June 27, 2006

• good things

  Lots of good things today.  Pinchbeck has sold around 11,000
  copies.  Our publisher is thrilled, and has set the bar at
  30,000.  Some guy is flying Pinchbeck out to LA to tape a show
  about prophecy and oracles for The History Channel.  We’re trying
  to get him blog space on Amazon.com.  He’s happy with me. 
  I’m happy with him.  I’m getting a lot of attention at work. 
  I’m still coming up with new ideas for this book. 

  Joe has invited me to a party for his book next week.  Yay! 
  Book parties are actually kind of rare these days.  Publishers
  don’t really do ‘em anymore because they cost a lot and don’t really
  sell books.  So you generally only have them when a friend of the
  author’s throws one, or someone donates space, like the CoSM thing for
  Pinchbeck.  So there’s a party for Joe’s book a week from Friday,
  and I’m invited, and so is Ben.  The e-mail didn’t seem to be cc’d
  to too many people.  I know Jim Knipfel was invited so I hope to
  get to meet him.  Joe and I had a couple of pleasingly bantering
  e-mails after I got the invite, which pleased me.

  But I’m juggling a lot; there wasn’t much time to sit and smile. 
  One of my backlist authors had to get yelled at.  I had to sort of
  mediate with an outside publicist for one of Ben’s books who can’t
  write to save her life; I’ve been quietly revising her letters, but Ben
  blew his stack with her today and I had to make nice.  Then I had
  a phone meeting with one of my new authors; she’s a good friend of the
  publisher and her book has already been mislaunched twice.  Now
  she has a better cover and me for her publicist.  I might actually
  be able to push this book somewhere, but even if I don’t, I’ll give it
  my best shot.  She’s very sweet and we hit it off.  The
  publisher loved the introductory e-mail I sent her and I’m sure will
  get a good report on today’s conversation. 

  The Italian author of my little inspirational book is going to be in LA
  for three weeks in July-August, and his English seems to be good enough
  for me to set up some interviews for him.  I haven’t heard as much
  noise as I’d like from my galley mailing, so maybe it’s time to follow
  up with a blast e-mail.  Lee and I are also talking about spending
  a little ad money on this book, since the author is flying in on his
  own dollar.

  This was also one of those days when Ben and I worked really well
  together.  I think he inspires devotion in the people who work for
  him.  Lee, I know, is really attached to him. 

  I think the new publicist is, too (I have momentarily forgotten her
  phony name), but she’s basically a very happy and adaptable
  person.  She’s not at all into politics but she’s gotten almost
  all of our political authors laid on her, and she’s okay with
  that.  I’d be miserable if it were me, I think. 

  Of course, that’s partly my doing and my fault:  I caught on very
  quickly to which books I wanted to do and there was always a good and
  demonstrable reason why, and that’s why I got those and not the
  political books.  (I’d probably feel guiltier about laying those
  books on the other publicist except for the fact that our political
  books are pretty much all liberal.)  I demonstrated a feel for new
  age books and their authors and for cultural topics and for fiction (we
  do very little fiction, and Ben of course will continue to handle and
  micro-manage Erica Jong, but I really might get to handle Jim Knipfel’s
  next book).

  Ben farms out just about nothing as concerns Erica because, let’s face
  it, Erica is a fucking goddess to people like Ben and like me. 
  She’s one of our very few big-ticket authors, which means she tours a
  lot and you have to plan out most moments of her day, the car service
  in LA from her hotel to a radio interview at 3:20 PM and her pickup
  from the radio interview at a time TBD when her media escort will phone
  you — with the number of the hotel, the escort’s cell number, the
  radio producer’s phone number, the phone number of the studio green
  room, the publicist’s phone number, the travel agent’s phone number,
  the car service’s phone number…that’s first-class treatment and it’s
  very fussy and detail-oriented and has to run like clockwork.  I
  don’t think Ben could sleep at night if he had to worry that someone
  else had to do one or more of those things and maybe got distracted and
  forgot.  I can do a Pinchbeck tour mailing two days after I
  originally planned and it isn’t the end of the world; if Erica’s
  flight’s been changed and someone forgot to change the car service,
  that’s bad.  He’ll ask me to mail her books and paste up
  clippings, but that’s all.

  I will have to do a lot of that shit for the Lynch book.  I won’t
  get to be sole publicist on that one — it’s too big, which is fine
  with me.  No one had to say so.  At one point in a department
  meeting, Ben said, “J. will work with me on that,” which just means
  that someone higher than me, maybe even Ben, decided that I wasn’t yet
  ready to do it alone.  If that’s the case, I count it as a
  favor.  It’s one thing to be a newbie and surprise them by
  performing with Pinchbeck; it’s quite another to be a newbie and be
  over your head with David Lynch.  I also believe that when Ben
  says “J. will work with me on that,” his intention is for us to split
  the work pretty equally.  Of course, Lynch has his own people, and
  final approval over all material, so it may be that both Ben and I and
  excluded from tour planning and may just be soliciting reviews. 
  But hey, that drives sales too.

  Sales?  it’s a way to measure my effectiveness.  I’m trying
  to get a particular book in front of every single person who might be
  interested in it; if a book outsells its expectation, it means I’ve
  found and attracted more people than the publisher and editor thought
  were there to be found.  Dollars are not meaningful but
  identifying and communicating with the target audience is; that’s my
  job.  And this is a little different than advertising because the
  media are a real wild card; in Pinchbeck’s case, I got his book into
  the Village Voice and the New York Times,
  but they both gave him shitty reviews.  The editor was bummed, but
  I’m actually at least a little happy that the book was mentioned at
  all.  I mean, I’m a publicist for two months, and I got a book
  into the Voice and the Times. 
  (I do fuckin’ rock, don’t I?  I’m usually too busy to sit back and
  look and something like that and say, holy shit, look what I just
  did!  At the office, I can kind of congratulate myself if I do it
  in a good-news-for-the-book sort of way, like today:  “This guy is
  flying Pinchbeck out to LA next month to interview him for a show on
  prophecy and oracles for The History Channel.”  Subtext: 
  “Holy shit, I got Pinchbeck on TV!”  I never got anyone on TV or
  into the Times Book Review before. 

  In fact, the only media placement I ever got in my life before this job
  was in the early 80s, when I very briefly had a PR job where I could
  actually work on accounts, and I got a client who did on-campus alcohol
  abuse awareness programs into Glamour.

  Sidebar:  that woman Molly I used to work for in one of the BIG
  imprints just promoted her two assistants, the one I worked with and
  the one I *was* but didn’t get to be permanently.  They have these
  new administrative titles.  I’m glad for them and congratulated
  them both, but I’m so much happier to be doing publicity than I would
  have been as Molly’s second assistant.  Molly’s keeping an eye on
  me and has been quite friendly.  Her department’s stolen a
  publicist from ours in recent years.  Someone from her imprint
  came asking us for a copy of 2012
  the other day; her department is right next door, but — pardon me for
  bragging again — there is buzz about this book all over the
  company.  The president (Ben refers to her as “Boss Lady”) is very
  aware of this book.  If I can make some fancy numbers on this
  book, and do a little something with the self-help and inspiration
  books, I should have a bit of a name for myself.

  How embarassingly unused to success am I?  how sadly unused to loving my work?

  Yesterday, I brought a CD into work (I got speakers for my work
  computer recently to listen to radio interviews and podcasts), and
  listened to it twice through.  I do listen to music at my home
  computer some, but it’s usually one-at-a-time selections from my hard
  drive.  I haven’t sat and listened to a CD for a long time. 
  And I enjoyed this one thoroughly, a long-time favorite.  Almost
  every track on it is great.

  • 11:28 pm
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