A new chapter for Kirsty

We are delighted to announce that Kirsty Hamilton-Emery has been promoted to Publicity Manager, taking the lead on campaigns for our biggest books.

by Chris Hamilton-emery

There are some announcements you make because the trade expects them, and some you make because they are simply a pleasure to write. This is firmly the second kind. Kirsty Hamilton-Emery, who joined Salt as Publicist in the summer of 2023, is becoming our Publicity Manager – a new role, with a bigger remit, and one she has more than earned.

In her new role, Kirsty leads publicity right across the Salt frontlist, with direct ownership of the campaigns behind our lead and superlead titles – the books on which we place our biggest bets each season. She continues to look after the wider work too: the reviews, the festival slots, the radio, the long patient business of getting a book into the hands of the readers and critics who will love it.

The timing is deliberate. Over the past two years we have been quietly reshaping Salt, moving towards a more concentrated frontlist of thirty-five titles a year by 2027, with a sharper focus on literary fiction, crime, historical fiction, and the Gothic and eerie writing that has become something of a Salt signature. A list like that lives or dies on its publicity, and it needs someone who can think strategically across the whole programme as well as title by title. That someone is Kirsty.

She came to publishing the best possible way for a publicist – through the newsroom. After a first in Journalism Studies from the University of Sheffield, she trained as a reporter on the Worksop Guardian and went on to become a senior journalist at The Star in Sheffield, with a spell in communications at the Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust along the way. It shows. She has a reporter’s nose for a story and an insider’s understanding of how news and features desks actually decide what to cover – which is exactly the instinct a Salt book needs in its corner.

Kirsty has been the engine room of our publicity operation for nearly three years. She has built genuine relationships with reviewers, festival programmers and broadcasters, and she has that rare combination of editorial judgement and campaigning energy that lead titles need. Giving her the Publicity Manager role is simply recognising what she is already doing – and making room for her to do more of it.

—JENNIFER HAMILTON-EMERY, PUBLISHER

It is, we think, a promotion that says something about where Salt is heading. We are publishing with more ambition than at any point in our twenty-seven years, and our authors deserve a publicity lead who can match that ambition with a clear vision for how their books reach the world.

Salt publishes some of the most distinctive writing in the country, and getting those books in front of the readers and critics who will love them is the best job in publishing. I’m thrilled to be taking on the Publicity Manager role and to be leading the campaigns on our lead and superlead titles. There is a great deal to do – and I cannot wait to get on with it.

—KIRSTY HAMILTON-EMERY, PUBLICITY MANAGER

Please join us in congratulating Kirsty. You will be hearing a great deal more from her over the coming seasons – usually about a book we think you ought to be reading.