PPA May Luncheon
Spotlight on HuffPost
Tuesday, May 16, 2017
: @publisherspublicityassoc ||
NAME:Claire Fallon
OUTLET:HuffPost
TITLE: Books & Culture Writer
EMAIL:
BIO: Claire Fallon is a Books & Culture Writer for HuffPost, as well as the cohost of HuffPost's “Here to Make Friends,” a podcast about The Bachelor franchise. She studied English literature at Princeton. She writes about literary fiction and trends, grammar, and language, as well as art, women in pop culture, comedy, and other aspects of culture.
Q: How do you prefer to be contacted? Phone, fax, email? Are there specific days or time of days that you prefer to be contacted?
A: I prefer to be contacted by email. I don’t have a fax number and I typically do not check my work voicemail; we operate digitally as much as possible. I’m usually on email from 8 to 6 each day.
Q: What do you want to see and when? Catalogs? Galleys? Finished books? Do you want to see all books or only select titles? Please be as specific as possible.
A: I do not need hard copies of catalogs. We receive a lot of mail and it’s time-consuming for us to go through it, so we discourage just sending everything. Especially for significant releases, we prefer to get a galley and a finished book when available.
Since we are a two-person operation with other reporting responsibilities outside of the book world, we are fairly limited in what we can and choose to cover. Our fiction coverage is primarily literary fiction geared toward adults, as well as books that would be appropriate for major features like hot beach reads (though we typically take a more literary approach to those lists as well). We cover some narrative/literary nonfiction, such as memoir, and nonfiction on literary figures, grammar, and linguistics. We do not, or only rarely, cover straight nonfiction with lifestyle, business, and political angles (business books, self-help, political books, etc.). We rarely cover children’s books and young adult books, and are more likely to do so if there is a clear angle for a trend piece or a social justice angle.
Q: What is your lead-time? How far in advance would you like to know about upcoming books?
A: Our lead time is relatively short, since we’re an online publisher and more responsive to the daily news cycle. However, for coverage planning purposes, it’s ideal to know about books 3 to 6 months ahead of time.
Q: Do you prefer to deal with one person at each house? If so, who? Or are you open to contact from individual publicists?
A: I am fine dealing with multiple people from each house or individual publicists, though a previous relationship is very helpful in getting my attention when hearing from a publicist who isn’t affiliated with a publisher.
Q: Who else should we send books or galleys to?
A: Editors for relevant pages (parenting books to Parents, business books to Business, feminist books to Women, etc.)
Q: Please briefly outline your demographics.
A: We gear our page toward young and middle-aged women who are progressive and politically engaged. Our coverage typically has a strong feminist and pro-diversity bent.
NAME:Maddie Crum
PUBLICATION:HuffPost
TITLE: Books & Culture Writer
EMAIL:
BIO: Maddie Crum is a Books and Culture Writer at HuffPost, and an MFA candidate at Brooklyn College. She writes about literature, art, film and pop culture. She's from Texas, and lives in Brooklyn with her husband.
Q: How do you prefer to be contacted? Phone, fax, email? Are there specific days or time of days that you prefer to be contacted?
A: I prefer to be contacted via e-mail.
Q: What do you want to see and when? Catalogs? Galleys? Finished books? Do you want to see all books or only select titles? Please be as specific as possible.
A: Digital catalogs are great, and we’d love to take a look at these as early as possible. We’re happy to see all books from the genres outlined below (literary fiction, YA, science-fiction, and nonfiction centered on art, photography, women’s issues, or pop culture). Otherwise, please only send titles on request.
Q: What is your lead-time? How far in advance would you like to know about upcoming books?
A: Our lead time for the weekly book review, The Bottom Line, is very short -- we usually decide what we’ll be reviewing no more than a month ahead of pub date.
But, we also arrange seasonal preview lists and other big recommendation roundups (i.e. beach reads), and for these, we start planning a few months in advance.
And, for big literary names (which in the past have included Mary Gaitskill, Jim Shepherd, Kazuo Ishiguro, Neil Gaiman and Ursula K. Le Guin), we like to arrange interviews a few months in advance. The same goes for public figures (which in the past have included Lindy West and Aziz Ansari).
So, for that purpose, we’re happy to get in galleys, so we can start picking the titles early.
Q: Do you prefer to deal with one person at each house? If so, who? Or are you open to contact from individual publicists?
A: We’re open to contact from individual publicists, but seasonal catalogs rather than pitches for individual books usually wind up being more useful.
Q: Who else should we send books or galleys to at VICE News Tonight?
A: For fiction titles (of all genres, but especially literary, YA and sci-fi), personal essays collections, art and photography books, pop culture books, and nonfiction centered on women’s issues, send books to Culture Reporters Maddie Crum and Claire Fallon. We open all book mail ourselves, and we’re the ones keeping tabs on what we’ll cover, and when, and in what way.
But, we seldom cover lifestyle topics -- cooking, crafting, etc. -- and still receive these books from publicists. These titles should instead be sent to Kristen Aiken, the site’s Executive Lifestyle Editor.
We also do not cover children’s books or middle grade books. These titles should be sent to Emily McComb’s, the Editorial Director for the Parents section.
We also seldom cover history books on the site.