What is the point of being a PR person for a publishing company, if you don’t bother to respond to requests for review copies? Everyone in the “business” knows that getting published by a mainstream publisher is hard, and then getting your book reviewed is even harder. So if someone emails you to say “I’ve been asked to review such and such a book for an education magazine [likely reach around 30,000, which I know is not much by American standards but it’s a helluva lot by British standards], so may I have a review copy please?”, you would think that at least they would respond, if only to say “Get knotted”. Anyway, I’ve emailed a particular PR person 4 times now, and as there has been no response whatsoever I’ve arranged to review another title instead.
What I would love to do is compile a list, and then publish it, of all the publishers whose PR department is useless, as a warning to ever-hopeful authors not to bother pitching them. But I don’t fancy being sued for libel or something. I have compiled the list, though, so that in future I will know not to waste time approaching them regarding other books. It’s no skin off my nose, but I feel sorry for the authors who are in the hands of people who appear to do nothing.
