Abstract
The representation of publicists in popular culture appears to have a direct relationship with how publishing sector publicity staff are perceived by their colleagues and peers, having a distinct knock-on effect to work practices and labour conditions. In this article, we explore these perceptions and, through interviews with eight publicists working in publishing houses in Australia, explore how the work of publicity is commonly misrecognised and undervalued. In framing publicists as cultural intermediaries who contribute to the shaping of cultural tastes, we further illuminate the significant gap between the common gendered perceptions of publicists and the realities of their professional practice.
Introduction
Anglophone book publishing is a cultural sector wherein women make up the majority of staff but the minority of senior managers and CEOs (Couper, 2016). Almost all book publicists in Australia are women. This pattern of gender dominance in publicity roles in publishing houses is consistent with publicity and public relations professions overall, with the Global Women in PR Annual Index reporting in 2021 that two-thirds of the global PR workforce were women (GWPR, 2021). Other studies have found women make up as much as 79% of the public relations workforce in Australia, and estimates range between 63% and 85% in the United States (de Bussy and Wolf, 2009; Khazan, 2008).
The overrepresentation of women as publicists in publishing is important to illuminate, particularly as research into gender and public relations work suggests that the gendered nature of the workforce directly influences the perception and the compensation of the work of publicity. Gendered stereotypes—suggestions publicists are passive, sensitive, highly-strung or weak (Choi and Childers Hon, 2002: 233) or that they are ‘ditzy, obsequious, unfulfilled. . .easy. . .and useful only in a crisis’ (Tsetsura and Bentley, 2015: 4)—have long been attributed to women in PR. Moreover, research indicates the gendered workforce composition historically correlates with lower wages compared to similar industries and professions (Aldoory and Toth, 2002: 122).
The confluence of these factors—workforce composition, gendered perceptions of professional identities and limits placed on remuneration—has led to a societal perception that public relations is not a ‘real job’ (Tsetsura and Bentley, 2015: 4), influencing attitudes towards publicity professionals among their colleagues and clients. These gendered perceptions exist within a cultural context that informs and is informed by stereotypes that extend from these industry attitudes.
This article discusses the representations of book publicists and public relations workers in popular culture in tandem with the function of publicity work in book publishing, examining how perceptions, attitudes and position-takings intersect explicitly with the experiences of book publishing industry publicists. Based on in-depth semi-structured interviews with eight publicists working in Australian publishing, we argue that the typical misrecognition of the work of publicists has flow-on effects for the kinds of labour they perform and working conditions in which they perform them.
Interviews with book publicists
As a research team, we recognise the value of ethnographic research that pays close attention to the specifics of personal experience within an industrial context. Our research in this sense applies feminist standpoint theory, a social sciences approach popularised by Dorothy Smith (1987), which explores individuals’ lived experiences from their own standpoints and uses this as a means of understanding the social contexts to which those individuals belong. This kind of approach, and the belief which underpins it that knowledge and experience are inherently socially constructed, follows the lead of researchers working with public relations professionals outside book publishing, as well as that of other scholars working with contemporary book culture (Daymon and Demetrious, 2013; Driscoll and Rehberg Sedo, 2019). In their introduction to the essay collection Gender and Public Relations: Critical Perspectives on Voice, Image and Identity, Daymon and Demetrious (2013, 10) explain that:
Critical feminist public relations research is both ‘critical’ (in terms of power relations) and ‘political’, by speaking about and to the lived experience rather than a theoretical ideal . . . scholars working from this position . . . make visible and audible the personal and collective gendered meanings and experiences of those involved in and with public relations, and also the experiences of those who are affected by public relations, including those previously invisible or silenced, who are often women.
Informed by this understanding, we conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with eight publicists working in contemporary Australian book publishing. Participants were invited to participate in the research with the promise of confidentiality in order to protect those who may disclose information that references negative experiences associated with their work and may contribute to their precarity. Due to the small scale of the Australian book publishing sector, we have purposefully limited the amount of detail about the participants and the publishing houses they work in to ensure the anonymity of the participants. The participants, referred to here at P01–P08, worked across both trade and scholarly publishing, from large multinational publishing houses to small local independents. There was a diversity of experience among the participants, representing both early-career publicists and publicists who had been working in the sector for decades. Many of the publicists we interviewed had worked at multiple publishing houses and several in more than one country. The breadth of these research participants’ experiences contributed to a set of findings that establishes new knowledge about the work of publicists in contemporary book publishing and the power dynamics that structure this work.
These interviews were conducted over Zoom in late 2020 and early 2021 and were analysed by each member of the research team who independently coded the transcripts using an inductive approach. Three major themes that emerged from the interviews are presented here: the problematic professional and cultural perception of publicists; the power imbalance inherent in the work of book publicity; and the flow-on effects from employer and author expectations. The common thread that ties these findings together is the affective labour that underpins the work of publicity, a structure of work that also influences the broad cultural perception of publicists.
Perceptions of book publicists and their representation in popular culture
Lauren Heller (played by Molly Kate Bernard) is the publicist working at the fictional Empirical Press on Younger, a hit television show about the New York book publishing sector. Lauren embodies the typical characteristics of a publicist, at least according to imaginings of the job in popular culture: she is young and conventionally attractive, smart but often silly, loves to party, is socially confident, and her approach to work is portrayed as unprofessional. These characteristics are reminiscent of Bridget Jones (played by Renee Zellweger in the 2001 romantic comedy Bridget Jones’ Diary). In performing her work as a publicist in a publishing house, Bridget is framed as promiscuous, confident, someone who loves to party and is only somewhat competent at her job. She is unsure which great authors and revered critics are alive or dead, and is casually sexually harassed in the workplace. Moreover, the work of publicity is considered unimportant by Bridget’s publishing house colleagues. This pop-cultural framing of the work and characteristics of a publicist is not confined to the book publishing industry. While Sex and the City’s Samantha Jones (played by Kim Cattrall) is framed as intelligent, she also at times exhibits the stereotypical vapid or conniving traits that dominate representations of this profession: throwing elaborate parties, securing access to exclusive restaurants, and using a famous client’s name to secure a designer handbag (Knibbs, 2019). Finally, Absolutely Fabulous’ Edina Monsoon (played by Jennifer Saunders) may own her own PR company but is rarely shown working.
Popular cultural representation of publicists and their work illustrate broader societal perceptions (Tsetsura and Bentley, 2015). Writing in The Cut, Ann Friedman (2014) explores the ‘pink ghetto’ of public relations, linking both societal perceptions and popular cultural representations of publicists as vapid to the gendered nature of the workforce. Friedman’s interrogation reveals publicists are seen as ‘low intelligence’ and the ‘working world’s sorority girls’. Representations in popular culture may also feed into the broader societal perception of the work of publicity as simply organising/attending parties, getting manicures and posting Instagram stories (Friedman, 2014). The relationship between publicists and parties recurs in popular culture representations, and discussions of publicists in the media (Friedman, 2014) and scholarly literature (Parnell et al., 2020). Used as short-hand for general frivolousness, associating publicists with parties or with partying belies a lack of understanding of both the role of book publicity and the work involved in event planning and execution (Pan, 2014). Beyond popular culture renderings, these perceptions are supported by the ways other book publishing professionals discuss publicity staff and the lack of genuine understanding about what constitutes a career in book publicity.
It can be difficult to ascertain the explicit ways in which representations of book publicists in popular culture trickle down into the industry’s vocational perceptions and practices. However, we are able to observe some tacit manifestations of this process. First, there is a general misunderstanding, perhaps even disregard for the work of publicists in both popular and scholarly examinations of the publishing process and contemporary book culture (Parnell et al., 2020). Writing about the state of Australian book publishing in 2007, author Richard Flanagan describes publishing industry publicists as ‘starry-eyed beginners’, ‘badly trained’ and ‘ill informed about both books and the media’ (139), revealing a disrespect for publicists and their professional practice. Where publicists or publicity are discussed in the scholarly literature, there is commonly a downplaying of the profile and impact of publishing industry publicity (see, for example, Childress, 2017 or Thompson, 2012). This can, in part, be attributed to the fact that successful publicity is designed to render publicists themselves invisible by conferring visibility onto someone or something else (Parnell et al., 2020). The inverse of this is that unsuccessful publicity is often made visible. Friedman (2014) notes that ‘We only notice PR work when it goes horribly awry’. This is exemplified by a 2019 Twitter thread by author Porochista Khakpour (2019):
Hey book publicists, please take your jobs super seriously! I am on a major prize committee & we keep noticing MAJOR books missing! Like books that could have won a lifechanging prize. Now it is too late. This is incredibly scary & I hope editors keep an eye on this. I’ve seen this problem before & it is always a screw-up from an overworked junior publicist. Writers will never know! Very sad. . . Junior publicists: i know you are overworked and exhausted but you have a salary & health insurance & many of your authors do not. A prize like this could literally save their life. No pressure!
This thread attracted significant attention, with thousands of retweets, likes and replies, demonstrating not only that there is a limited understanding of publicity practices within publishing houses, but also a lack of respect for publicists themselves. The implication that publicists do not take their jobs seriously and that their ‘screw-ups’ are commonplace echoes book publicists’ representation in shows like Younger and films like Bridget Jones’ Diary. Khakpour’s tweets strike a similar tone to Richard Flanagan’s (2007) description of book publicists, and both authors appear to assume that not only do book publicists not know how to do their jobs, but also that either Khakpour or Flanagan could do their job to a higher standard. Our interviews consistently revealed a common sentiment within publishing houses that publicity work is highly gendered – both in terms of personnel and in terms of the way the work is framed – and that publicists are made to feel like their work is less valuable and more frivolous than that of other staff in the organisation.
Book publicists as cultural intermediaries
We invoke the structures of power and practice that Pierre Bourdieu (1977, 1993) outlines to describe how capital and individuals interact within cultural sectors. Despite the historical and cultural specificity of Bourdieu’s model, the contours of Bourdieu’s field of cultural production can be overlaid on the contemporary publishing house to establish a nuanced understanding of publicists’ role within the sector, and the relationship between capital, value and respect that often defines contemporary practice. The opposing poles of symbolic and economic capital within the prescribed structure of the field of cultural production (Bourdieu, 1993: 49) illuminate this relationship. Prestige and literary power are concentrated in spaces with accumulated symbolic capital. In publishing houses, symbolic capital is typically associated with creative and editorial work, that is, working with words: the work associated with putting the book together (Childress, 2017: 90). The other end of the field is typified by work that is not symbolically wealthy but has a more explicit relationship with generating economic capital. This is where the work of publicity is situated. Within this structure, symbolic value or power accrues from the relationship between editor and author because the object of value in publishing, a book, is produced within the bounds of this relationship. Within the vocational structures of publishing, publicists occupy roles in support of these primary relationships. We recognise and argue that there is substantial intellectual and creative work done by publicists, however this broad perception of the structures of the dominant forms of work within a publishing house is consistent with other sociological studies of the professional publishing practice (see, for example, Thompson, 2012).
This structure was established and continues to be reinforced by the nature of relational structured hierarchies wherein practice determines structures in a generative and self-fulfilling manner. The structure of the field shapes access to capital and power, and this structure is shaped by the practice of those who work within its confines. This is evident in how scholarly examinations of publishing practice and ‘author care’ treat the relationship between editor and author, and publicist and author. Albert Greco et al. (2007: 165) describe the relationship between editor and author as akin to a midwife and expectant parent. Albeit professional, there is an intimacy between editor and author as they collaboratively create a new cultural product. While there is little scholarly attention paid to book publicists or the relationship between author and publicist (Parnell et al., 2020), our interviewees also describe a level of intimacy that blurs professional and personal boundaries. Both editors and publicists perform the labour of ‘author care’, but it is framed and understood differently. This difference is rooted in the structural hierarchy of the publishing house, and is reinforced by practice.
Positioning book publicists as cultural intermediaries highlights nuances in editor/author and publicist/author relationships (Edwards, 2012). It draws attention to the dual structure of the relationship between publicist and author: the power of the publicist is simultaneously evidenced and obscured by their work (Parnell et al., 2020). The publicist leverages cultural and symbolic capital to make visible – and accrue cultural and symbolic power for – the author and the publishing house they represent (Edwards, 2012: 441). As a cultural intermediary, the publicist works on behalf of the publishing house to shape and sustain ideas around which books and which authors are worthy of critical engagement and attention (Surma and Daymon, 2013: 5). Bourdieu (1996: 228) recognises the function of the cultural intermediary in producing value, noting:
The producer of the value of the work of art is not the artist but the field of production as a universe of belief which produces the value of the works of art as a fetish by producing the belief in the creative power of the artist.
There is considerable cultural power in the work publicists perform as cultural intermediaries, however, this power is commonly overlooked or displaced in both scholarship and popular culture. This displacement can be attributed to the duality of their work and the designed invisibility of their labour. As cultural intermediaries, publicists establish frameworks for engagement and consumption and, when successful, consumers see the resulting products (the authors, the books) but not the framework itself.
Within the publishing house – where power and value are understood in terms of creative contributions to making a book – the value that a publicist contributes to a book can be overlooked or misunderstood. Outside the publishing house, where the publicist acts as the mediator between production and reception (Smith Maguire and Matthews, 2012: 551), their work is again overlooked or misunderstood, obfuscated by its own success. The way that publicists (working both within and outside of publishing houses) are portrayed in popular culture is also explicitly tied to this obfuscation, and to how access to symbolic capital is mediated by these structures. We can observe this hierarchy at the fictional Pemberley Press in Bridget Jones’s Diary and at the fictional Empirical in Younger, where an important/not important, serious/not serious dichotomy delineates between editorial and publicity staff. The lack of scholarly curiosity in the definitional power of the publicist within contemporary culture (Edwards, 2012: 441) means that images of Bridget Jones and Lauren Heller are the enduring understandings of book publicists. This perception undermines the working conditions of contemporary book industry publicists, but does not dilute their cultural influence.
The perception of the publicist
Commonly, publicists are portrayed in television and cinema as young, attractive and potentially vapid. It is difficult to unpick whether publicists’ representation in popular culture emerges from vocationally-based perceptions, or if vocationally-based perceptions are influenced by the cultural imaginary. However, the relationship between the two is clear, as is the fact these perceptions have an effect on the work that publicists perform as well as the way that they conceptualise their perceived role in the sector. P08, a publicist in a large conglomerate publishing house, offered a suggestion as to why the stereotype of publishing industry publicists as young and attractive endures, saying:
it’s this kind of old fashioned idea that the young, the young girls better finesse the male author, which is kind of disgusting. (P08, 4 November 2020)
Taking this at face value, we see that there is a gendered power imbalance baked into the perceived success of the role of publicity and of campaigns. This might not be explicitly part of the structure of a publishing house or at the forefront of personnel decision-making, however, it is fundamental to how publicists are understood and treated within a professional context.
Many of the participants we interviewed for this research discussed the perception of the role of the publicist among their industry peers, commonly citing the stereotypes that characterise many popular cultural portrayals of publicists. P06, who had worked at both independent and conglomerate publishing houses, noted that:
But there’s a weird kind of thing with authors, and often within a publishing house, where publicists are like not considered, like, as smart as other, like, members of the publishing house. . .I’ve had authors specifically say to me, like, when I’ve walked up to them and introduced myself, like, ‘I knew you were going to be the publicist, because it’s always pretty young women under 30 who are the publicist’. (P06, 25 March 2021)
The way that P06 describes this experience indicates that this is something that has happened repeatedly over her career, and suggests that the perception that she describes is one that is commonly held among other publishing industry professionals. Here, P06’s skills, knowledge and expertise are rendered invisible and what is brought to the fore is the fact that she is a ‘pretty young woman’. The participants appear to be conscious of the ways in which the enduring stereotypes people hold with regards to publicists often overshadow their expertise, and many participants explored and countered this dynamic. P07, a senior publicist at an independent publishing house, captured the bifurcation between perception and reality that defines the way that the work of publicity is understood within the publishing sector:
I think even the word publicist kind of has this, like, oh, we’re just kind of running around opening bottles of wine and popping champagne. And we’re just there to kind of do anything at the kind of beck and call, but actually we’re media managers. And we’re organising some really high profile, intense campaigns. (P07, 3 March 2021)
P06 similarly acknowledged this duality, highlighting the tension between the ways in which authors perceive publicists and the role that a publicist plays in the success of a title. Moreover, P06’s experiences highlight the ways in which this duality plays out within the psyche of a publicist and the affective labour involved in keeping a publicity campaign on track within the context of this tension:
So it’s this weird dual thing, It’s like, you’re on the one hand very crucial to their [the author’s] book success. But on the other hand, I have lots of experiences where, like, you try not to get your ego involved, but I want to say to them, like, I’m actually like, I studied literature like I’m, I get you and your work, and I want to, like I feel invested in your literary success, but like even being told recently, like, ‘oh, you’re too smart to be a publicist. Like, I can’t wait to see what you do in the future. You know, beyond publicity’. But this is why publicity careers are so short because people get treated like shit. (P06, 25 March 2021)
Within P06’s and P07’s descriptions of their experiences is a desire to reframe the work they perform, a theme that emerged in nearly all interviews. This reframing is not radical, rather, it is an accurate reflection of the work that publicists do, and the skills and knowledges they bring to the work and develop over their careers. The way that publicists describe this internal reframing exemplifies the by-product of affective labour, wherein a tension between ‘selves’ develops as a result of professional practice (a point we will return to later). This tension between the realities of the work and the overarching perception of publicists from their industry colleagues—perceptions that are closely aligned with the representation of publicists in popular culture—shapes the professional practice of publishing industry publicists.
An informal but established hierarchy structures the interactions between the author and the publicist, which is reinforced through widely-held perceptions and expectations of publicists. P03, a publicist working at a medium-sized independent publisher, described the ways in which this hierarchy is perpetuated, often unthinkingly, by their colleagues. Moreover, the pervasive nature of this hierarchy in practice extends to all authors that a publicist interacts with, regardless of their prominence:
I think a lot of the time, a publisher will put pressure on me, for example, to be in touch with an author or to have a level of contact with an author who, say, for example, is a front list author, and that’s where it can be frustrating because it’s kind of like by even just introducing me to the author, you were setting an expectation. You are making it seem like that I am now at their whim, at their every beck and call, and that’s not what it’s going to be because they are not a priority. (P03, 7 April 2021)
We can see from P03’s testimony that when a publicist and an author work together, there is an expectation that the publicist and the author will fall into a well-worn structure that places the publicist in a position of service to the author. P02, who works at a small independent press, spoke to the pressure they feel when managing the feelings of the author and the role they play in an author’s feeling of comfort, even if this prioritised above their own:
I guess as a publicist your role, or part of your job, is to as I said make sure that authors feel comfortable and supported and everything, so sometimes I think our job is not to speak out when [or] if you feel something is a bit off. So, for example, if you have an author who, maybe it’s a different generation and has different attitudes towards um racism or homophobia or something like that, [that] can come through in a casual chat, I feel like it’s not my place to kind of say like actually you know I disagree or actually that’s really harmful or whatever. All I can say is don’t say that on air. (P02, 11 November 2020)
The nature of the author/publicist hierarchy, and the power imbalance inherent to its structure, appears to be a commonly accepted part of working in book publicity. P08 spoke about the history of this structure, the difficulties of working within it, and the ways in which it is understood to be a normal part of the job of publicity:
The hierarchy of structures means that all of the kind of senior leadership related to publicity, so my boss, my boss’s boss. . . they’ve all done this. They’ve all done the touring with difficult authors, blah, blah, blah. So there’s kind of a feeling of like, if somebody needs emotional support, they’re going to get it. But there’s no kind of formal infrastructure for that. (P08, 11 November 2020)
We asked participants about the support structures that were in place in their places of work for dealing with potentially difficult authors or blurred professional boundaries, a factor that consistently arose throughout interviews. P08’s description of the ordinary nature of ‘difficult authors’ in their work, and the lack of formal support infrastructure further reinforces the continued practice within this structure. There appears to be an expectation from both authors and publishers that the publicist’s job is to cater to the emotional wellbeing of an author, however, little consideration appears to have been given to the ways in which this practice impacts the emotional wellbeing of the publicist or sustainability of their work.
Affective labour
The work of a book publicist is varied and complex, although primary responsibility is for the promotion of an author. We explicitly distinguish between publishing house publicity staff and marketing staff, as the differences between their roles are fundamental to book publicity’s particularities and precarities (Parnell et al., 2020: 65). Within a typical structure, publicity and marketing departments are responsible for work that exists between the production and the consumption of books. Both work on promotional projects, but while marketing works to directly promote books through paid and owned media, publicity works to promote authors through earned media. The publicists we spoke to cited securing media opportunities, organising public events and promotional tours as common day-to-day tasks. Recognisable as typical public and media relations work, these activities build the profile of the author, hoping in turn to increase public visibility of their books (English and Frow, 2006). There is, however, another type of work that publishing industry publicists undertake that goes beyond the bounds of classic understanding of ‘publicity’. Clustered under the umbrella term ‘author care’, this practice has no concrete definition but is commonly used by publishers in publicists’ position descriptions (Parnell et al., 2020), and in describing the value of publishing houses to prospective authors (Zwar, 2016). It operates, therefore, as a valuable commodity in publishing.
Author care can be understood as affective labour designed to support an author through the promotional cycle of their book. If we understand the event wrangling and media relations work of publicity as the public or visible work of the profession, author care can be understood as the hidden, personal labour that often happens between just publicist and author. This could be supporting an author when their book is negatively reviewed, having dinner with an author on a book tour, or even ensuring they have their preferred pen at a book signing. These kinds of tasks are major parts of publishing industry publicists’ roles but are rarely discussed in the scholarly literature, with its focus predominantly on book promotion.
Upon the announcement of the retirement of Jane Beirn, Senior Director of publicity at HarperCollins, author Ann Pachett (2022) wrote of the long-term professional relationship that they shared. Patchett attributes much of her success to Beirn’s work and recounts many instances of support over her career:
She sends the book to radio stations and television stations (back in the day when radio stations and television stations were likely to interview novelists), and later to podcasters and bookish websites. She follows up and follows up and follows up, singing the praises of your work. If you’re lucky, she arranges endless, gruelling book tours, then listens to you complain about them.
We see the duality of the role of publicity here: the visible, ‘If you’re lucky, she arranges endless, gruelling book tours’, and the hidden, ‘then listens to you complain about them’. In the interviews we conducted with publicists, this duality – and the frequent lack of distinction between the two sides of the job – was commonly discussed. Much of the work publicists perform has characteristics of affective labour (Hardt, 1999; Hochschild, 2012) but the author care side of the role, and the impact it has on publicists, is particularly under-explored.
The immeasurability of affective labour (Bolton, 2009, 3; Hardt, 1999: 96) pushes this work to the margins. However, situating the characteristics of affective labour – that is, the transmutation of the self in order to manage the state of mind of a customer or client (Hochschild, 2012: 22; 27) – in broader perceptions of what constitutes ‘work’ or ‘valuable work’, there is not simply a lack of understanding for the affective work of author care that publicists perform, but a disregard for this within the spectrum of what constitutes meaningful or valuable work. The notion of what is and is not work is bound up in the blurred lines between what constitutes work and what constitutes leisure (Nixon and Crewe, 2004: 114). Publicists’ work often occurs in venues and at times regarded as earmarked for leisure activities, resulting in mischaracterisation of said work as leisure. Certain spaces, such as book launches and festivals, commingle work and leisure, but much of the work of author care can fall outside even these blurred boundaries: at dinner after the book launch; on the phone on a Saturday morning after a review is published. This pushes against the parameters of conventional understandings of ‘work’, and often leaves publicists in precarious and unsupported situations.
Further, while scholars like Greco et al. (2013) and Childress (2017) articulate the vocational structure that exists between author and publicist and publicist and reviewers, detailing the work that they both perform within this structure, scant attention is paid to the ways affective labour introduces a power inequity to this dynamic. The publicist acts in a supportive and subordinate role to the publisher, working to ensure the author’s success as well as their comfort. Moreover, the author represents a financial asset to the publisher, further complicating the dynamic.
The duality we discuss above of the public visibility of the author and, in turn, the invisibility of the publicist’s labour is a common feature of affective labour. This structural dynamic gives rise to questions about the long-term effects of this labour on publicists’ connection to their sense of self (Hochschild, 2012: 20). A consistent theme that emerges from our interviews was emotional exhaustion and a lack of sustainability associated with the work. Publicists’ affective labour, in particular the work they undertake to establish a positive emotional state in the authors they are working with, might be largely overlooked when considering their work, but can have a profound lasting impact on the publicists themselves. And while the affective labour individuals perform within the bounds of their professional work is not necessarily gendered, where this labour intersects with gender these effects are compounded. In exploring the increasing prevalence of commercialised affective labour, Hochschild (2012: 111) notes that ‘the general subordination of women leaves every individual woman with a weaker ‘status shield’ against the displaced feelings of others’. Thinking back on the gendered perceptions that underpin the work of publicists and public relations professionals, reinforced by the representation of these professionals in popular culture, we start to see how the combination of both the visible and invisible work that publicists undertake, together with the lack of regard for the seriousness of this work, can undermine publicists and introduce emotional precarity to the profession.
Blurring of boundaries
Working in the publishing industry, like many other cultural sectors, regularly involves working in spaces where the boundary between professional and non-professional activities is blurred. For a publicist working on a launch campaign, attending a book launch event is part of their professional practice. So too is taking an author out for dinner after the event. However, for other people at these events, the line between personal and professional is not as clear cut. For the author, the launch of their book can be a moment of public and professional as well as personal celebration, but the celebratory dinner following the launch might be viewed as further from the public/professional event, and closer to the personal. For many people attending the book launch, this is a purely social event but for the publicist it is still part of their professional work. Therefore, across all the individuals who may attend the events associated with the launch of a new book, there is a complex mix of personal and professional motivations, resulting in a blurring of boundaries between the personal and the professional:
Say we’re [in] like a bookstore where the event’s happening. That’s like, clearly a place of work and you know the ropes so you can kind of guide the situation. And then after that is often where this sort of blurring happens, because it’s like, you’re in, like, a more intimate social setting. So you’re at a bar, or you’re at a restaurant, you’re paying, which is often kind of the weird thing. (P06, 25 March 2021)
For many publicists, the blurred line between professional and personal – between public and private – can be the cause of internal tension and deliberation for the publicist as it often involves navigating different consciousnesses relating to their private and professional selves. P04 refers to the embodied nature of her work by describing her ‘publicist self’, who possesses a ‘heightened level of, like, social awareness and activity’. Dorothy Smith (1987: 7) theorises the labour involved in this kind of ‘bifurcated consciousness’ where ‘moving from one to the other. . . involve[s] a different organization of memory, attention, relevances and objectives, and indeed different presences’. The blurring between professional and personal work environments and selves reinforces the perception of publicity work as inherently social, and consequently unskilled and nonstrategic.
Despite the onus placed on individual publicists to navigate these blurred boundaries themselves, publicists often lacked the power to determine where the boundaries lay. This is compounded by the often conflicting aspects of their job, including ensuring media appearances, performing author care and delivering on employer and campaign expectations. As P06 stated:
I didn’t always feel like I got to call the shots of like, when that evening would end, you know, despite saying something like I’m so exhausted, we’ve got a really early morning. We’ve got like ABC Radio Between 5am or 6am. . .It’s always a kind of fine line, because it is the publicist author relationship is not just strictly professional, kind of intimate, and all the travelling and stuff. So yeah, tricky, tricky work to kind of distinguish those boundaries, especially when you’re like, in a darkly lit hotel bar at 10.30 at night. That’s a very social setting. (P06, 25 March 2021)
We see the ‘tricky’ nature of the boundary that P06 describes recur in our interviews with the publicists and the way it contributes to precarious labour structures. Publicists often felt that it was their responsibility to decide, manage and protect the boundary between personal and professional. In describing what it was like to be on a book tour with an author, P08 noted that:
I put up very firm boundaries. I’m like, ‘alright, you are on your own now’. Like, I’ve done my bit. And I think that’s something you learn how to do off your own steam because you have to. (P08, 4 November 2020)
Despite publicists putting up these boundaries, however, they are not always respected, with authors frequently encroaching on them. Our interviewees describe how these boundary-crossing behaviours are grounded in the expectations that govern the existing relationship set up between publicist and author, as well as reinforced by general social dynamics relating to a desire to please other people. This occurs not only within the context of author events, such as book launches or tours, but also in communication practices between a publicist and an author:
If an author that you’ve been working very closely with messages you at, you know, eight o’clock on a Saturday, while they’re reading the morning papers, and wants to kind of run through a review that they feel like it’s unfair or is good. It’s because you’ve got this kind of existing close relationship. I always felt like I couldn’t just not respond to a text, you know, for the entire weekend and start it back up on a Monday. And maybe that’s just like, me being a people pleaser, and wanting to maintain a good relationship, like I feel the pressure of replying. (P06, 25 March 2021)
Ultimately, the implications of these boundaries being encroached are potentially severe. While the kinds of situations that our interviewees described tended towards frustrating incursions on their personal lives, setting up this kind of pattern of transgression of and disrespect for personal boundaries can have severe implications for personal safety. As P06 observes,
I think I’ve been really, I’ve been really lucky in lots of ways, because I’ve never, I’ve never been put in a situation where I felt like unsafe. Yeah. And I know that that has happened to publicists. (P06, 25 March 2021)
Industry surveys conducted by Books + Publishing (2017) in Australia and The Bookseller (2017) in the UK revealed the prevalence of sexual harassment among publicists working in the publishing sector. The nature of the social/professional events and spaces that characterise a significant proportion of publicists’ work sites were identified by industry survey participants as places where harassment was ‘most likely to occur’ (Books + Publishing, 2017). Squires and Driscoll’s (2018) research into publishing industry sexual harassment similarly identifies the blurring of professional and social spaces and activities as a risk factor associated with ‘abusive behaviours’. The research participants refer to the fact that navigating boundaries can be ‘tricky’ and that that they are ‘really lucky’ for not being placed in an unsafe situation at work. This speaks to not only the prevalence of the transgression of professional boundaries among publishing publicity staff, but also the fact that the responsibility of safety falls to the publicist.
Feelings of exhaustion and burnout
One of the most pervasive themes in our discussions with publicists was a feeling of exhaustion or burnout, and our interviewees described how this was explicitly related to the perceptions and expectations that publishers, authors and the general public hold of publicists and the way that the boundaries between the professional and personal are blurred. For many, these feelings were particularly acute in relation to certain parts of the role, such as touring with authors, as a result of both the inability in a touring situation to withdraw from her professional role, and the extent of the affective labour that this professional role entailed. As P04 encapsulates,
I think sometimes, like before [Covid-19], going on tour with an author just fills me with dread. Because I just know that I’m going to have to be like, my publicist self for the next week, or whatever. I did a lot of stuff about like, work masks and how that burns you out. When you’re putting on a different sort of personality, when you go to work and all that kind of thing. (P04, 6 May 2021)
In other words, the role of the publicists has the potential to lead to burnout both because of the specific kinds of labour that it involves – being consistently sociable and subjugating their own feelings – and because of the lack of clear definition and boundaries. This is articulated by P03:
. . . what I find sometimes frustrating is feeling like a PA. I’m just like, ‘I’m not your PA’, and I think that’s, again, where a big blurring of this role, particularly in books publicity, comes in is that I am not the author’s publicist, I am the book’s publicist, and my job is to sell the book. (P03, 7 April 2021)
A final but important contributor to this pattern of burnout is that the kinds and extent of the labour publicists engage in are frequently invisible and unrecognised by their colleagues and the authors and journalists that they work with. P03 adds,
It’s people pleasing in various different ways. As I say, it is thankless work because not only do you not get recognition from your author that you’re working with, you don’t get recognition from the journalists that you work with. (P03, 7 April 2021)
Power imbalance as affective labour
The above experiences – of the perception of publicists, the blurring of boundaries, and burnout and exhaustion from the work – are indicative of a final important theme that arose from our conversations with publicists working in book publishing: the sense of a power imbalance between publicists and authors. This imbalance pervades publicists’ work, highlighting the hallmarks of affective labour inherent to this profession:
I think a big essential part of it is that publicists [are] often like young women, maybe early career, people in the publishing industry. . .And then another factor is that authors [are] often, like more powerful established people. And so starting off, like, that’s the kind of framework that you’ve got a bit of a power imbalance. (P06, 25 March 2021) When I started, I think the first author event I had to go to was with like, quite a famous author. And I just got sent up by myself, on like my third week at [the publisher], to Brisbane with this author. And my manager was like ‘Oh, you might have to take him out for dinner afterwards, And I was like, I’m like a 27-28 year old like newbie in publishing, this guy is world famous. And I have to take him out for dinner. Just me and him. (P04, 6 May 2021)
Both of these publicists speak to their perception of this power imbalance and identify some of its potential causes. Gender, age, level of experience and public profile all contribute to their perceptions of a necessary unequal dynamic between the author and the publicist. Both of these interviewees went on to hint at the potential implications of this dynamic:
Part of my nature is to sort of go ‘oh yeah, of course, like, well, we’ll do that all hang out’. Or, ‘yeah, we’ll go for dinner afterwards, we’ll go for coffee’. And I do feel a lot of guilt when I don’t do that. I do feel like I’m kind of letting down the like author schmoozing element but for me, and I’ve seen you know, stuff that’s gone on with other publicists and colleagues and to me I think I can make a pretty good call on like when it’s not going to be a good idea to take someone out. (P04, 6 May 2021) I think there’s sort of an expectation, but with the bigger more important authors you’re kind of there for them all the time. And, you know, they would know that you’re giving it your everything. (P06, 25 March 2021)
It is worth noting that the factors that these interviewees clearly identify – gender, age, experience and public profile – are not unique in contributing to unequal power dynamics in this particular context, that is, in the professional work of book publicists. Rather, these are broader social factors that could potentially shape interpersonal dynamics in any professional or social context, but that are subsequently experienced by the individuals we spoke with as directly interacting with their professional lives. In other words, these observations from our interviewees demonstrate how broader social structures inflect the specifics of the book publishing industry and of these particular roles within book publishing. These observations reinforce the argument we put forward in the theoretical setting up of this article, namely that publicists’ work is shaped by their position within the dual structures of book publishing as a field of cultural production, and broader social structures, and that both impact how their labour, as affective, is perceived and valued.
Conclusion
In this article, we make visible both the invisible influences and invisible practices that structure the work of book publicists, demonstrating ways in which perceptions, expectations and assumed hierarchies influence publicist wellbeing. This work is connected to research examining the broader systemic devaluation of women’s work in the cultural industries, a sector characterised by blurred boundaries between work and play. The professional experiences shared by the publicists that we spoke with for this research cohere with and extend upon this research and illuminate the complexities that characterises the nature of labour – and specifically the affective labour that is so commonplace in publicity roles – within the cultural sector. Moreover, this research raises questions around the ways that the particularities of book publicity professional practice intersect with gender, power and the structured hierarchy of the contemporary publishing sector.
A major issue to overcoming the problematic structures and practices described by the participants in this research is the way in which broad perception of publicists interacts with the professional relationships and working environments that define the work of publicists. When publicists are regarded by authors and their publishing colleagues as frivolous or unserious, or their work is regarded as frivolous or unserious, there exists little impetus to take issues of wellbeing, respect and safety that arise in their work seriously. We suggest that there is a tacit link between the perceptions of publicists and the consistent and accepted transgressing of professional boundaries that is so commonplace in publicists’ working lives.
Despite the perception of the unserious or frivolous nature of publicists within and beyond the publishing sector, the publicists we spoke with for this research define their work in quite different terms and clearly demonstrate the significant economic and cultural impacts that their work has on the publishing industry and the broader culture. And while many publicity careers are short-lived, those who do have long publicity careers do so because of the benefits and joys that come with the work. Any interventions into the working practices of publicists, interventions to perhaps dismantle hierarchies or increase wellbeing, should come from publicists themselves and be informed by their experiences and the care they demonstrate throughout their careers.
