Secrets Of A Book Publicist

What does it take to sell a book?

If you’ve read or written about books in the last five years, there’s a good chance Amy Hagedorn had something to do with it. The young PR power player was a publicist at Penguin Random House, where she worked on campaigns for Claire Dederer, Kaveh Akbar, Joan Didion, Tayi Tibble, Dolly Alderton, and more. I first met Amy in 2022, when she cold-emailed me and asked if I wanted to get lunch in Bushwick. Over Pad Thai and lychee martinis, we gabbed about books and how to make coverage of them more exciting. Amy is passionate about shaking up the publicity industry by injecting a little something called fun into her campaigns, whether she’s throwing splashy parties, pitching interactive concepts, or pairing her authors with of-the-moment writers for interviews.

In a time when it feels like authors, publishers, and readers are paying attention to the mechanisms behind not just book publishing, but marketing and PR, we wanted to ask an expert in the field to give a peek behind the curtain and try to distill the elusive alchemy that makes a book sell.