On my last night in the UK before I set off for Vegas I went to the launch party of my good friend Susannah Jones's latest book 'A Missing Person's Guide to Love'. Su and I lived together at University and the party was a great opportunity to meet with a lot of our old friends and catch up.
It was also a great opportunity to meet with members of the literary community (particularly crime writers) and I ended up talking to a group of well known authors who were debating whether the most gory, horrific and violent scenes were mostly written by men. The argument was never resolved.
One of our midst was Helen Zahavi who had written the cult (iconic in Brighton) book 'Dirty Weekend' which subsequently was made into a film directed by Micael Winner starring Ian Richardson and David McCallum. When her book came out the critics savaged her for its violent content. Interestingly they made more of a personal attack on her for having written it, rather than critique the book itself.
Helen found this hard to accept and it clearly was not a nice experience for her, but her publishers told her that 'all publicity is good publicity' and I guess in this case it was for them as the book gained notoriety and the sales grew.
I don't subscribe to this theory. Look at the case of Gerald Ratner, who famously proclaimed that the jewellery his chain of nationwide shops sold was "crap". Sure he was front page news and for sure the Ratner name became synonymous with jewellery - crap jewellery and he crippled his business. That particular gaffe wasn't handled at all well in the aftermath and perhaps if Ratner had been better advised he wouldn't have made the error at all.
That is why PR is so important. All publicity is not necessarily good publicity and the media can be savage.
Comments