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This week we kick off a series of interviews with the DK staff, where we'll try to figure out the secret to their success by asking them about their favorite childhood books and what sort of trouble they've been up to lately. Read these interviews carefully--DK's secrets are contained within!

Katy Ball, Publicist

Okay, quick: tell us about yourself, what your favorite book was as a child, and how you ended up as the US Publicist for DK Eyewitness Travel and Rough Guides!

Though I did fall into publishing partially by happenstance, I have always been a voracious reader. Among my favorite early books was Go Dog, Go, which my parents read to me every night for a while. In it, a narrative-free string of scenes involving party-going dogs that drive cars up tree trunks and dogs that ski past each other in increasingly improbable hats parades by in milky blues and poppy reds. My perfectly common but most heartfelt love of entering new worlds-and the local public library's "Book It!" program that kept me rich in Pizza Hut and waterslide park coupons--kept me discovering new authors, which I continue to do, with the curious shadow of my past manias for Christopher Pike, then Tom Robbins, and more recently Lorrie Moore hanging over me. After growing up in San Jose, CA and moving to the East Coast to explore the nooks and crannies of New York while double-majoring in Language and Mind-a poorly orchestrated but very interesting hodge-podge of linguistics, psychology, and philosophy courses-and Spanish, I was offered a job as a Marketing Assistant by Continuum Books.

The potential spontaneity and whimsy of publicity over marketing sparked my interest. I began to work more on the trade books that occasionally graced Continuum's largely academic, non-fiction list like rare and majestic birds. I remember the delicious sense of glee I felt while ordering a spray chalk kit online, in hopes of emblazoning the Tribeca Film Festival-crowded sidewalks of Soho with the cover art stencil I'd had made for a book on guerilla film-making on which I was working. The results were patchy, and I wasn't sufficiently confident that my bail would have been posted to resort to using real spray paint, but I knew then that any job that potentially involved the forces of danger, colorful paints, and company credit cards set loose in the name of books was not a gift horse who's teeth I needed inspect.

What books offer imaginatively, travel can create literally (setting aside, with not insignificant disappointment, my sci-fi favorites...), and I was thrilled when I began work at Rough Guides. In my current role as publicist, talking to people could be considered the shortest of short-hand for a job description and I believe there are few conversations as consistently rewarding as hearing about people's recent trips or a dream vacation they've been dying to take.

Could you tell us what a Publicist actually does, and how being a DK Publicist might differ from what other Publicists do in more conventional imprints?

What does a publicist actually do? I don't think I've even done a passable job of explaining this to my family or friends. Basically, my job is to work with various media outlets to raise the profile of a book or a book's author in the service of letting those most likely to be interested know about the book's existence-and getting them excited about it-which, if all goes according to plan, means that we sell more books. I get copies of title into the hands of those media folk-radio producers, magazine editors, and bloggers-who can communicate the book's appeal-or mitigating flaws, as occasionally happens-to a focused, established audience.

Publicists at other more conventional imprints working on, say, literary fiction seem to rely more on author-driven publicity, as well as having a sharper focus on frontlist titles. Since interest in the destinations covered by both DK Travel and Rough Guides is somewhat perennial, all titles, and authors, are fair game for journalists all the time, meaning I'm in touch with more authors, probably with more frequency and less depth.

Also, instead of having my publicity plans throughout the year be driven primarily by a specific title, a good part of what I work on is branding for each travel guidebook series. Even as I work on promoting a new title, such as this fall's Ultimate Adventures: A Rough Guide to Adventure Travel, part of the benefit of that media outreach is to help those who I'm in contact with better understand what new things we're up to, and how they sensibly build upon what each brand stands for, and how it widens our range of travel offerings, which includes a variety of non-book items and digital content, such as the DIRECTIONS series (available as e-books), podcasts, digital maps, and downloadable audio files tied to Rough Guides' line of dictionary phrasebooks. I feel like my day-to-day tasks might be more fractious for those reasons, involving creating a coherent, compelling story of how the series emerged and for whom each is intended. That said, I have the opportunity to work with lots of great authors, too, and so do try to set up Q&As and print and radio interviews when possible, much like other imprints.

One benefit I have working with travel is that I don't have to deal exclusively with Book Review Editors, but also can approach Travel Editors, or News Editors, even, on a good day (our new Rough Guide to Korea, which includes North Korea, offers this potential given the current political situation). Also, since there are very few subjects Rough Guide reference list wouldn't consider dipping in a toe, I work with a very varied and title-dictated list of media contacts, from music and film editors to parenting, technology, and YA bloggers.

You recently travelled to Colombia to work on half of the chapter devoted to the country in the forthcoming Rough Guide to South America on a Budget: what was that experience like, and how did you get involved? What was one of your favorite moments while travelling down there?

Traveling to Colombia was a really amazing experience. April Isaacs, the editor of the book, allowed me to get involved with the project. I think my strong Spanish, that I'd written a few items for last winter's Make the Most of Your Time on Earth: A Rough Guide to the World and a piece for the website on my trip to Morocco inspired enough confidence to give my eagerness to work on the book the activation energy required for it to actually happen.

One of my favorite moments involved ending up by mistake in a small town called Curiti, not far from adventure travel-driven San Gil 6 hours north of Bogota, that apparently used to be a hotbed of ELN (political rebel group) activity. I'd somehow conflated the popular local waterfall of Juan Curi with the swimming pools of Pescadarito and so sent my friends and I out seeking out this mythical, non-existent, string of interconnected pools and waterfalls. Aside from some unusually disturbing trash here and there, Curiti turned out to be a great find, with a rolling dirt path following the dips and climbings of the river. I love jumping off rocks into water, and there was plenty of that to be had. Plus, a local showed me a hidden waterfall under a shelf of rock that covered the river at one point. It was neat to swim and relax off the tourist trail, with no happy-go-lucky guys laden with rappelling equipment milling around offering their services.

You work with two distinct travel guidebook series-what are the challenges inherent in juggling them, and if you had to take either an Eyewitness Travel guide or a Rough guide to a travel destination, which would you pick?

I present the visually-driven DK Eyewitness Travel Guides and the more text-driven Rough Guides as being complementary since the strengths of each are so distinct from one another. Travelers seem to identify with their preferred guidebook brand and with the two brands being so different, it's actually less challenging than I initially thought it would be to promote both. At the same time, it can be hard to do justice to both series within one conversation with a reporter or editor. To tout the pleasing visual immediacy of DK's museum cutaways, illustrations, and 3-D maps while also emphasizing Rough Guide's strong focus on culture and history, and the guidebooks' willingness to have an opinion during the course of one phone call or email requires a whole lot of the listener.

Also, I don't think I realized that many people don't buy travel guides for their trips until working with the series, so the idea of encouraging people to invest in more than one guidebook can be a little daunting. Personally, I love looking through the DK guidebooks before a trip, such as the increasingly unrealistic trip Australia I have been trying to take for years, mostly for the pictures. There's an earnestness to the food photography that I find weirdly heartbreaking. I have to confess, though, it's a Rough Guide I'll actually take with me on a trip. I like the "full size," B-format guides: the more information, the better. No guidebook can perfectly match one person's interests and personality, so it's important to me to have as much raw material as possible to sift through, looking out for the places and things to do I find most exciting.

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