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.

As his publicist, I wrote a different subject-driven pitch for every core topic in the collection. This took more work, but it also created more opportunity. Getting a book in the news means figuring out which podcasts, interviewers, and other press are a good fit — not just for the author, but for the title. Take a food magazine, for example. If I sent them a pitch saying My Life of Crime is about appendicitis, they’d throw away my email. But if I told them the book had a story about ordering pizza, they’d perk up. Meanwhile that appendicitis pitch was perfect for medical awareness and patients’ rights podcasts.

Again, this may sound like a lot of work, but it’s nothing essayists can’t handle. With every new piece, they already create a separate world — as opposed to novelists who tend to stay in one world for the entire book. By writing 12 essays, Gore had already invented 12 worlds. When I thought about it that way, writing 12 pitches to promote them wasn’t all that hard. As a result, we were able to secure coverage with New Books Network, WRHU Hofstra University Radio, How to Be…Books, Arts Calling, Fck Yr Bookclub, and others.

Terena Bell is a book publicist and author. Explore her services here.