publicity

  • All about Anthologies: A Roundtable Discussion

    All about Anthologies: A Roundtable Discussion

    With Lilly Dancyger, Sari Botton, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, and Christine Taylor.

  • “Dear Abby” for Books

    Stop any comparisons… turn to your own project with laser-beam focus, and bolster your own campaign as if you’ve spent years of blood, sweat, and tears working on this creative achievement—because chances are, you have spent years working on it.…

  • Hating Your Own Book Trailer

    Slate is on the case, looking at why so many book trailers are self-loathing: Behold Jonathan Franzen, opening his book trailer for Freedom with the words: “This might be a good place for me to register my profound discomfort at…

  • Annoying Authors

    Writer Delilah Dawson on why self-promotion for authors is a bad idea: From the very beginning of my writing career, I’ve been told that publishers want a writer to have a brand, a platform, a blog, a built-in army of…

  • A Nation of Readers

    At The Atlantic, Yori Applebaum chronicles a marketing tactic taken by American publishers in the midst of World War II. They sent free books to the troops overseas, succeeding in raising sales, Applebaum argues, by making a nation of readers.

  • The Self-Promotional Balancing Act

    When does sending an email blast about an upcoming event become spam? Writers are as much publicists as they are authors, and social media hasn’t made things any easier. Over at Beyond the Margins, Randy Susan Meyers explores how much is…

  • Paying for a Book Tour

    Katey Schultz published her debut collection of stories, Flashes of War, through a university press. Lacking the support of a major publishing house meant Schultz ended up self-financing her book tour. To get started, she spent $12,000 on a publicist, tour…

  • Where Has All the Anonymity Gone?

    What are the cultural consequences of cell phone cameras, social media websites, and online photo hosts? The degradation of anonymity and an obscured understanding of privacy. It’s shockingly simple to identify people on the web—whether to scorn them for an…

  • Welcome to Rumpus Books

    At The Rumpus, we believe that a healthy literary culture is one which embraces writing of all kinds, by authors of all stripes – young and old, established and emerging, traditional and experimental, writing from the margins or from (or…

  • What I Learned at AWP

    The Rumpus dispatched dozens of our top reporters to Chicago. None of them were heard from again.