JE: Independent publicist Lauren Cerand, who we’ve mentioned before here at Three Guys for her ability to help generate and foster the ineffable buzz, is one of the coolest people I’ve met in the business. When LC is trumpeting a project, I listen. I follow her tweets. I like her style, her approach, and her enthusiasm for her work. And she’s got a great smile to boot, which is imperative in the world of publicity! This weekend, Lauren let me throw some questions at her for the benefit of the writers among us. Listen. Learn it. Live it. Lauren, can you give me a brief job description for independent publicist? A day in the life of Lauren Cerand?
LC: An independent publicist provides personalized consultation to an author on how to comprehensively reach and engage the ideal audience for a book. Services range from pitching reviews and features to booking events, advising on online strategy and more. Much of my work focuses on creating and capitalizing on opportunities and generating positive momentum for creative professionals. Today was a pretty typical day. I woke up in a good mood because I spent a long weekend in the woods thanks to the country house largesse of my bud, Jen Bekman of 20×200.com fame. This grosses me out, but it’s a habit: as soon as I wake up I grab my BlackBerry and get back into bed, where I check my email and monitor blogs for mentions of my current clients and projects. I met my boss at Barnes & Noble, Brenda Marsh, for lunch in the West Village. The purpose was to celebrate my recent birthday but we also talked about Upstairs at the Square and other dynamic ways of connecting readers with writers. And we agreed it was the first official day of summer! Then I came home and made a list of projects to focus on this week (concluding spring campaigns, following up on consulting, press release distro for events). I also sent some background materials on prior speaking engagements to a university in California that may invite me to speak next spring and considered whether I’d like to go to Paris and London for potential gigs. Then at six o’clock I went to meet Michael Miller, the books editor at Time Out New York, for a drink in Chinatown. We talked about everything and it was great: technology, the critical establishment, cultural evolution and lots more. Mostly we told each other really funny off-the-record stories. I convinced him to join Twitter (I think) and we made plans to go to a party together. After he left I ate dinner at the bar and the owner tried to convince me to start a film series based on what I imagine was probably an impressive knowledge of film for someone eating dinner at a bar. Our intriguing conversation hinged on the acute emotional sensitivity of otherwise invulnerable thugs in two similar quasi-love scenes in the entirely brutal films, This is England and Taxi Driver. Sure, it’s something I could do, I guess, but I suggested that the bartender, an avowed cinephile, do it instead. I spend a lot of time making connections that might not otherwise happen and often think that may actually be my true talent. Now it’s eleven, and I’m making tomorrow’s to-do list. Mainly, I have to do a custom galley list for Terese Svoboda’s two books I’m publicizing. I also have a new business call with a potential future client, and a meeting with my pal Kamy Wicoff, founder of SheWrites.com. But first, dreamland.
JE: Following your tweets (and I do stalk you), your life always seems so sexy– this from a guy who does most of his social networking from the bathtub in the woods on an island in a dusty corner of the contiguous USA. You seem to always be out and about, and it’s quite obvious you love what you do, which makes you a magnetic personality, which seems ever-so-key to being successful. Tell me about your dream client, how does he or she help you help them?
LC: Well first, thank you for the kind words. I personally think my life is fairly mundane (I also often think of myself as shy, another conceptualization that is hotly contested) but everything in this world is propelled by a sense of immediacy. So if what I do and where I go seems happening then people will check out my projects. And it’s true, I only do what I love. That’s the truest thing about me. My dream client has nailed something about the human experience that no one else could do in precisely that way. Whether it’s about an aspect of love, or connection, or sex or death or imagination or what happens next in this mixed-up world, it stops my heart. Beyond that, s/he has to be motivated and committed to the project. Everyone I work with knows that no one has to do anything they don’t want to do, but that’s not a free pass either. If you don’t like readings, you don’t have to do any, but you need to blog instead.
JE: How do your clients find you? How does one get the opportunity to work with Lauren Cerand? Do the publishers pay for your services, or the writers themselves? I like the idea that you actually create work for your clients.
LC: My work comes 100% through word-of-mouth referrals. I often speak to organizations and groups because I like to meet as many new people as possible. In 2009, I’ve spoken to high school students at St. Alban’s School in Washington, DC, college students at Rider University in Lawrenceville, NJ, aspiring authors at the Nebraska Summer Writers Conference, and publishing professionals at Book Expo America. But knowing about my work is probably a fairly hip thing, unless you live in New York or are on the internet all day. I keep a low profile, relatively speaking, in that I’m usually more interested in talking about my clients than talking about myself.
I am always reading new manuscripts, which is usually the stage I get books in because I book my projects 6-12 months in advance. Of the people who write to me (I prefer initial contact by email), I probably talk to about 2 or 3 in 10 further. Most of the time, it’s just bad timing that rules a book out, but I definitely have a sensibility and my taste is as subjective as any one else’s. Of the authors I meet with or talk to on the phone, I’ll probably continue the conversation by requesting a manuscript from about half of them. Money is the main issue at that stage but outlook counts, too. I don’t focus on traditional media and it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say I couldn’t care less about it. Reviews matter, but they’re not the only thing. Nothing is the only thing anymore. I’m aiming to create a constellation and we need to see the same stars. Once I have the book in hand, it’s like Beckett says,* either you love or you don’t.* It’s not personal. Writing rejections is my least favorite thing about my job and I try to refer everyone to someone who could be right. If the publisher is a big house, they will often pick up a significant portion of the cost. But it’s really the author who drives the process. Although I view the nature of my profession as extremely collaborative and strive to create that atmosphere at all times, I prefer to do my work alone– I was once introduced at a conference as “the very independent independent publicist” — and I only do about six projects per year, by choice. In general, my philosophy is to do less, better. I don’t want working with me to become an elitist thing, though, so I do one-time stra
tegic consultations by phone on a rolling basis for a flat fee. I definitely have a different approach, and want my perspective and expertise to be accessible, at least on a conceptual level. Those calls are fun to do and have proved very popular. You’d be surprised how much you can solve in that context; most people’s core challenge is one of resource organization. I’ve publicized the work of authors including Rudolph Wurlitzer, Roxana Robinson, Anne Landsman, Min Jin Lee, Tayari Jones, Marcy Dermansky, Jeffrey Frank and Laird Hunt. This year, I’m working with Jonathan Baumbach, Mark Sarvas, Ben Greenman, Jean Thompson, and Terese Svoboda. I do the “Upstairs at the Square” series for Barnes & Noble, which is at www.bn.com/upstairs.
JE: So, in a phone conversation we had awhile back, you touched on this idea–to which I wholeheartedly subscribe– and you touched again upon it at BEA panel recently: talk to us a little bit about creating perception.
LC: Two things are essential for effective publicity: a sense of urgency, and the perception of ubiquity. There are thousands of books published per month, competing with all of the other forms of media and entertainment,including human social interaction, so why should someone choose to checkout of every other option to curl up solo in a corner somewhere with your novel? Usually buzz is what makes us pick something up. People are talking about “it” and more importantly, they’re talking about it now. And everyone wants to belong and participate in the conversation. That’s just part of being human. I understand that this can come across as out of reach and impossibly daunting but basically this paragraph is my job, and has been,day in and day out, for eight years. It’s a scalable endeavor. The key thing is to understand who exactly you’re trying to reach with your message. Who’s your ideal reader? What is she or he into? Where does this person obtain information? That’s where you start. I like to approach each campaign as though a constellation were being created. Every new piece of exposure is a new bright spot, and the point is to pack as many stars into the night sky as possible. For example, you might begin with your web presence. That’s one thing. Reviews are another. Guest pieces for other blogs are another. And so on with profiles, interviews, Twitter and other forms of social media, events, etc. When everything lines up, you shine.
JE: How about one piece of advice, say, for the soon-to-be debut novelist whose galleys are one month removed. Mine advice would be: don’t quit your day job. How about Lauren Cerand, what’s her advice?
LC: The main thing to remember is that nothing happens overnight, not even — and maybe, especially not — overnight success stories. The authors that I see consistently lining up the best gigs and getting enviable exposure are not the ones with the most money to burn or endless time to spend but rather the ones that take the long view of their careers and keep a sense of perspective on things. Fiction takes a while to get going. I’ve been reading all of these cultural studies lately because I’m really into using the democratic medium of the internet to reverse this thing that’s happening to literature, where it’s in danger of becoming as relevant as jazz, so I’ve been looking at historical patterns for new ideas in books like Slanted and Enchanted, Buying In, Notes From Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture, Unmarketable, etc. In Hip: A History the author helpfully points out that those quintessentially American avatars of literature, Melville and Whitman, were sales failures at fairly critical junctions in their careers, if not their lifetimes. On the other hand, this notion of, I’m only thinking about the canon type of BS is why so many authors have shoehorned themselves into this tiny irrelevant section of the cultural universe, by only taking the long-view. A healthy outlook is somewhere in the middle. But no matter what anyone says, just know that it takes more than six months of busting your ass for your novel to get noticed. I publicized Anne Landsman’s The Rowing Lesson in hardcover and paperback a couple years ago, and it just won the most prestigious literary prize in South Africa about a month ago. If you do your job right, a book has a life that continues beyond the PR.
JE: Thanks a ton, Lauren. I’m crossin’ my fingers I get to work with you on West of Here!
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