Author Care and the Invisibility of Affective Labour: Publicists’ Role in Book Publishing

‘You’re too smart to be a publicist’: Perceptions, expectations and the labour of book publicity

“…Where publicists or publicity are discussed in the scholarly literature, there is commonly a downplaying of the profile and impact of publishing industry publicity (see, for example, Childress, 2017 or Thompson, 2012). This can, in part, be attributed to the fact that successful publicity is designed to render publicists themselves invisible by conferring visibility onto someone or something else (Parnell et al, 2020). The inverse of this is that unsuccessful publicity is often made visible.…”

“…The work of a book publicist is varied and complex, although primary responsibility is for the promotion of an author. We explicitly distinguish between publishing house publicity staff and marketing staff, as the differences between their roles are fundamental to book publicity’s particularities and precarities (Parnell et al, 2020: 65). Within a typical structure, publicity and marketing departments are responsible for work that exists between the production and the consumption of books.…”

“…There is, however, another type of work that publishing industry publicists undertake that goes beyond the bounds of classic understanding of 'publicity'. Clustered under the umbrella term 'author care', this practice has no concrete definition but is commonly used by publishers in publicists' position descriptions (Parnell et al, 2020), and in describing the value of publishing houses to prospective authors (Zwar, 2016). It operates, therefore, as a valuable commodity in publishing.…”

“…Representations in popular culture may also feed into the broader societal perception of the work of publicity as simply organising/attending parties, getting manicures and posting Instagram stories (Friedman, 2014). The relationship between publicists and parties recurs in popular culture representations, and discussions of publicists in the media (Friedman, 2014) and scholarly literature (Parnell et al, 2020). Used as short-hand for general frivolousness, associating publicists with parties or with partying belies a lack of understanding of both the role of book publicity and the work involved in event planning and execution (Pan, 2014).…”

“Your eyes and ears on this side of the ocean”: Complicating S. J. Greenburger’s Role as Literary Scout and US Representative for Rowohlt Verlag in the 1960s

“…This dearth of research has only recently been recognized by book studies and publishing studies scholars, in particular by scholars engaged in feminist book history. As Parnell et al (2020) have recently shown in regards to the authorpublicist relationship, invisible labor is highly gendered, and particularly relevant to study within a publishing industry that employs a large majority of women, though for top positions hiring practices still tend to favor predominantly male (and white) actors (see Anderson 2017 andCowdrey 2016). Combining these perspectives from recent work in feminist book history and publishing studies with a network-inspired view of gatekeeping (cf.…”