Caitlin Hamilton Marketing, LLC, [email protected], 303-725-2613
• National media campaign, including TV and radio.
• National print and online campaign, including reviews, features, and original essays.
• Multi-city national tour involving bookstores as well as book festivals, libraries, and associations: Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Miami, New York area; possibly Boulder, Chicago area, Detroit area, Pittsburgh, San Francisco.
• Prepublication industry buzz campaign, including widespread galley mailings, author appearances, full-page ad in Publishers Weekly, and ads in other key trades.
• Targeted outreach to Ohio libraries and independent bookstores, the latter through ad campaign targeted to regional bookseller associations.
• Media campaign to Jewish media outlets (Jewish Book World, Lilith, Hadassah Magazine, The Forward, Jewishcommunityradio.org) and through the Anti-Defamation League.
• Selected outreach to women’s media and websites, like Good Housekeeping.
• Jewish Book Council “Authors on Tour” program for nationwide events (there are more than 100 Jewish Community Centers in their network).
• Reading-group promotions and outreach to top book club sites; NetGalley giveaways.
• Outreach focus in trades about author as bookseller-novelist.
• Social media campaign, including prepublication outreach to bookstagrammers and Facebook and Instagram advertising.
• Content marketing.

Just days after the close of World War II, Bess Myerson, the daughter of poor Russian Jewish immigrants living in the Bronx, is competing in the Miss America pageant. At stake: a 5,000 dollar scholarship. The tension and excitement in Atlantic City's Warner Theatre are palpable, especially for traumatized Jews rooting for one of their own. So begins Bessie. Drawing on biographical and historical sources, Bessie reimagines the early life of Bess Myerson, who, in 1945 at age twenty-one, remarkably rises to become one of the most famous women in America. This intimate fictional portrait reveals the transformation of the nearly six-foot-tall, self-deprecating yet talented preteen into an exemplar of beauty, a peripheral quality in her world, where success is measured by intellectual attainment. Yet it is the focus on her beauty, and the secular world of pageantry, that she must choose to escape her roots and fulfill her fierce desire to achieve and become someone for whom great things happen. Bessie is a tender study of a bold young woman living at a precarious moment in our cultural history as she searches for love and acceptance, eager to make her mark on the world.