I think it’s important to have an open mind and articulate what those goals, those ambitions, those dreams, are while also meeting a publishing team halfway if there is a difference of opinion about those benchmarks.

Maybe it's not even as broad as an establishment of benchmarks for overall success of publication of a book. Maybe it’s, “What are your hopes and dreams, when it comes to publicity? What is the thing that would make you feel most validated as an author of a book, who's sharing it with the world? Is there a niche podcast that you're a super fan of that might otherwise be outside of a publicist orbit? Or is there some big national target that you think is really, really important and maybe warranted, and maybe justifies a more detailed conversation about the strategic approach for getting to a yes on that kind of a hit.” For me, a successful intro meeting with an author is one where they’re taking the time to do that homework with the author questionnaire, but also taking a little bit of time to reflect on what their vision for a successful publicity campaign is, because the more clarity the publicist can have about that, the more they can try to realistically meet an author where they want to be while also operating within a realm of rational optimism.⁵

Do you have a sense of your own definition of success for a book? When do you feel like you did a good job on the publicity? And are there benchmarks? I know it varies from book to book.

I think with the experience I have of more than ten years doing this kind of work, I've realized that publicity is not the be-all-end-all of a book. I am one part of a much larger publishing apparatus that's going to determine a book’s success.

It’s also not always the case that sales are the benchmark for success, especially for first-time authors. If you're establishing a career as an author, I don't want to imply that your publisher’s perspective is going to be as cut and dry as just selling X number of copies. There are other things, from the publicist perspective, that have to do with establishing an author's identity and their credentials. I am thrilled to work with a debut author who gets a broad swath of positive coverage, even if the book doesn't sell particularly well, because I think there's an understanding that debuts are a really, really challenging retail project, and it's not always going to be a matter of making that first book work immediately. Many authors need multiple opportunities to find the right audience at the right time.

An author has to decide for themselves what that benchmark, what that metric, what that rubric looks like. No one is going to be able to validate them other than themselves. What will hopefully be sorted by an incredibly supportive publishing team is getting an author to the result they've articulated as their vision for how the book should get published. But the author is the only person who can ultimately decide for themselves whether or not it was successful. And maybe that means the author writing the book that they knew that they could write, and then leaving the rest of it to the publisher’s expertise. If that is the benchmark that they want to use, I think that's totally valid.

1. Are you six months (or less) out from your book’s publication and you haven’t heard who is assigned to publicize your book? Don’t panic, but kindly ask your agent if they can set up a meeting with your publicity team.

2. This is also a helpful way to think about your own book when you are querying agents.

3. Let’s say your publicist isn’t as thorough as Michael. Use some of his strategies to research media who might be interested and (collegially, respectfully) run them up the flagpole with your publicist.

4. About a year before your book is scheduled to publish, your publisher will send you an author questionnaire (usually abbreviated as an “AQ”) asking you to summarize your book in a few sentences, list any institutional and/or media relationships and share your thoughts on key markets and audiences for the book.

5. And this is the part you can control.