A Woman’s World
On being a Male Book Publicist
Adam Howard is Publicist at independent publisher Scribe UK, working on media and marketing campaigns for books such as Universal Harvester by John Darnielle, Destined for War by Graham Allison and A World of Three Zeroes by Muhammad Yunus. He provides the most recent installment in our monthly series of insights into the publishing industry.
I’ve thought about it a lot and can’t for the life of me figure out why the vast majority of publicists in publishing are ladies. When I began my former job as events coordinator at Foyles and played host to a meeting of the networking group Publishers’ Publicity Circle (PPC) for the first time, I stood at the back of the auditorium and marvelled at the male-to-female ratio of people in the room — you can, at most meetings, count the number of men on one hand. I’ve always worked in jobs in creative industries that skewed towards women majorities and even went to university that, as rumour had it at the time, was 80% women and gay men, but I’d never realised quite how tilted the scales were in this particular area of the industry until I began working in it.
Most of my role as a publicist involves talking to editors, journalists, radio producers and bloggers, basically trying to convince them (begging, pleading) to say something nice about a book so that we can sell some more copies of it. Or, I'll be talking to bookshops, festivals and event programmers, convincing them that having my author talk about their book will draw a crowd. I'm lucky, I think, in that the quality of Scribe's list is exceptional, so it's easy to be passionate about the books I work on and I'm fulfilled, work-wise, by drumming up that passion in others.
Day-to-day, you don't interact very much with other publicists, but when you do it's rarely antagonistic — while technically we're all rivals competing for column inches and airtime, the mode of the industry is generally friendly and collaborative. But because your work is often isolated from others' it's only on occasions where large volumes of publicists come together — PPC meetings, conferences, festivals — that I’ll find myself being one of a only a handful of my gender in the room. It’s got to the point that I feel an automatic affinity when I meet another male publicist — our eyes will meet across the room and I’ll think to myself: ‘Is the fact that we’re both dudes enough to go on to start a conversation?’ But in the end I usually won’t because a) I’m pretty shy for a publicist and b) what if he wants to talk about football or something? I’m really not one to gravitate towards other men socially anyway. Growing up almost all my friends with girls, and now as an adult there’s at least a 50/50 split. I draw inspiration in both my social and professional spheres from the inspiring women around me – the amazing women I work with at Scribe and the women writers and musicians that I grew up reading and listening to — there has never and will never be an issue with me being the only man in the room.
My point, then, is we’re a rare breed, the Male Publicist — and that makes for a somewhat unique experience. Generally speaking, if you’re a white, middle-class, able-bodied, cisgender man (which I am, as are, to my knowledge, all the other male publicists that I’ve met — this is something that should certainly change ASAP), you don’t spend much time thinking about the intersections upon which your identity lays. So it's surprising when you’re suddenly at a conference that has a talk on navigating the workplace as a woman. I didn't begrudge it at all (it was very engaging!) but it was the first time I've ever been at an event that has presumed its audience would be women without marketing itself towards them explicitly. I'm almost certain that every woman in that audience has had the opposite experience on multiple occasions.
That’s not to say being a man in a woman-dominated industry puts me at any kind of advantage or disadvantage among my peers, but it does make me conscious of my position in relation to everyone else in a way that I’m rarely made aware of usually. And whilst being gay in an industry that is largely straight has made me feel a little alienated in the past, I wouldn’t suggest for a moment that being the only man in the room is akin to being a minority — of course it isn’t. What I do think the experience does, though, is act as an exercise for empathy. If being the only person ‘like you’ in one way or another in a throng of people makes you feel a little strange in spite of all you advantages, then imagine what it’s like having that experience as a part of a systemically disadvantaged group. I do often wonder if I'm treated differently, that I'm being oblivious to a male or female bias in the people I work with, but aside from the times where I've been mistaken for a friend of the author rather than a publicist, I don't really notice it. At most my experience is that of being a novelty, something different — not ideal, maybe, but far more benign than the experience of women working in male-dominated industries.
And at the end of the day, we’ll always have Cher: