So What Does a Book Publicist Do?

Learn the difference between book marketing, public relations, and publicity

Great book publicity is like anything else: If you don’t know what you’re after, you won’t get it. So when it comes to marketing your book, the better you understand who does what, the better results you’ll have.

So let’s take a quick look together at the difference between publicity, PR, and general book marketing.

The answer is in the words themselves. Marketing is pretty much everything and anything that gets the word out to your target market about your book: Amazon keyword strategy, Google Ads, etc. Public relations — or PR, for short — is a subset of marketing that deals directly with the public. Think anything where there’s interaction back and forth, such as a blog where your readers can leave comments and ask questions. Book publicity is a subset of PR that centers around the public image this relationship creates, so you the author are interacting with the public, but without the back and forth. This information tends to go one way, such as news articles that quote you as an expert or that mention your title.

A diagram’s below to help you see how the areas fit together. A book expert who specializes in general marketing may or may not be able to help with publicity and PR — it depends on where their knowledge lies. A consultant who answers Amazon category questions isn’t the same person who gets author on “The Today Show.” They’re two…