Book PR in Action: Fall 2025

Everything we teach at Book Publicity School stems directly from our decades of publicity experience at Press Shop PR, where we develop and execute over 30 book launch campaigns each year. Some recent highlights:

Man, we have been busy … in the best possible way! This fall, we’ve worked with many brilliant, thoughtful, caring writers who work tirelessly to share their research, craft, and ideals. Here are some of the successes we’ve celebrated with our authors over the past couple months: 

Dan Wang’s BREAKNECK: China's Quest to Engineer the Future (W.W. Norton; August, 2025) is a firsthand investigation of China’s seismic progress, the human costs, and what its drive forward means for America. We landed coverage on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and in The Atlantic—and the book rose to #3 on the NYT Bestseller list!

Ieva Jusionyte won the MacArthur “Genius” Award! We already knew she was a genius, and now we know the rest of the world agrees 🥳 We had the pleasure of working on her book EXIT WOUNDS: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border (UC Press; 2024), in which she flips the usual narrative surrounding the US-Mexico border to focus on the American-made weapons heading South. As part of her book launch campaign, Ieva spoke with NPR’s Here and Now and CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS.

Harvard Professor Eram Alam’s, THE CARE OF FOREIGNERS: How Immigrant Physicians Changed US Healthcare (JHU Press; October 2025) reveals how much Americans rely on foreign-born doctors to keep them healthy—and, as a result, how the administration’s ongoing assault on immigration and immigrants is impacting the entire health system. She recently published an op-ed in The Guardian, had an interview in Reuters’ Context, and was featured in The Boston Globe’s online and print issue!

Shirley Strum has lived in Kenya studying baboons for the last half-century. (Sounds pretty good to me these days!) In ECHOES OF OUR ORIGINS: Baboons, Humans, and Nature (JHU Press; September 2025), she recounts what she has learned over those decades and what some of our closest biological relatives can tell us about ourselves. Check out her interview on Talk Nerdy and an excellent piece in Nautilus.

Alexis Okeowo’s BLESSINGS AND DISASTERS: A Story of Alabama (Henry Holt; August 2025) is a beautiful, thoughtful look at Alexis’ home state of Alabama. The hits piled up for this one—here are a few: B&N's Poured Over, NPR All Things Considered, WBUR On Point, NPR Book of the Day, Garden & Gun, and, to sum it all up, Lit Hub’s Book Marks.

What if the best chance to save our wounded democracy is to literally put strangers together in a room and have them debate the issues? It’s what Stanford Professor James S. Fishkin proposes in CAN DELIBERATION CURE THE ILLS OF DEMOCRACY? (Oxford UP; July 3, 2025) and he outlines actionable steps and proven results from experiments with his Deliberative Democracy Lab at Stanford. Some media hits from the campaign: John Fugelsang on SiriusXM, Future Hindsight, PBS’s Story in the Public Square, Salon, and Ana Kasparian on Substack.