Meet the Publicist: Fauzia Burke

In 1995, the web was nonetheless in its infancy and lots of within the publishing trade have been making an attempt to disregard it. Fauzia Burke, a tech-savvy publicity and advertising and marketing skilled, didn’t. She had such a robust imaginative and prescient of how the web might assist authors, which led her to stop her publishing job and launch FSB Associates, a e book publicity agency that she initially operated out of her residence in New Jersey.

With the assistance of Listservs, newsgroups, and dial-up modems, Burke created a proprietary system of on-line advertising and marketing, publicity, and consulting companies for authors and publishers. Since then, FSB Associates has promoted such authors as Alan Alda, Mika Brzezinski, Deepak Chopra, Arianna Huffington, and Charles Spencer.

Now primarily based in Carlsbad, Calif., FSB Associates has executed greater than 2,000 e book publicity campaigns. At the moment the group contains COO John Burke, Burke’s husband; senior publicity managers Michelle Fitzgerald and Anna Sacca; web site supervisor Syrah Burke and digital advertising and marketing supervisor Aliya Burke, Burke’s daughters; and a number of other assistants. The corporate works to position tales about its shoppers in such shops because the Day by day Beast, Entrepreneur, Quick Firm, Forbes, Oprah.com, Salon, USA At the moment, and Vice. It additionally locations authors on on-line video exhibits, podcasts, blogs, and radio exhibits, and with social media influencers. “We set up e book excursions and digital occasions,” Burke mentioned.

Burke was born in Pakistan and settled together with her household in Queens, N.Y., in 1981. After graduating from Queens Faculty with a level in English, she held positions in advertising and marketing and publicity at Springer-Verlag, Wiley, and Henry Holt, the place she had her web epiphany. “Publishing will not be precisely a B2C [business-to-consumers] surroundings; it’s a B2B [business-to-business] one: we promote to bookstores, and bookstores promote to customers,” she mentioned. “However on the web, we might attain customers straight, and we focus our efforts on shopper advertising and marketing.”

Burke mentioned she might see how the web would “completely upend how we market, how we will join with folks, and the way our readers and authors can join with one another.”

Eighteen months after launching FSB, Burke had so many purchasers—together with Greg Hamlin, her former boss at Holt—that she satisfied her husband to stop his job as gross sales director at Springer-Verlag and be part of the corporate. In 2014, the Burkes moved to California and targeted FSB on on-line advertising and marketing and promotion. “We’re a digital firm doing digital advertising and marketing, so Covid-19 has had much less of an impression on us,” Burke mentioned. “We have been already organized to work from home. Nonetheless, we needed to pivot from in-person occasions to digital ones utilizing quite a lot of video conferencing platforms.”

About 98% of FSB’s enterprise is referral primarily based, Burke mentioned. The corporate locations options and secures on-line publicity for its shoppers by web site editors, bloggers, social media influencers, and podcasters. “From the start, our mannequin has been to pitch one particular person at a time: we’ve labored with editors—some for 10, 20 years—all the time on a one-to-one foundation,” she famous.

Burke additionally writes for on-line publications, together with the Huffington Submit. And in 2016, her e book On-line Advertising for Busy Authors: A Step-by-Step Information was revealed by Berrett-Koehler.

In March 2018, FSB launched PubSite, an internet platform designed to permit authors to create and keep their very own web sites. Burke mentioned FSB constructed it “from the bottom up.” Every creator web site can show and hyperlink to social media pages, supply mailing checklist sign-ups, launch new blogs or import present ones, host on-line creator occasions, and help video, audio, and e-commerce, all for $19.99 per thirty days. By December 2019, PubSite was supporting practically 200 creator web sites, cut up between fiction (48%) and nonfiction authors (44%), with youngsters’s and YA writers accounting for the stability. Amongst these utilizing the positioning are the estates of Tom Clancy and Robert Parker, in addition to literary brokers (McKinnon Literary) and publishers, amongst them Secant Publishing.

“It’s been thrilling to see folks in publishing embrace one thing that we predict is an actual downside solver,” Fauzia mentioned. “I’m so pleased with how we’ve innovated, tried new issues, and continued to develop, even throughout a pandemic.”