What does a book publicist actually do?

The most common description of this job is “sending press releases to journalists.” That is roughly like describing a doctor as someone who writes prescriptions. It’s a real thing that happens, it is the visible output, and it is nowhere near the work.

Here is the work, as plainly as I can put it after fifteen years of doing it — at Random House India, at the Frankfurt Book Fair’s South Asia node, and at HarperCollins India since 2016.

What does a book publicist actually do all day?

A book publicist decides what the story is, and then finds the people who genuinely want to tell it.

That’s the whole job in a sentence, and both halves are harder than they sound. “Deciding what the story is” means looking at 90,000 words and working out which single thread a stranger will care about. “Finding who wants to tell it” means knowing the difference between a list of 400 email addresses and eleven people who actually cover this beat.

Everything else — the release, the mailer, the follow-up, the tour logistics, the embargo — is administration in service of those two decisions. Get the decisions right and the administration is easy. Get them wrong and no amount of following up will save you.

What is a hook, and why does everything depend on it?

The hook is the reason a journalist can justify the piece to their editor. It is not the book’s subject. It is what the book gives someone else to say.

This is the part that gets skipped, and it is the part that determines the outcome. A book is not automatically news. “A book exists” has never been a story. The publicist’s job is to find the thing inside the book that is a story — an argument, a revelation, a conflict, a piece of expertise, a moment of the culture the book happens to explain.

Sometimes the hook is not the thing the book is most proud of. On The Liver Doctor by Dr Cyriac Abby Philips at HarperCollins India, the book has a genuinely literary voice — it is about love, loss and regeneration, and it is well written. But the hook was the health takeaways. That is what people wanted to pass along, argue with, and act on. The literary quality is why the book is good. The takeaways are why anyone heard about it. Confusing those two is the most common error I see, and it is usually made out of loyalty to the book rather than laziness about it.

Sometimes the hook has to be built out of what’s available rather than what you’d like. For the Shah Rukh Khan and Salman Khan biographies — no author interviews, no star involvement, no pre-order runway — the coverage ran on strategic excerpts rather than interviews, because an excerpt was the only genuinely new thing we had to offer. It worked. Both were bestsellers. The Shah Rukh Khan title reached 271% sell-through.

Is it about relationships or is that just something publicists say?

It’s about relationships, and the reason isn’t sentimentality. It’s filtering.

A journalist at HT or Mint or The Hindu receives more pitches in a week than they could read in a month. What they are doing, constantly, is discarding. A relationship is simply the state of not being discarded unread — and you earn it in exactly one way, by never having wasted their time before.

Which means the real discipline of this job is restraint. Every publicist can send every book to everyone. The good ones don’t, because the cost of pitching a books editor something that is obviously not for them is that the next pitch, the right one, arrives with a small tax on it. Relationships are not built by charm. They are built by a track record of accurate matching.

That’s also why blasts fail even when they’re technically efficient. A blast optimises for the cost of sending. The scarce resource was never sending — it was the attention on the other end, and a blast spends that attention on people who were never going to run the piece.

This is true across the range, incidentally, and not just for legacy press. The same logic applies to the indie and digital-first outlets, to podcasts — a footprint that keeps growing — and to a creator community. We work with over 200 creators, run by a team of three, with followings from 4,000 to 4 million. The 4,000-follower account is often the better placement. Fit beats reach almost every time.

When does a book publicist start working on a book?

Far earlier than most authors expect, and the timeline is dictated by the slowest medium, not the fastest.

Long-lead media — glossies like Vogue, Elle, Grazia — work months ahead. Daily press works in days. Podcasts sit somewhere in between and need a real conversation, not a slot. Because these clocks run at different speeds, a campaign is not one timeline; it’s several, layered so that they land together.

That is why “the book comes out next month, can you get me some press” is a request that cannot really be fulfilled. The doors for the biggest rooms closed a while ago. Nobody is being unhelpful; the calendar simply already happened.

The deeper version of this is that the earliest decisions aren’t publicity decisions at all. On Too Good To Be True, data showed a heavily campus-based readership, so the 14-city tour was rebuilt around colleges and universities rather than bookshops alone. That is a campaign changing shape because of what we learned — and you can only do that if you were in the room early enough to change something.

What is actually in a publicist’s control?

A short list, and it’s worth being honest about how short.

In control: what the story is. Who gets approached. What they’re offered. When. How prepared the author is. Whether the book is where people can buy it the moment they hear about it. Whether the community around the book has somewhere to go.

Not in control: whether a journalist runs it. What they write. Whether it runs on the day it was promised. Whether news happens that week and buries it. Whether people buy it.

A publicist who tells you they can guarantee coverage is telling you one of two things: either they’re buying it, in which case it isn’t coverage, or they aren’t being straight with you. The honest version of the promise is that we can make a book maximally pitchable and put it in front of the right people at the right time. The decision belongs to someone else. That’s what makes it worth having.

Why doesn’t coverage automatically sell books?

Because coverage produces awareness, and awareness only converts where there’s a route from hearing about a book to owning it — plus a reason to act now rather than later.

This is the most uncomfortable fact in my trade and I’d rather say it than have an author discover it alone. A beautiful review in a paper you respect, read by people who admire it and then get on with their day, can move very little. Meanwhile a book placed front-of-store, where a hand can reach it, moves a great deal without a single word being written about it. The retail front-of-store presence on the two Khan biographies did real work that no clipping can show.

Publicity’s job is to create the conditions in which buying is possible and desire exists. It is not a vending machine. The campaigns that convert are the ones where awareness, availability and community are all present at once — which is why the Blinkit ten-minute delivery board on Too Good To Be True mattered. It closed the gap between the impulse and the purchase to almost nothing.

If you take one thing from this: the press release is the receipt, not the transaction. The job is the judgement that came before it — knowing what this particular book is really about, and knowing the small number of people in the country who will be genuinely glad you told them.

Everything else is typing.