Q&A: Sabah Khan, head of publicity, Simon & Schuster UK

How has your approach to staff/author care evolved since the return to non-remote working and live events?

I think the pandemic really blurred the lines between the work and home life balance, even more so for publicists. We tend to be "on" all the time anyway, especially if we have events on the weekends and during the evenings – so we must be more aware now than ever that establishing a clear line between work and actual life is allowed, and be given permission by those in the industry around us to do so.

This means that everyone needs to be on the same page about what a good balance looks like from the outset – so having the conversation early on with authors and agents, setting and managing expectations and laying the campaign framework so everyone knows exactly what’s happening.

Often a publicist is the person who (alongside the editor/agent) has a direct relationship with the author and is with them for a lot of their publishing journey, so you can end up feeling responsible for their emotional wellbeing. It is important to establish the perimeters of this relationship early on too, so that you can work well together and be collaborative, but with the understanding that you’re both two pieces of a publishing puzzle and on the same side. This is where agents can also help by being transparent and sharing important details of the publishing process. No one can be wholly responsible for the success or failure of a book, and it can lead to a lot of pressure being placed on people which is really unfair.

I do think the pandemic also reminded us of the importance of looking after ourselves outside of work, so it feels like this is a conversation we’re having more regularly across the industry which is positive. At S&S we’re having mental health check-ins with our teams too and this is so important.

Authors, publicists and marketers have all been strongly impacted by changing working/events patterns. How do you manage the increased workload and how do you see them further evolving?

For me, a lot of the clarity around workload comes down to having honest conversations from the outset. Is doing this event actually going to sell books, or should the priority for this campaign be something else? What is really going to be meaningful? Getting a group of people together to discuss these things can have an immediate impact to focus the mind and help to make the workload more manageable.

We also have to acknowledge that the workload for everyone is up across the board – everyone is publishing more, editors are buying more, which puts pressure on M&P and sales teams – and it does mean that everyone is working to a really high capacity. Sometimes just saying this out loud makes a difference, and really being aware that we don’t have the down time anymore.

On the event circuit, we’re still finding our feet post pandemic, some festivals have bounced back, and others haven’t and it is the same for bookshop events. I’m hopeful that things will settle into something a bit more consistent in the coming months and as we look ahead to schedules and publishing for next year, we can be more strategic about where we focus our time and energy in terms of publishing.

Everyone is busy and we know how tough it is to make things work – what motivates you?

Personally, I’m motivated by my team – being surrounded by people who love what they do and really champion and believe in putting these stories out makes everything a little easier because we’re all on the same page.

I also have some hugely exciting campaign work coming up – Faiza Shaheen, Eva Verde, Patrick Stewart… it does always help to remember what a privilege it is to work in an industry I care so deeply about.

Sabah Khan will form part of the panel for “Pastoral or professional? Looking after our authors and our publicists” in partnership with the Publishers’ Publicity Circle at The Bookseller’s Marketing & Publicity Conference.