By Dana Kaye
Last night, I spoke to a group of graduating Columbia College students (I’m always up for poisoning young minds). They had great questions, so I thought I’d share some of them with you:
How do you use what you learned in the Fiction Writing Department for your work as a publicist?
There are three specific skills I use every day:
- The ability to write – whether it’s a press release, a pitch email, or a blog post – is a key skill that, unfortunately, many people lack.
- Knowing my audience. Whenever I took classes, we were always told to think about the reader, know our audience, sometimes we even addressed our stories as a letter. In publicity, it’s necessary to know the audience. Who will buy this book? Where do they obtain information? How old are they? Etc.
- The ability to bullshit. At Columbia, we did a lot of “on the spot” storytelling and most of our work began as an oral telling in class. The ability to make stuff up on the spot and spin a story are essential to publicity.
What do you think about book trailers?
I think without distribution, book trailers are a waste of time. First of all, I’ve never bought a book because it had a cool trailer. And second, most trailers are only posted on the author’s website and YouTube channel, so only a handful of people see them. I think if authors want to do a book trailer, they should find a way to increase their distribution. Either team up with a corporation that will post the video on their website or gather a group of bloggers/twitter followers/facebook friends to cross post and promote.
What does a typical day look like for you?
The thing I enjoy most about what I do is that every day is different. No day consists of the same tasks. But here’s an example of a typical day in the office:
7:30am Arrive, make coffee, answer all emails (30-50)
8:30am Spend some time on Twitter/FB, publishing news sites, and blogs.
9:00am Let the pitching begin! (this is usually spliced with some client phone calls)
12:00pm Walk the dog
12:30pm Eat lunch at the desk while answering more emails
1:00pm Phone calls with clients, librarians, etc. I try to save phone calls for the afternoon because it’ll keep me awake and alert.
4:00pm Business matters (pay bills, update website, clean office, etc.)
5:00pm On a good day, I usually leave. On bad days, I either stick around or go for a quick workout, then come back and work from home.
Now companies are hiring “social media experts” to assist with Twitter, FB etc. In the future, do you think knowledge of social media is going to be a required job skill or something that everyone has?
Not necessarily. I think these “social media experts” are simply people who pay attention to the trends and remain ten steps ahead of the corporations. Social media is forever morphing and changing, so I don’t think that knowing the ins and outs of Twitter and FB will ever be something everyone knows. I think we’ll always need these “experts” because by the time everyone learns how to tweet or post to facebook, there’s something new emerging.
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Any other questions for the publicist? I’m happy to answer them!
