I want to get this out of the way first. Before someone says. Yes I do need to stop signing up to newsletters. Being a PR consultant, it’s the easiest way for me to keep up with everything happening in the publishing industry. If you’re thinking about getting into marketing or PR, that’s a free tip. It’s a difficult job. Knowing audiences. Keeping authors going. Chasing up contacts. If you can hack it, it’s a really rewarding job. While there’s a lot of rejection, it’s the highlight of my job to help a writer become a bestseller.
Some dream of it since childhood. Others turn their whole lives around off the back of a well-selling book. We hold lives and dreams in our hands. Vain, perhaps, to call it a noble profession. Yet, if you have a publicist who cares about you, it’s liquid gold. I can be the hand that carries you through the strife. Represent the beautiful world you’ve crafted. Let the world see you.
There are some people, I’ve learnt in this job, that should never be seen.
This started in 2020. The pandemic gave us an influx of new books. Traditionally and self published. Goodbye is always the hardest for me. To keep in touch (I do with all the authors I’ve worked with), I’d sign up to any newsletters. If you’d believe it, I read them all too.
I used to work with an author that wrote primarily in the crime genre. When he would come for a meeting, every woman in the office would note a chill in the air. Some would put their cardigans on. Very few would have eye contact with him. They found it too consuming.
I took him on around the month of September. He had released a crime novella about a serial killer who had a penchant for collecting women’s heads. It was the most graphic book I’ve ever read. In meetings, I’d flagged up the severe scenes of rape and the long, drawn out prose describing the killer’s relationship to his victim’s heads. It had been published and was climbing. That was the end of that.
We’re here to tell people about the book, Kim. Not critique it. I knew this was my job, and I’d seen a lot of things get audiences. Besides, I didn’t want to be one of those people that made an author pay for the sins of their pen.
When I said goodbye to him, I shook his hand. This is the first contact we’d ever had. I understood completely what the other girls in the office meant. He was the only author I didn’t send flowers. His request. They don’t last and when they rot, the smell isn’t strong enough.
I put it down to him being eccentric. Maybe too method. He took his work too seriously. What we’d seen in the office could have been a calculated crafted character to keep the aura of his books alight going forward. Until, the newsletters came.
The first newsletter detailed his new book. A serial killer that stalked women in pubs. He’d used his hometown as inspiration. A smart move. You know your hometown better than anywhere else.
The second was a little more cryptic. An inner monologue of his main character. His motive. Methods. A present he leaves at the bodies and why. Deep detail of why he would sleep with the bodies for 2 nights before he would leave. How a death rattle sounds.
The third, I can’t describe. I can’t do that to you. I was working. I stumbled to the toilet, threw up what I’d had for lunch and made a call. Waiting for the call was one of the most frustrating times of my life. I tried to distract myself, but my mind kept going back to what I’d seen. Sleep finally came at 3AM.
At around 11AM the next day, the girls in the team were crowded around our television. When I left my meeting about the romance novel I had to market, I joined them. Our heads stretched upwards and took in what we were seeing.
A man in his 30s, arrested for the kidnapping, torture and dismemberment of three women. They’d gone missing in the past month, in their local area of Lincoln.
I have to tell you, I was slightly relieved. I never have to market one of his books again.