Book Publicity 2020 - How To - A Slideshow by Susannah Greenberg, President, Susannah Greenberg Public Relations, A Book Publicity Firm

Do you want to know more about book publicity? Check out this slideshow I prepared for students in a book marketing course.

My website: http://bookbuzz.com

My email: publicity@bookbuzz.com

In the News! BookExpo 2018 Panel on Children's Books, Organized by Susannah Greenberg Public Relations, is Covered in Publishers Weekly

BookExpo 2018: 

Connecting Children’s Books with Readers 

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-industry-news/article/77173-bookexpo-2018-connecting-children-s-books-with-readers.html via 



Publishers Weekly, a leading book trade magazine, covered a panel on children's books which was organized and moderated by Susannah Greenberg of Susannah Greenberg Public Relations, and took place at BookExpo 2018 on Thursday, May 31, 2018, in New York, NY at the Javits Center.

Panelists included:

• Michelle F. Bayuk, Children's Book Marketing Consultant
• Yvonne Brooks, McNally Jackson Books
• Kristin Freda, Bank Street College of Education
• Sean Qualls, Award-Winning Author and Illustrator
• Lara Starr, Chronicle Books, Chronicle Kids

CONTACT:  Susannah Greenberg, Public Relations, 

publicity@bookbuzz.com

(646) 801-7477

Where Are The Women CEOs In The Book Industry?

Where are the Women CEOs in the Book Industry?

By Susannah Greenberg  

Three recent news stories and the subsequent media coverage of them have me thinking about gender equality in the workplace and more specifically in the book industry: 

Pioneering Woman Astronaut Sally Ride's passing and posthumous coming out; 

Marissa Mayer's appointment as CEO of Yahoo at 37 years old and pregnant;

and Anne-Marie Slaughter's article in the Atlantic Why Women Still Can't Have It All.

How far have we really come nearly 50 years after the passage of the Equal Pay Act in 1963 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned sex discrimination at work? How far have we come from the days of Sally Ride's flight into space, the first for an American woman? How far if it still makes headlines that a woman, a pregnant woman, is made CEO in Silicon Valley? How far if it is still a matter of heated debate in the wake of the Atlantic article as to whether women can work and be mothers?   

  

My thoughts then turned to our own industry, which I am proud to be a part of, but it is not above the fray. Is there a glass ceiling in the book world? Do women in the book industry have an equal chance to rise to the top? How many women as they mature, gain experience and qualify for more senior management positions are forced to drop out, or start their own small businesses, because of the gender pay gap, the pyramid effect, or the lack of affordable childcare? Where are the women CEOs? Are women proportionately represented among the CEO ranks in an industry mostly populated by women?   

  

To be sure there are women CEOs in some key leadership roles in book publishing: Gina Centrello of Random House, Marjorie Scardino at Pearson, and Carolyn Reidy at Simon & Schuster, come to mind.

    

However, the Publishers Weekly Salary Survey of 2009, the most recent available online, shows a serious pay gap between men and women, and also that although women are the majority (85%) of the employees at the entry level, they do not hold the majority of leadership positions.

  

Publishers Weekly Salary Survey of 2009:

• Women avg. pay: $64,600
• Men avg. pay: $105,130
• 85% of employees with fewer than three years of experience were women. The only area where men outnumber women is in management, where the highest paying jobs are found.

What can be done? For one thing, women in publishing must be encouraged to keep up with the digital revolution transforming the book industry, from ebooks to Internet book selling, to social media marketing. This is one reason for the panels on digital books and online book marketing which I have been organizing for the Women's National Book Association New York City Chapter since 2009, (like this one in March 2012 which was written up in Publishers Weekly) which not only provide valuable information but also hold forth the role models of women succeeding in the digital realm within our industry. For another, while progress is being made, we should not become too comfortable and complacent with women's achievements in the book industry. We need to be vigilant and to continue to demand more progress or risk losing more ground. Battles can and are still being fought for women's equality and won; like the passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009.

The full moral and spiritual transformation toward justice that will allow equality in the workplace, including the book industry, equality that will benefit women, men, and families--equality for women, for gays and lesbians, for minorities, for people of different races, religions and cultures, for the disabled, for parents, for aging workers -- is slow in coming. Until then, organizations like the Women's National Book Association fulfill an important mission for women's equality, one WNBA has been fulfilling since its founding nearly 100 years ago: women helping other women succeed in this book business.

  

Of Related Interest:

CATALYST: Statistical Overview of Women in the Workplace
United States Department of Labor: Myth Busting the Pay Gap
New York Times: In Google's Inner Circle, a Falling Number of Women
Cover Story: 50 Top Women in Book Publishing. Book Business honors leading female executives who are helping to shape the industry
Book Review. The New York Times. Business Day. OFF THE SHELF. 'Good Girls' Fight to Be Journalists
The Washington Post: Marilyn Ducksworth, Former Penguin Employee, Sues Publisher for Age Discrimination

Susannah Greenberg is a past president and past publicity chair of The Women's National Book Association of New York City, and columnist for The New York Bookwoman. She is the president of a book publicity firm, Susannah Greenberg Public Relations. She can be reached atpublicity@bookbuzz.com, Twitter @suegreenbergpr, Facebook, LinkedIn or via her blog:http://bookbuzzbysgpr.blogspot.com. Susannah recently read: The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson. (Reviewed below by Fatima Shaik.)

Please get in touch with Susannah at publicity@bookbuzz.com with your comments on this article or if you can point to more data which shows what percentage of CEOs in the book industry are women. Continue the conversation on Twitter with hashtag: #wnbadiscuss.  

This article was originally published in the September 2012 New York Bookwoman, the newsletter of the Women's National Book Association New York City Chapter.  

Digital Marketing and PR for Books Panel Post-Script

From left, Susannah Greenberg, Lydia Hirt, Kelly Leonard, Iris Blasi.
Photo: Sandra Pike

March 29, 2012, New York, NY.  Gabe Habash of Publishers Weekly reported on the panel Digital Marketing and PR for Books: Driving Buzz and Sales organized by Susannah Greenberg of Susannah Greenberg Public Relations for the Women's National Book Association of New York City with panelists Iris Blasi of Hilsinger-Mendelson, Lydia Hirt of Penguin, and Kelly Leonard of Hachette Book Group.

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/51296-don-t-be-bot-like--how-to-blend-books-and-social-media.html

A web cast of the entire event can be viewed here:
http://ustre.am/IBA2

More choice snippets of commentary by the panelists can be gleaned from Twitter by searching for #wnbanyc.

Susannah Greenberg to Speak at uPublishU at Bookexpoamerica

Susannah Greenberg of Susannah Greenberg Public Relations, a book publicity firm in New York, will speak at uPublishU, a new educational arm of Bookexpoamerica, the largest trade show in the book industry in the United States, on Sunday, June 3, 2012 at the Javits Center in New York, NY. uPublishU was created to address the huge growth in self-publishing spawned by the digital revolution and the social web.

Greenberg is both organizer and speaker for the session "Building the Buzz for Books: The New Book Publicity." Greenberg will speak about the elements of the new book publicity and how to get great publicity for books, both print and eBooks, including advice on meeting the special challenges facing the self-published author; from creating strategies and goals, to writing a great pitch to the media, to building a web presence and community online, to figuring out how to reach top journalists, producers and bloggers.

Discoverability and credibility are keys for success for the self-published author and her book. They can be built if you know how, says Greenberg, and I will speak to exactly how one goes about building them, and building the buzz.

Greenberg has enlisted Publishers Weekly Editorial Director Jim Milliot to be a part of the session and Milliot will offer his insights on book publicity and speak about the special new section of the venerable book trade magazine PW which is devoted to self-publishing called PW Selects.Publishers Weekly has been the publication of record for the book trade since 1872 and reaches publishers, booksellers, librarians, agents, and media.

Publishers Weekly is a bellwether publication looked to by media for indications of what the big books are going to be and what books they need to pay attention to. And the PW reputation is golden with the media.  Authors in PW Selects will benefit from PW's longstanding relationship with general consumer media, says Greenberg. 

Greenberg has also drafted Patrick Brown, Community Manager of  Goodreads who will speak about opportunities for authors to build community and reach readers on his site. Goodreads is a social reading site with 7.3 million members, more than 100 million pageviews and 15 million unique visitors a month.

Building your community online will help build the buzz and reach readers. Goodreads has the distinct benefit of being a community solely devoted to avid book readers and the ability for the author to target niche communities of readers within who are most likely to be interested in a particular book, a marvelous benefit of specificity which the net, and Goodreads in particular, brings to book marketing and publicity, says Greenberg.

I'm delighted and honored to have been invited to participate in uPublishU, an exciting new program designed especially for self-published authors' benefit. If authors are given the right tools and an understanding of the book business, they can speed up the learning curve and successfully publish their books.  I think uPublishU will give them the tools to do the job. 

Registration for the all new uPublishU at Bookexpoamerica 2012 is open:
Register Online Now for uPublishU at BEA 2012. Your uPublishU at BEA registration includes a boxed lunch during the conference and a 1-day pass to BEA on Thursday, June 7.