When Your Publicist Gets Married …
And he’d rather be with her than with you.
One week he was catering to my every whim—format the sequel, add magic to my media kit, work on my sales—and the next week he was honeymooning in the mountains.
He left me the email address of his substitute—let’s call him Bob—with the instruction, “Don’t contact him except in an emergency.”
Well, what constitutes an emergency? The deadline for the formatting of my sequel or the video for my social-media posts? After a fair bit of soul-searching, I let both of them go.
Then a disaster occurred.
In the middle of the honeymoon, A Reluctant Spy won the NYC Big Book Award in the category of Suspense.
The award came with a gorgeous gold seal that could be affixed to the front of the book, and also some digital seals that could be added to all the covers online.
Those sparkling seals could be displayed on my Amazon covers, social-media banners, my book trailer, my website, my everything.
If this wasn’t an emergency, what was?
I took the plunge. Contacted Bob. Explained the problem. And told him what needed to be done. Two days later, he emailed me a photo of my cover with the digital seal affixed to it. Oh, thank you very much! I too could drag the digital seal onto my cover. What needed to be done was the heavy lifting, adding this cover to my Amazon sales pages and media kit, changing the banners and the trailer and the videos and just about everything else in my life. And it had to happen now. The naked covers without gold seals looked so ordinary. So yesterday. I would have done all this myself if I could, but it was tricky to edit a pdf. Adding an image, for example.
Two more days passed without a reply from Bob. Three days. A week. I checked my messages. Examined my A+ content. Nothing had changed. Nada. Zilch.
I ranted to my husband and fumed. I threw toys.
Hell hath no fury as a writer scorned.
When I’d calmed down, I explained to Bob again, in an email, in tranquil, measured prose, everything that needed to be done. I gave examples in order of importance, numbered one, two, three, four and five. In my previous life I’d been a teacher. I took pains to make everything crystal clear.
I hit Send.
It took days of radio silence for me to realize that Bob hadn’t dissed me because of personal animosity. It was simply that what I’d asked of him was hard, and he simply didn’t have the know-how to do it.
In comparison, my publicist, the irrepressible Jake, could do everything, the opaque stuff that no one else could do. He clearly was the backbone of his publishing company. He and he alone could fix a blog post that had a fatal error message; or reformat a book cover so that it fit exactly on Amazon; then reformat that same cover to fit somewhere else. He could retrieve lost messages and add a web page to my website so that it contained my media kit as a pdf. If I just gave him a password, he could go into any site as me and fix whatever screw-up I had perpetrated.
He could get actual human people to talk to him on Amazon.
He could upload any kind of file type to any kind of online anything.
He was a tech wizard nonpareil.
I now understood that the reason Jake got married was to make me and his company appreciate him.
On a deeper level I knew that without him, his company would fold.
I had always erroneously assumed that since I was paying, I had the power.
When Jake told me he would make me famous, what he really meant was that HE would make me famous.
Perhaps he still will. The honeymoon (the real one) is over, and Jake and I have a phone call scheduled for tomorrow.
Normally, I would say something frivolous and superficial, like Happy Monday, and then deliver a list of items for him to take care of. But now I’ll tread carefully. Congratulate him warmly on his marriage. Tell him I hope he had a wonderful vacation. Ask him how he’s coping with the return to work, the mountain of tasks that awaits him. Say something true like I’m worried about him.
Perhaps the list I give him will contain only the most important things.
I’m now aware there’s a wife in the background.