INTERVIEW: Hollay Ghadery, Book Publicist and Author of Fuse: A Memoir

Interview by Michèle Dawson Haber

Hollay Ghadery is a Canada-based book publicist and multi-genre author who is active in a multitude of book spaces. I met Hollay through the Canadian Nonfiction Collective and then read her debut, Fuse: A Memoir, which was published in 2021.

Reading Fuse, I was struck by the juxtaposition of her fearless, determined voice with her tormented narrative of struggling through addiction, mental illness, and an eating disorder. A key theme in Hollay’s writing is about the fight for control over one’s identity — a topic I find endlessly fascinating. When I realized she is also a book publicist, I was doubly intrigued. Hollay agreed to sit down with me to talk about the work of a publicist, her writing, and the most beneficial promotional and publicity practices for writers.

Michèle Dawson Haber: Hollay, I’m thrilled to speak with you today. You are so accomplished, it’s hard to know where to start! I really enjoyed Fuse, your memoir for which you won the 2023 Canadian Book Club Award in the nonfiction/memoir category, and you’ve been going full tilt since, writing a number of other books in different genres. But before we get to how you sustain such extraordinary output, I’d love it if you could tell me how and when your career as a book publicist began.

Hollay Ghadery: I worked in corporate communications and public relations (PR) for about twenty years, first as freelance then through my company, River Street Writing, which was established in 2010 as a corporate writing and PR consulting firm. In 2023 one of my biggest contracts did not renew, which was for the best. We were beginning to have major differences of opinion, and I was already not happy.

I had been looking around to do meaningful work with the WWF or Greenpeace, or David Suzuki or something that would allow me to sleep at night. I decided to shift the focus of River Street and put all my experience into book publicity, even though I knew there was little money in the arts, and I have four children to support. Although I wanted to do something in climate activism, I realized that the arts are also important, and they intersect a lot with my activism in other areas. I’ve been proud to represent many books about climate action, so I haven’t felt totally lost. And I get to spend my entire days with books!

MDH: How easy is it to do publicity for a nonfiction author?

HG: In my experience, nonfiction is the easiest genre to present to traditional media. You’re more likely pitching a news station or a write up in a newspaper if you’re talking about life, especially if what you’re writing about happens to be really salient and topical. Not everybody wants to talk to a novelist, unless they’re a big-name novelist. Same with poetry. But nonfiction is comparatively easier than other genres. When I say easy, nothing’s easy right now, everything’s a bit of a slog — but you’re more likely to have someone willing to talk to you about a nonfiction book, because it’s easy to take a news angle with it. That’s true for memoir, biography, personal essay, and science.

MDH: Is the job of a book publicist the same in Canada as it is in the US?

HG: I gather it is, yes. Every publicity firm does things a little bit differently, but it’s basically the same: reaching out to traditional media, earned media, legacy media, occasionally looking into paid media, setting up events, readings, occasionally looking at festivals, and working with new media, whether that’s podcasts, social media, and blogs.

MDH: Could you tell me more about paid media?

HG: Paid media is coverage that you pay for. I don’t do much paid media with my clients. There are a lot of scams out there. For example, someone will say, “Oh, give me $300 and I guarantee you a review in The Washington Post.” Earned media is coverage you get without paying, like Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly, but you can pay for spots there as well, so there are some media that cross borders. But there are certain paid media platforms like Kirkus and Bookstr, which is a really big platform out of New York City that does organic content and has a lot of reach. Bookstr has paid media, and they do a really good job. So, there are some paid media that I would say are worth it, but I encourage people to be careful.

For social media, don’t only look at the platform and the followers, look at engagement. If somebody has 20,000 followers, but only 10 likes per post, that’s terrible, and probably most of their followers are bots. Good engagement, about 3% of total followers, is actually hard to get. If it’s less than 3% it’s probably not legit. Or if it is legit, you probably don’t want to trust their promotion expertise.

MDH: And what about non-traditional media?

HG: There’s a lot of new media that’s coming in and sweeping into where traditional media used to be. It’s a bit like the Wild West sometimes, but it’s filling a very necessary need. Something that River Street does that’s quite different from a lot of publicity firms, is we create organic content. On our website we put up blogs, special interviews, features and excerpts, and we spotlight authors on our social media.

We don’t only spotlight authors we represent, though they get the majority of our attention, we talk about authors and with book adjacent people we admire, for example, podcasters. We’re interested in everybody, and we try to do what makes us happy, to celebrate the people who celebrate literature and, of course, who celebrate us. The effect is like a nice, cozy community of people who respect each other and love books.

MDH: I’m curious about how much of your work crosses over into the US. Do you work primarily for Canadian authors? Do your publicity efforts include the US market?

HG:  Yes, I work primarily for Canadian writers. Sometimes I extend my work into the US. I’m a member of the US National Book Critics Circle and write one or two reviews a year for literary platforms. So, I do reach out to some of my colleagues there and even in Europe and Australia. And for podcasts, it doesn’t matter. But Canada is really my focus.

MDH: How do you decide whether or not to take on a new author?

HG: We don’t take on just anybody. We interview people just as much as they’re interviewing us. We need to get the feeling that this is not someone who’s going to micromanage us, or who isn’t someone who thinks they know everything because they read one article on publicity 20 years ago. We ask for a copy of the book and read a good chunk of it. If we like what we’re reading, we set up a meeting to discuss how we do things and our approach, which is to under promise, over deliver.

We make it clear that absolutely nothing is guaranteed when it comes to publicity. The only thing we can guarantee is the organic content we create. We also make sure the author has checked with their publisher and that their publisher is cool that they’re working with an external publicist. We will not work with an author if their publisher is not on board.

MDH: Those aspiring to publish a memoir right now are inundated with the message, “memoir isn’t selling.” Based on your experience, do you think this is true?

HG: I can’t tell you. One thing about working in publicity or any communications is that it’s very hard to get a measurable return on investment. We send our little spaceships out there into the world, and we don’t really know what happens after that. Sometimes, if you run a social media ad, you can see who’s clicking, and you can try to follow that trail. But if you get a review in a big newspaper, I won’t know if anybody actually went out there and bought the book after reading it.

As far as memoir goes, I can only comment from the perspective of readers. I’m not speaking to sales because, although there are intersections, there’s a difference between marketing and sales and publicity. We’re not the people placing books in bookstores, that’s marketing and sales. But when we put books out to our social media reviewers, BookTokkers, bookstagrammers, or booktubers, we are far more likely to get a request for a memoir. It is one of our most popular genres.

MDH: What would you advise the nonfiction author who hates social media and doesn’t have much of an online presence? And related, how much self-promotion do you expect from your authors?

HG: I encourage all authors to get on at least one social media platform. If you’re not social media savvy and are only going to pick one, it’s probably not going to be TikTok, although there is a thriving literary and nonfiction readership there. However, BookTok tends to focus on romance and genre fiction, like fantasy. Instagram is usually a good place to start, and then you’re automatically with Facebook too. Bluesky is pretty cool for an X alternative without the icky, slimy guilt.

One thing I constantly say to people is, if you stay in your lane, there’s no traffic. Just be yourself, whoever that is. Whatever you post, be sincere. Not everyone’s going to follow you, but you will find your people and your readership. Yeah, it will take a while, but it’s possible. If an author refuses to do self-promotion, that’s OK. If I like a book enough, I don’t care. I’m going to be loud enough for the both of us.

I will however tell authors about all the phenomenal opportunities I’ve had as an author from being on social media. I’ve been invited to speak at universities, be a part of a reading series, contribute to anthologies, appear on podcasts, and collaborate with filmmakers. Many of these are paid opportunities. There is so much that wouldn’t have been possible for me as an author if it weren’t for social media.

MDH: I know you also are a book reviewer; can you tell me more about this? Do you think it helps move the needle on book sales?

HG: I don’t know how many people read a review and think, “I need to buy that book.” It depends where the book review is. For those people who still read newspapers, maybe. Blogs, too. As an author and publicist, it is almost irrelevant to me whether reviews increase sales or not. They do two other important things. Number one, they make the authors happy, especially if the platform is prestigious. And two, it helps with visibility.

This speaks to the Rule of 27 in marketing: it takes twenty-seven times to see something for it to start taking up real estate in somebody’s brain. So, posting about that review gives an author more opportunities to put their book in front of readers, and it provides a solid opportunity for a pull quote from a recognizable name in the media landscape, regardless of whether the author’s audience actually subscribe to the media platform. It’s about ensuring that potential readers are seeing it and hearing about it again and again from a variety of sources. The more people see that book cover, the closer you get to that threshold.

MDH: What’s it like being both an author and a publicist? How does one inform the other? When you were writing your memoir Fuse, about coming to terms with your Iranian/Canadian identity and your struggles with mental health, did you ever think about the market for memoirs like yours? Aspiring writers are always told, “write for yourself, not the market,” but I wonder if this is hard to turn off in your own writing?

HG: Not at all. When I wrote Fuse, I was writing it for me and people like me, but I wasn’t necessarily thinking about a giant market. I was just thinking — and I know this is so cliché — I want to write a book that I wish exists but doesn’t. I was writing because I felt alone for so long. It scared me that girls were dying, and I needed to write about it. I’m talking about the fact that there’s this major issue with biracial, mixed-race women and mental illness, especially when it comes to eating disorders. But no one’s talking about it. I was aware that some people might see themselves in my story, but I did not expect so many. That was incredibly shocking to me. And lovely and scary.

Also, the fact that I wrote the memoir, then poetry, then flash fiction, and then I have a novel coming out (which is the most marketable thing I’ve done), and I have a kids book coming out next year, and right now I’m writing poetry again — if I gave a crap about publicity and marketing and sales, I wouldn’t be doing all this. I’d be writing smut, not poetry. Smut sells, big time. I know — I read it! And, having so many books come out so close together is not great from a marketing perspective. So, the answer is my author and publicity roles are completely separate. I don’t really think about the market, I just write what I need to write for me.

MDH: Can you tell me more about your publications that have come out since Fuse, and what’s still to come?

HG: In 2023 I published Rebellion Box, a collection of poems. It came out with Saskatchewan’s award-winning little press-on-the-prairie, Radiant Press. And then in September, Gordon Hill press, which is a press in Ontario that focuses on writers with invisible illnesses, published my short fiction collection, Widow Fantasies. Then I have a novel coming out with Palimpsest Press in 2025 which is narrated entirely by a sock puppet.

MDH: That’s hilarious!

HG: Yeah, it was so much fun but exhausting. The year I wrote it was world consuming. I wrote that novel like I was in another world. I was constantly thinking about it. I talked to the sock puppet more than I talked to my family! Then, I have the hardest thing I’ve ever written in my life coming out, which is a 1000-word children’s book. It’s done now, and I don’t know if I’ll ever do it again.

MDH: Congratulations. That’s fantastic. Wow, wow, wow. So you’ve written all these other books, and you’ve got other book adjacent gigs—for example a podcast and a book club—how do you do all of this while working full time as a publicist?

HG: I don’t sleep a lot. It’s nothing to be valorized. On my part it’s unhealthy. It relates to my OCD and addiction. A lot of addicts do this kind of thing when we stop using. We just keep ourselves really busy. That’s my experience anyway. But number one, I do it because I love it. I don’t have hobbies. Reading books — that’s my hobby. The only things I do that are not book related are working out and being out in nature. (I won’t count hanging out with my family because that’s not a hobby; that’s a primordial need.)

But I find I’m not leaving time for anything else, and I’m having to dial back because it’s becoming problematic. And also, not only do I not want to glorify what I’ve done, but I also want to speak to this illusion of everything happening quickly. A lot of these books—the poetry, the memoir and the short fiction and even the kids book—were all written in fits and starts over the years while I was still an addict. Everything came together once I got sober, and then it all got accepted relatively quickly.

MDH: If you could give only one piece of advice to an aspiring nonfiction author, what would it be?

HG: It would be to read a lot. Read nonfiction that excites you, that you’re passionate about but also don’t be afraid to step outside of what you think you like and read something different. Experiment. Have fun. Try writing different styles of nonfiction. Read, read, read: voraciously, widely, and passionately.

MDH: Thank you so much, Hollay. It’s been a pleasure to speak with you.