I spent some time with Penguin’s stunning On The Road app this week, it’s a treasure trove of engaging content, illuminating back-story and to top it all off it's a book I love.  However what really caught my eye was the pre-publication letter from Patricia McManus, the Publicity Director of Viking, to Jack Kerouac.

It may have been written 54 years ago but it highlights just how little has changed between then and now in terms of a traditional publicity campaign. She discusses the pitches she wants to put forward to the key magazines, asks him for his personal contacts within the press, suggests the regional contacts she thinks will support him as a local author, and explains the difficulties of getting coverage - 'it takes a lot of beating and many bushes to flush out a few worthwhile birds'.

Roll on 50 years and the media has just started changing, becoming more dynamic and it’s increasingly clear that the traditional campaign isn't enough to get the message out, especially for small publishers where pr coverage is their only form of advertising and they have to work every possible angle.

In 2011 readers want their media to be up-to-the-minute and delivered in a bespoke way. They read newspapers online, watch tv on-demand, and read features on magazine websites rather than waiting for the printed version. They can communicate with huge numbers of people including friends, the media, celebrities and even authors through social networking sites and blogs. It isn’t the information super-highway anymore, it’s the information out-of-town superstore, where you have a mass of informative products each with its own varieties and brands. This means that no two people’s information shopping baskets are ever the same, and it’s the job of the publicity (and/or marketing) department to make sure that somewhere, in those baskets, are our books.

It can sometimes feel like a thankless role and often goes unsung (just look at The Booksellers list of Rising Stars) but publicists know just how important their job can be to the success of a book. Their role, as the voice of the book, is even more vital now as they have hundreds of contacts for every campaign, hey have to not only create press releases to entice journalists but also write content directly aimed at consumers and even on occasions become online surrogates for authors. Modern book PR is a balancing act between ensuring that the traditional media campaign works and engaging with new media. You have to make sure you target both bloggers and literary editors with proof copies and launch event invites, place features on influential websites as well as in magazines, and get authors up and running on the most relevant social networks as well as out to events.

At DBP we take full advantage of these changes to the way we communicate: we tweet, post on facebook and work closely with our authors to get them connecting with their readers. We cultivate relationships with bloggers, influential websites and the traditional press. But we also like to think a little outside the box, so we have gathered an ever growing review team of real readers who get early copies of our books, have a newsroom blog with all our press releases and are just about to launch our first batch of eBook proofs. All of this means that whilst we are beating more bushes, hopefully we are also flushing out more worthwhile birds as well.