Laila Lalami, the creator of the popular Moorish Girl litblog, weighs in with her own take on our recent debate over how authors can handle the publicity cycle. “When [Lalami’s debut] Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits was sold,” she emails, “several of my writer friends recommended that I hire a freelance publicist to work on it.”
“They argued that, these days, in-house publicists are just too
overworked to really focus on each book and give it the attention it needs, that the marketplace was flooded, and that without hiring a freelancer my book
would be doomed. So I did some research on freelancers and even met with a couple of them to talk about how they could help the book.”
Her first meeting with Michael Taeckens of Algonquin Books, however, addressed all her concerns about whether the small house would be able to do enough for her and her short story collection. “I could tell that he had read Hope and understood what I was trying to do,” she reports, “and I felt that he would be great at promoting it. So I didn’t hire a freelancer, and I have not regretted that decision.”
Do you have a similarly positive relationship with your publisher? Tell us about it. Heck, tell us if you had a negative experience, too, or if you’re a publicist who had to deal with the author from hell, even—we love to hear insider stories.