An author gets the interview. The questions are good. The answers flow. Somewhere, a listener turns up the volume, becomes interested, and starts wondering where to buy the book. There is one small difficulty: the author keeps calling it “my book.”
David E. Johnson has written about this remarkably ordinary failure. In his advice to authors, he points out that people tuning in after the introduction may never hear the title. The publicity campaign has successfully delivered a person to a microphone, then forgotten to deliver the information the audience needs. A bookseller cannot do much with a request for My Book by That Interesting Person.
His remedy is modest: work the title into answers twice during most interviews. Avoid reciting it in every response. Remember that an audience arrives at different moments. It is practical counsel from someone whose professional territory stretches from book promotion to the rather less comfortable business of explaining a public controversy.
Johnson founded Strategic Vision PR Group in 2001. Based in Atlanta, he works in media relations, branding, reputation management and crisis communications. The book advice offers a useful introduction to his work because it brings publicity down to a human scale. Someone has to listen. Someone has to understand. Someone has to remember what was said.
Say the book’s title twice in most interviews. Help the listener who arrived late.
A political education, then a computer
Before the authors and television appearances came politics. Johnson graduated from Florida State University in 1989 with a degree in political science. His Republican campaign work dates to the late 1980s. He also worked with trade associations and government agencies in Florida, a setting in which communicating means dealing with institutions, competing interests and people who may have already decided against you.
By the late 1990s, he was working at an Atlanta public relations agency, overseeing accounts across fields including architecture, law, hospitality, education, sports, technology and real estate. That portfolio required changing vocabularies without losing the thread. A hotel and a trade association have different audiences; both need a reason for those audiences to care.
Strategic Vision began in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. The agency describes its starting equipment as a computer and a vision. Johnson developed book publicity as a particular practice from the beginning, working with both traditionally published and self-published authors. The business eventually described four divisions: corporate communications, book and author publicity, entertainment and sports publicity, and public affairs.
The political work included polling, strategy and communications for campaigns and trade associations. It gave the later agency a public affairs dimension alongside its commercial accounts. When his 2013 recognition was announced, Johnson thanked the Strategic Vision team and connected the honor to preparation for the following year’s elections. His account of the work was collective, with the next campaign already on the calendar.
There is a revealing continuity in that range. A candidate, novelist, executive and athlete all need to communicate beyond their immediate circle. Each also brings a temptation to assume that the public knows the background. Johnson’s advice repeatedly returns to the work of explaining it.
- 1989Political science graduate, Florida State
- Late ’90sAgency work in Atlanta
- 2001Founds Strategic Vision PR Group
- 2021Bookfox recognition announced
When the publicist became the story
His own career includes a difficult encounter with public scrutiny. In September 2009, the American Association for Public Opinion Research publicly found that Strategic Vision LLC had violated its disclosure code by failing to provide sufficient methodological information about polls before the 2008 presidential primaries in New Hampshire and Wisconsin.
The association said it had received partial information but still lacked details about response rates, weighting and estimating procedures. Its finding concerned disclosure. It explicitly said the investigation had not assessed the quality of the work, the accuracy of the polls or the company’s integrity. Those limits matter as much as the finding itself.
Johnson initially threatened legal action. By March 2010, he said he had abandoned that plan, describing his earlier reaction as anger. He also supplied an unusually candid observation for someone in his profession: “I guess a PR person should never be their own publicist.”
The firm resumed public statewide polling after a hiatus, releasing a Georgia gubernatorial poll with crosstabs. The episode places a complication inside Johnson’s career: advising on scrutiny and experiencing it are different positions. His published response acknowledged how personal the second position could become.
“I guess a PR person should never be their own publicist.”
David E. Johnson · March 2010
The case for taking your time
When Johnson discussed brand reputation ahead of 2014, he advocated what he called a “slow” approach to media relations. Learn which journalists cover the subject. Understand their writing and preferences. Give some thought to whether the story belongs in their inbox before sending it there. The mass email blast, in this account, is an efficient way to demonstrate that no such thought occurred.
He also argued that a brand should define its promises and make sure it can fulfill them. Consistent messaging starts with a promise the business can actually keep. It is an inconvenient requirement for anyone hoping that a pleasing phrase will compensate for an unreliable experience.
His campaign-planning advice is similarly specific. Decide what success should mean. Choose the communication outlets that reach the intended audience. Establish a timeline, a budget and responsibility for the work. Editorial calendars and the dates for beginning outreach belong in that plan. The appearance of spontaneity can require a rather well-maintained schedule.
Adapted from Johnson’s December 2017 planning advice.
A microphone is a complicated place
Johnson also appears on the other side of the interview. A 2017 CNBC Power Lunch appearance placed him in the discussion of the NFL’s national anthem protests, their implications for sponsors and brands, and uncertainty about what the protests represented. It was the sort of story in which the same gesture could produce several incompatible interpretations.
The appearance fits his movement between political communication and commercial reputation. Sponsors have audiences of their own. A league has players, supporters and business partners. A response that satisfies one group can irritate another. His work occupies that crowded junction, where a public statement has more than one destination.
Campaigns & Elections included him in its 2013 Influencers 500, a distinction the agency announced that June. Bookfox later included him in its list of 25 book publicists and marketers; Strategic Vision announced that recognition in June 2021. These are different professional circles, brought together by the same problem of reaching people who have plenty of competing claims on their attention.
Eliza Hamilton meets Ser Davos
Johnson’s teaching examples have a theatrical streak. In a November 2017 essay, he used Hamilton to consider who tells a brand’s story. His interest was in Eliza Hamilton’s role in preserving her husband’s account of himself. The business question followed: who inside a company understands it well enough to explain what it stands for?
His answer put responsibility near the top. The owner, chief executive or president should communicate the story; another senior officer who understands the organization can do it when that leader cannot. In his account, the website, social presence, products and services already communicate a company’s values. Leadership has to make sense of the whole.
Two years later, his Game of Thrones lesson selected Ser Davos as a model spokesperson. Johnson admired the character’s ability to understand an audience’s interests, speak plainly and acknowledge a missing answer. At the Iron Bank, Davos talks about repayment and profit. The bankers are, after all, bankers, even in a world with dragons.
These choices give his public writing some of its personality. He reaches for recognizable stories, then examines a small piece of communication inside them. An epic musical becomes a question of organizational responsibility. A fantasy series becomes a reminder to answer the question in language the listener understands.
The story has to survive the response
In his discussion of Equifax’s 2017 breach, Johnson emphasized prompt disclosure, empathy and visible leadership. He criticized the gradual release of information and argued that the chief executive should face the people affected. A useful response also had to explain how the company would move forward. Addressing employees, customers, policymakers, vendors and shareholders was part of that work.
Those recommendations reveal what he expects a crisis response to accomplish. People need facts they can act on, an acknowledgment of what happened and some reason to believe the organization is addressing it. A statement that merely announces concern leaves much of the practical work undone.
His April 2023 commentary returned to consistency between a brand’s established identity and its public actions. Discussing Nike and Bud Light, he argued that partnerships are interpreted through what customers already believe about the brand. His assessment was an argument about audience expectations, continuing a subject that runs through his earlier writing about politics, corporate promises and interview preparation.
The author practice also involves two publishing routes. Johnson works with writers who have traditional publishers and those publishing independently, bringing both into the same discussion about visibility. In announcing the Bookfox recognition, the agency described interviews, reviews, speaking appearances and social media as parts of its campaigns. That range makes the simple interview instruction more telling: even after arranging the appearance, the work still depends on what the author says when the opportunity arrives.
Book publicity makes the same demand in a quieter register. An interview must leave listeners with a name they can recall and a reason to investigate. A crisis response must leave people with a clear account and a next step. Each depends on paying attention to the person receiving the message.
For Johnson, that has meant a career spent moving between people seeking an audience and people discovering they suddenly have one. The advice can be disarmingly small beside the machinery of modern publicity: learn the reporter’s interests, explain the promise, name the book. Once attention arrives, there is still the matter of saying something useful.