A day in the life of a Publicist with Alison Barrow

In this bonus episode we speak with Alison Barrow, Publicity Director at Penguin Books, to explore the fascinating world of book publicity. Alison shares insights into her role, offering a glimpse into her daily life as she works with authors and connects their books with readers.

Click the button below to listen or continue scrolling to explore all of the books mentioned in this episode.

Click here to read the transcript of this episode

Bonus Episode 4: Transcript

Rhianna Dhillon:

Hello and welcome to the Penguin podcast. I'm Rhianna Dhillon, and I'm delighted to be popping back up in your podcast feed with another bonus episode of Ask Penguin. We had such a jam packed series last year that we just didn't have enough room for all of the amazing moments with our guests. So today I wanted to bring you some more from our crime and mystery episode. Back in November, we dived into the world of crime thrillers and mysteries with the award-winning author Kate Atkinson and discussed her brand new Jackson Brody novel Death at the Sign of the Rook. As ever, we put your Ask Penguin questions to Kate and we were lucky enough to chat with her publicist, Alison Barrow too. Alison's been working with Kate for the whole of her career, having worked on the author's very first book behind the scenes of the Museum, which was published in 1995. So I wanted to find out from Alison a little bit more of what it's like to be a publicist at Penguin and began by asking her to explain that rather multilayered role

Alison Barrow:

To boil it down. If you think about, apart from personal recommendations from friends and family, how you hear about books or writers, that can be from a multitude of places, and those are the places that I'm talking to all the time. So traditional press and magazines to broadcast radio, TV events, bookshops, booksellers, podcasts, anywhere that a writer might talk about their work and their craft, I am the conduit between the writer and the producer or the journalist or the editor. I put books in people's hands so that they can share them with readers.

Rhianna Dhillon:

And like you just said, you seem to have to be across so much. So what is an average day in the life that's

Alison Barrow:

An average day of

Rhianna Dhillon:

Alison?

Alison Barrow:

There isn't really an average day, but the sort of nuts and bolts, because I attend a lot of meetings and I'm very much part of decision making on the books that we publish on crafting thoughts around pitching books out and coming up with ideas for lines for books, involvement with the art team on creating brilliant covers. But the nuts and bolts of every day would see me constantly contacting people, connections and contacts and outreaches and networking is kind of the hub of what we do. So it could be sending out lots of books to booksellers to media. It could be writing press releases, writing pitches to suggest authors for interviews. It could be talking to events, programmers, festivals and saying how wonderful this writer is, and they could talk about these things in an event in front of an audience, multitude things, meeting authors as you speak to me today, I am out with Kay Tac Kinson and we're doing the podcast and then we are heading off to do an event down in Canterbury with Waterstones there. And then tomorrow I'll be back at my desk pitching away for other books forthcoming.

Rhianna Dhillon:

And I think what's really interesting, talking to Kate earlier about the genre of her writing, Kate doesn't describe herself as a crime writer, but as a PR director, is it your job to try and find areas that her book naturally can fit under these specific umbrellas so that you can sell them as such?

Alison Barrow:

That's so right. Yes, absolutely. That. And what's

Rhianna Dhillon:

That

Alison Barrow:

Bundle like then? So, well, it's really about understanding where the audiences are and how to message a book that will pique their interest. So if they're crime thriller readers, then you heavy duty on the crime thriller element. If they like historical, you come into that. If they are fans of Kate's anyway, and she has multitudes of those, you talk to them. But it's about sort of recalibrating really what your message is according to the

Rhianna Dhillon:

Audience.

Alison Barrow:

And our job as publicist is to find different angles that will please the media. So if you think about it with your podcast, you want really quality content, you want rich anecdote and stories and so on, because you want to capture your audience. So the prs job is to identify those within a novel or nonfiction, if it's a sort of expert area of nonfiction, and feed those out to the media and say, you could talk about this. They could also talk about that. This is the USP, the unique selling point of this author. So it is, as I say, multilayered,

Rhianna Dhillon:

I do find the minutia of marketing and selling a novel. Absolutely fascinating.

Alison Barrow:

Yeah.

Rhianna Dhillon:

Can you tell us about a particular, I dunno, publicity campaign that is really memorable for you or one that you're really proud of?

Alison Barrow:

I'm proud of all of the campaigns

And very proud of working with Kate for the longevity of her career. And that's a really special relationship that you build a trusting one. And I hope I am not speaking out of turn to say that about her. A book that might be on quite a lot of people's radars is a book called Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garma. It was a debut, it was published a couple of years ago now. And you talk about unpicking the different elements of the book and how to position it. It's a novel, it's set in the 1960s and it's about a pioneering female scientist, and it's about being a disruptive voice. I dunno if you've read it. It's a wonderful book

And there's a lot of humour in it. There's a talking dog in it. There is a talking dog, which tickles a lot of people. There's science, there's cookery, there's all sorts, there's tv, there's all sorts of elements. And what we did is parcel up all of those different elements to talk to different people. And one of the joyful things as seeing a campaign build is that you leverage the next bit of coverage based on the coverage that you've got. So you start with a sort of core bunch of people who are going to be your influential voices. Very often they're ambassadorial authors who will say, I've read this book, it's marvellous. So we had Nigel Lawson very early on saying wonderful things about it, Richard E. Grant, saying wonderful things about it. So we had lots of writers who had come to the party and then each time you get a nice piece of coverage, you then go back to people that you've spoken to before who have been a bit warm and say to them, this author is getting traction. There's a lot of interest in this. You should be part of this story.

Rhianna Dhillon:

And if a book doesn't have a tonne of money behind it, what do you think is the most beneficial way of marketing a book?

Alison Barrow:

Such a good question. And not every book does. No, I guess

Rhianna Dhillon:

Especially for a debut.

Alison Barrow:

Yeah. So I guess I would say as a publicist, it's a lot of hard graft on the publicist's account. So it's about building up that bank of context and understanding what those people want if they're media or if they're booksellers, what their reading taste is. So it would be sending out messages to them, sending out early proofs. I dunno if you know what those are, but they're early print copies of the book. To get that reading experience out there, you have to have really good confidence in the book that you're going to spread it out far and wide. But it's about keep going at it, on and on, pitching and re-pitching, shaking up your pitch if it's not quite landing, stepping back and wondering, am I giving the wrong message here? That's why it's not working. And then you don't need a lot of money to be sitting on a phone or at an email or on social media. So social media is a really good rich ground for spreading the word about books.

Rhianna Dhillon:

My thanks again to Alison Barrow for joining me on The Penguin podcast, and you can hear the whole episode about crime and mysteries and loads of reading recommendations from Alison and Kate Atkinson in The Penguin Podcast feed. Have you recently read something that you discovered through our recommendations? I'm mean, I hope so. We've given you enough. Are you searching for your next read? You can email us at Penguin podcast@penguinrandomhouse.co.uk or just click the link in the show notes. We would love to hear from you. Any thoughts you have, just send them over. Thank you as ever for listening, and until next time, happy reading.