How to Market a Personal Essay Collection

If there’s one type of book that has the reputation of being even harder to market than a short story collection, it’s personal essays. The best among them are varied in topic, covering multiple subjects. Take Tyler C Gore’s My Life of Crime (Sagging Meniscus), for example: In the collection’s first piece, Gore talks about calling in fake pizza orders to the neighbors’. In the last one, he shares how he almost died from post-surgical appendicitis complications.

In an industry where marketers like to sum books up with a single tagline, personal essay collections can be, well, a bit unsummable. It’s part of their glory, their elan: The more seemingly unrelated facets of life that an author can weave together, the better the writer he is.

Fortunately, the right publicist can find marketing gold in the purportedly unmarketable. It all distills down to one public relations trick:

Summarize the essay, not the book.

My Life of Crime is made up of 12 essays total. Whereas most books are confined to a central marketing focus (historical fiction, thriller, what you will), the variety in Gore’s collection gave us 12 different angles to approach. This meant 12 areas where we could win Gore essential media coverage instead of just one.