Yesterday I spent part of my workday sending unsolicited e-mail messages to individual book editors at daily newspapers. My goals were to: 1) alert them to the publication of a forthcoming book, 2) point them to an e-galley link, and 3) to offer a physical review copy if the e-galley was insufficient.

I received a few replies—mainly out of the office auto replies—but one auto reply stood out. It began:

(Because of the number of queries I receive, this is an automatic response.)

Fair enough. It was good to receive a response.

It continued:

Thanks for your note. Although I can’t respond to every message, I will try to read each one.

Understood.  This is the reason that I still send out some printed press releases to daily newspapers.

And somewhere along the way, it said:

The only way to guarantee publicity is to buy an advertisement through The [deleted] advertising department…

Denise, you’re up!