Ami Greko Jumps to Folio Lit

By Neal 

ami-greko.jpgWe’ve had our eye on Ami Greko (left) ever since we spotted her in the publicity department in Viking about two years ago, followed by a move to FSG. So when she left the world of publishing houses to take a job as marketing director for Folio Literary Management, we made her promise to give us the scoop, and she obliged over happy hour Monday night. “I spend my time now thinking about music bloggers and Civil War re-enactors,” she joked, talking about her two current campaigns for Widow of the South and Petal Pusher, the memoir from former Zuzu’s Petals member Laurie Lindeen. She emphasizes that her function is not to replace the publicity efforts by Folio’s clients’ publishers, but to supplement them. “I’ve never run into a publicist who’s been ruining her project,” she says. “But the author always wants to be in the New York Times, always wants to be on the Today show—which ist totally understandable—and the higher up you get in publishing, the bigger the authors you work on, the more that’s what you end up focusing on. My job here is to focus on the niche markets that build up the audience bases.”

Greko says such promotional efforts will become increasingly common among literary agencies in the near future, and in addition to working closely with publishers, she also intends to build Folio’s relationships with outside PR firms. “Once I heard them talk about their vision for the marketing department during our interview,” she recalls, “I knew this was a place where I wanted to be.” The strategy makes sense: When you consider authors as intellectual capital for a literary agency, a proactive stance towards building up those assets is simply good business, and we predict you’ll be hearing about a lot more similar positions opening up in the months ahead.