Books: "Celeb-o-grams" are the new grail for book promoters

In May, Picador Books sent a copy of an upcoming thriller, Christopher Yates’s “Grist Mill Road,” to the actress Krysten Ritter. The publicity team was thrilled when Ritter, the star of the Netflix series “Jessica Jones,” agreed to blurb the book — and even more thrilled when, unprompted, she shared a picture of it with her 655,000 followers on Instagram. “There’s a good chance her Instagram is going to help the book more than her blurb on the back cover, which will mostly be seen by people picking it up in a physical bookstore,” says James Meader, Picador’s executive director of publicity.

Increasingly, book publicists are working to get new hardcovers into celebrities’ hands — not in hopes of a film option but a simple tweet, Instagram photo or Facebook post. These little endorsements can reach a much larger audience than an interview with the author on a popular television show or a rave review in a major newspaper. “In previous times, you would have the Oprah or Daily Show bump,” says Todd Doughty, the director of publicity at Doubleday. “Now you have the Reese Witherspoon bump from Instagram.”

Witherspoon and Ritter are two of several actresses, including Sarah Jessica Parker, Emma Watson, Lena Dunham and Emma Roberts, who share photos of their favorite books with millions of followers on Instagram. While it is difficult to isolate the impact of a social-media post from the other facets of a promotional campaign, nearly all the major publishing houses see these accounts as a way to connect with audiences that would be difficult to reach through the traditional organs of book publicity. Watson’s pictures, for example, go out to 38 million Instagram followers, while an interview on NPR’s popular “Fresh Air” radio program reaches about a million listeners. “It’s absolutely something we think about,” says Miriam Parker, an associate publisher at Ecco Books. “We try to get books to people with big social-media followings and are strategic about it.”

A person need not necessarily be a celebrity to attract a publishing house’s attention. “What we really look for is people who are a little more niche, who do make sense for a particular title,” says Lydia Hirt, the marketing director at Riverhead Books and Viking Books. Instagram’s director of fashion partnerships, Eva Chen, for example, is not a household name, but she regularly recommends books to her 850,000 followers. “She’s somebody who absolutely puts books in front of a group of people who may not have normally come across them,” says Cristina Gilbert, the vice president of sales and marketing at Bloomsbury. Chen’s endorsements of young-adult fiction are an unlikely pairing with her carefully composed photographs of beauty products, handbags and designer shoes — which is exactly what makes them so valuable to book publicists, who might struggle to reach her audience through more traditional outreach. Other book publicists have received promotional boosts from the comedian Patton Oswalt on Twitter and the fashion designer Zac Posen on Instagram.

_NY Times