Three days after Heather Adams was laid off in 2010, a competing publishing house called with a job. It is the sort of efficient plot twist that publicity people adore: conflict on Monday, resolution by Thursday. Adams took the call and kept doing work she knew well. She had studied magazine journalism at the University of Georgia, worked as a public information officer and risen to lead publicity at a major Christian publisher. The career had momentum. The problem was subtler. She missed leading, especially leading women.
Four years later, she founded Choice Media & Communications. The company began with the muscle memory of publishing publicity: find the angle, know the producer, prepare the author, make the deadline. But the agency Adams runs from Franklin, Tennessee, now sells something wider. It works with authors, speakers, entrepreneurs, influencers, nonprofits and established brands on the whole contraption around visibility - brand strategy, media relations, podcast booking, launches, social media, content, paid campaigns, speaking opportunities and coaching.
This breadth could look like an agency unable to say no. Choice makes a more coherent argument. Its clients do not merely lack press. They often lack a sequence. Their message is blurry, their audience is too broad, their content arrives in spasms and the media hit, when it comes, lands on a business with no useful next step. Choice's offer is to connect the parts.
The product is a sequence
Choice describes its method in three pieces: visionary strategy, elite connections and flawless execution. Strip away the polished adjectives and the order matters. First, decide what the person or brand should be known for. Then identify the people, outlets and collaborators who can carry that idea. Finally, produce the pitches, posts, funnels, launch materials and follow-up that keep the idea moving.
Strategy
Clarify the message, the audience and the business outcome before chasing exposure.
Relationships
Match that story to media, podcasts, influencers, speakers and partners with relevant audiences.
Execution
Build the content, outreach and campaign machinery that turns a plan into repeated contact.
For an author, that may mean treating the book as one piece of a larger platform rather than a lonely object placed on a publication calendar. For an expert, it may mean replacing random social posts with a few content pillars and a repeatable production rhythm. For an established brand, it can mean outsourcing the unglamorous connective tissue: press materials, media follow-up, podcast outreach, social scheduling and campaign reporting.
“Relationships matter. People matter.”Choice Media's author-publicity course
The line is warm, but it is also an inventory statement. A boutique PR firm owns no television network and controls no newsroom. Its assets walk out the door every evening inside the heads and inboxes of its people. Choice says its team brings roughly four decades of media relationships. The company credits its work with more than 150 New York Times bestseller launches, while older interviews with Adams put the count above 100. The changing number is less revealing than the repeated category: books were the laboratory.
A service business learns to show its price tags
Most agencies hide pricing behind a discovery call. Choice still custom-quotes its core retainers and launch packages, but it has also made founder access and narrower outcomes easier to buy. A limited CEO Content Session was listed at $1,500 for 90 minutes, a roadmap and a playbook. A one-day Substack workshop was also $1,500; a version with a done-for-you build was $3,000. Choice said its deeper Collaborative strategy engagements begin at $12,500.
PUBLIC PRICE SIGNALS
That ladder explains the business model. Advice can be packaged as a session, education as a workshop, belonging as a community and execution as a recurring retainer. An earlier membership offer, the Choice Connection, advertised access at $500 a month and contrasted it with conventional retainers of $5,000 or more. Prices and packages change, but the architecture remains: let a client buy clarity before asking them to buy an entire communications department.
What failed first was the fantasy of the single hit
Choice's evolution contains a quiet correction. Traditional publicity can be organized around an event: the book ships, the interview airs, the review appears. The first thing that fails is the assumption that the event will carry the business. Attention decays. A founder who cannot explain what she does, publish consistently or guide a curious visitor toward a useful next step has purchased a very short-lived spike.
The agency's answer was to move both earlier and later. Earlier means audits, messaging, audience definition and campaign strategy. Later means content systems, social execution, email growth, speaking, partnerships and follow-up. Adams' own career nudged the same change. She built the company because a successful publishing track no longer supplied the leadership work she wanted. Choice then expanded because publicity alone no longer covered the work its clients needed.
The numbers are company-reported, and the 600 percent case lacks a named client and public methodology. That caveat matters. PR is full of impressive numerators attached to invisible denominators. Choice's more persuasive evidence is concrete and ordinary: a decade in business, repeat work with public figures such as Jen Hatmaker, client press pages maintained over years and a service catalog that reflects the labor clients actually avoid.
The bit worth copying
A reader does not need a Franklin address or a publicist's contact list to borrow the useful part. Choice has published enough of its process to reveal a compact pre-publicity drill.
BEFORE YOU PITCH ANYONE
- Write down the business outcome. “Coverage” is not an outcome; qualified inquiries, book sales or speaking invitations might be.
- Name the narrow audience and the problem your work solves for them.
- Choose three to five content pillars that connect your expertise, story and offer.
- Inventory existing media relationships, dream outlets and outlets you want to avoid.
- Build the destination first: a useful page, email sequence, press kit or offer that can receive the attention.
The method is a poor fit when there is no real news, no willingness to be visible, no operational capacity to serve new demand or an expectation that earned media can be purchased like an advertisement. It also weakens when a client needs a guarantee. Publicists can improve an angle and earn trust; they cannot order an independent editor to care. A $1,500 planning session is likewise expensive if the buyer will not use the system afterward.
The boutique in the middle
Choice sits between two familiar alternatives. An in-house communications hire offers immersion in one organization but has a finite network and skill set. A large agency offers scale but can put senior talent in the pitch and junior talent on the account. Choice's wager is that a smaller, founder-led team can offer senior strategy, a national relationship network and enough digital production to operate as an outsourced growth desk.
The culture is part of that pitch. The firm talks openly about women building ambitious careers without surrendering family life. At a 2024 retreat, the team brought in an organizational psychologist, shared home-cooked meals and used the gathering to clarify roles and simplify goals. This is not proof of perfect work. It is evidence that the agency treats relationships as an internal practice, not merely a capability printed on a proposal.
Adams likes a bold red lip, a popped collar and a good Nashville recommendation. Those details are not incidental to the business. Choice sells the premise that a person becomes memorable through a precise mixture of competence and particularity. The agency's own particularity is easy to spot: publishing rigor, Southern warmth, visible founder access and a refusal to treat a media mention as the final deliverable. Fame may be unpredictable. Machinery can be built.