Dear Readers,
Throughout life, we assume many roles, some
willingly and others out of expediency. We fit ourselves with
masks to play our roles, hoping that the required set of skills
and emotional, intellectual, or physical tools will emerge and
be sufficient to do the required work.
As an octogenarian, I wondered if assuming the role of marketing
associate would be out of my realm. My motivation to explore
answers was last year’s release of A Feast of Losses:
Yetta Dine and Her Son, the Poet Stanley Kunitz. TidePool
Press produced a gorgeous rendition of research and narrative
that began fourteen years ago. Because it is a small press without
staff or funds to do more than basic promotion, I would need
to step into a new landscape: marketing a book. Where to begin?
One thing I did know was the primary market for this
book: liberal arts colleges/universities. These institutions,
dwindling in number as they are, have libraries and programs
in women’s studies, contemporary poetry, Jewish-American
literature, creative writing. I searched websites and developed
a fifteen-page list of those institutions located in the United
States. Once a postcard is created, printed, and mailed, there
is a chance that the academic market will learn about A Feast
of Losses… Having been a part of that world for decades,
I know how many mailings ended up in my trash. But it’s
a (costly) chance I need to take.
I am on my own in my home office, without a social media presence
but armed with the hope that I could still learn how to make
an impact. Still, marketing associate seems like an exalted
title when you do not know the first thing about what it means,
and you read that publicists charge $8000-$12000 per client
to get a book “out there.” My next search was obvious:
type in “What does a book publicist do?”
It was the general reading audience I would need to focus
on next. Stephanie Barko’s article “What Does a Book
Publicist Do?” was a good start. Some items on her list,
such as “Assemble a media kit and disseminate its elements”
and “Initialize the author’s social networking profiles”
were not in my toolkit, but others I knew I could do. Here are
a few that I continue to work on:
After creating an author’s biography and book synopsis
to use in my query letter/email, I made a list of newspapers
and journals, print and online, that might be interested in
writing a book review of a new literary memoir/biography.
In the parlance of today, I “reached out” to the Boston
Globe, Worcester Telegram, Ploughshares, Lilith, Amazon, Goodreads
and others. This is an almost inexhaustible group, given the
number of publications available. But it is worth doing, especially
since the book received a fabulous review in the Boston Sunday
Globe on July 6, 2023 [https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/07/06/arts/debut-novel-navigates-immigration-post-2016-america-yetta-dine-poet-stanley-kunitzs-mother-center-new-biography-grubstreet-publishes-anthology-writing-created-response-roe-v-wade-annulment/].
I went to work after setting up a three-inch binder with tabs
that reflect several of Barko’s list of publicists’
services (book clubs, libraries, bookstores, interviews,
book award nominations). You may have noticed that the word
“list” pops up several times in this blog. That’s
what fuels the marketing bus – developing lists of contacts,
many of which are dead-ends. Those that lead to a booking or
an interview restore my energy and keep me going. The home page
of this website has some past and future events for my book,
plus video links! The promotion of A Feast of Losses…
is a time-consuming job, but every response is one step closer
to nurturing the legacy of Yetta Dine and her son, the poet
Stanley Kunitz.
