Anyone?
I won't hold it against you if you work for an agency, promise.
If you're looking for help promoting/marketing a book, there's a subforum devoted to that very topic.
Book Promotion Ideas and Advice
Why?
Do you think working in PR is especially compatible with writing fiction? (Just curious.) I have worked in advertising, though not for a long time, and when I did I was a graphic artist, not a word person. So, a different angle on promotion entirely.
Wow, that sounds like a really cool job. How'd you happen onto it?
In some cases I think PR is compatible. A large part of the job is copywriting and making words as efficient as possible, so that crosses over. I work for a museum, so most of what I do isn't promotion for consumer products, but promotion of things newsy things like research, stories behind artefacts, etc etc. In some ways it's quite like being a journalist.
It depends.
I didn't work in PR, exactly, but in a job where I dealt with press releases all day. Everything from corporate earnings, to any government agency you could think of, to the sort of thing you would have done, to dodgy 'studies' by right-wing or left-wing think-tanks.
I don't think the average person has any idea how much 'news' actually originates from a press release, especially in North America.
Ah, yeah, most of the good situations I've had I've just run across.
And my experience with advertising was as a freelance graphics production artist, before computers were used for graphics; that all was just beginning to be developed. I got out of the business right when that shift was happening, and now my old skills are not really that useful any longer.
And yes, it came to seem that there was a life-or-death energy to the production of what in many cases was basically garbage. I used to do production for American Express direct mail pieces - back when we had junk mail instead of junk emails. It was hard, grueling, precision work, extremely nit-picky, on a tight deadline, and the end result was something most people would toss right in the trash.
That was pretty heartbreaking, really. I didn't start out to work in advertising, but when I went freelance I learned that that was where the money was and where the jobs were, so, I did those jobs.
'Til I could no longer stand to, and then I became a gardener for a while.
Have you read Then We Came To The End? It's a comedy about exactly what you're describing.