FAQ.

Please reach out early for outside publicity help in general.

We like to start working on a book six months out from publication date, which means we usually book up about a year (sometimes more) before a book is due for publication. We do take on books quickly if we’re deeply interested and have the bandwidth.

Extra points if you reach out right after signing a book contract.

We are not a one-size-fits-all business, it has just never worked that way for us. So, unfortunately we do not have fee sheets.

We typically work on monthly retainer that ranges depending on angles we see for publicity, what an author wants, and what we imagine a publicity campaign to look and feel like logistically.

Clients have continued working with us after the traditional publicity campaign ends on an hourly basis.

Well, we love them. We have worked with big four publicity teams and small presses, and it looks pretty much the same for us either way. We love collaboration, we are happy to share our work however the inside team prefers, and we try our best to make it a fruitful relationship for our author and the publisher as well.

When a potential client reaches out we would love to know your publisher, publication date, genre, and if you’ve written some sort of query letter or summary for the book—we would love to know that.

We do read every book we take on (typically) before meeting with clients about a publicity campaign, which means when you reach out, it takes us about a month to set up a meeting. We do this so that we can make sure we’re the right team for a book and author (if not, we will definitely recommend someone else) and so that we come to an initial meeting with ideas and angles for publicity. Ideally that first meeting with us feels like a fun potion of logistics + strategy / brainstorm + buzzy excitement about we can do together.

-Press kit creation

-Pitch ideation

-Working with an inside publicity team

-Pitching media: print, online, literary journals, magazines, social media influencers (Youtube, Bloggers, Substack, newsletter-platforms, Instagram, Tiktok, Bluesky), broadcasts, podcasts, and whatever else we can find that connects to the book (nonprofits, campus groups, etc).

-Pitching events (including book tours, festivals, and some speaking engagements—depending on the project and author)

-Pitching excerpts & companion pieces. You can read our thoughts on those here.

-Brainstorming sessions with authors & weekly updates on what’s happening in the publicity campaign

We do other things as well, but this is the majority of our role.

So many folks we know in the industry are amazing, but we also understand that generally outside PR gets a bad rep.

What you’ll find with Pine State is that we have a mix of quirky weirdness when it comes to thinking outside the box, we pitch wide, we believe in giving an author enough momentum to continue our good work after a campaign ends, and we love transparency and collaboration. We like to think of ourselves as scrappy underdogs, though in truth, we are probably much more ambitious and intense than that.

While we create social media for all of our author hits, we do not manage social media channels as part of a publicity campaign, but we can recommend folks who do.

We all have different bandwidth levels and fluctuating schedules (I’m a mom, Zoe is also a literary agent, and Alisha is earning her MFA in creative nonfiction), and we each intimately understand our own abilities (and collaborate daily!), so the answer is, it depends.

We try to balance genres each season and work on books that won’t compete with one another. We often turn down books for this reason.

We have a “hell yea” rule. If it’s not a hell yea, it’s a no. We work on books that we love as readers, that we also feel we can break out in a larger way. Our hope is that every author we work with finds their people—that looks different for every single author, and we believe publicity should be flexible, specific, and unique to each author and book.