That time I was accused of being a mercenary
And other accusations I received as an inexperienced book publicist
This is another post about my misadventures during my first job as a book publicist. You can read other posts about dealing with demanding authors and pathological liars.
I once received more than 15 emails in an hour from one author. The author had an aggressive marketing plan for her book that involved sending a free copy of her book to senior leaders of 111 Christian colleges. Considering those senior leaders were the entirety of the book’s target audience, from a sales perspective, we didn’t love it.
To the author, it wasn’t about sales—it was about prestige and getting the book in the hands of those who could use the book. But outside of academia—where businesses have expenses like payroll, publishing costs and office space rent—sales were something we tended to care about.
In addition to my experiences handling authors for our popular imprint (by “popular” I mean general audience, not necessarily that these books sold well), I also dealt with academics who published under the university press. These were PhDs, professors, administrators, and researchers and plenty were no less demanding than our “popular” authors.
These books had small print runs. How small? One anthology of poems we published had only 150 copies. That particular book had several dozen poems—most less than one page—previously printed in a literary journal.
This tiny print run did not stop one of the esteemed “poets” to complain we were acting as “mercenaries” by not providing copies to all of the contributors. By “poet” I mean “someone who wrote a 10-line poem published in an obscure literary journal.” I looked him up and saw he was some Distinguished Professor of 18th Century Lithuanian Folk Art, or something equally important. His contribution to society was far more than just poems.
I was once copied on a rather lengthy email chain between this poet and the author/editor who were engaged in a back-and-forth about the mercenary behavior. He had copied everyone on our staff and other random people who were probably as uninterested in this skirmish as I was. Removing those not on our staff from the email, I replied something akin to, “Simply tell him he’s not getting a copy and sending obnoxious emails from the ivory tower isn’t helping his cause.” It was only after sending that I realized the poet had not been removed from the email I had just sent. He didn’t respond.
Emails from authors were a never-ending source of amusement (and frustration). One author had a habit of sending obscenely long emails (I once copy/pasted an email into a word document and saw it filled 16 pages at 20 pt font). They were basically newsletters she was sending to everyone helping with the book. The problem was, mixed in with random updates on book events, praise from other academics and shout outs to particular friends, she would sprinkle in requests for the publicity and marketing teams so you had to read the full thing. Most might have put that in a separate email but not this author!
University Presses were closing shop during this time. Many pointed the finger at shrinking budgets after the Great Recession and other economic factors (like authors sending free copies to the entirety of the book’s market). But part of me wonders if the staff at theses presses decided it just wasn’t worth the hassle of dealing with demanding authors of books that sold about as many copies as there are Distinguished Professors of 18th Century Lithuanian Folk Art.