Crystal Patriarche: Failure started path to book publicist
Job in engineering led to ‘cool and satisfying’ work
Our series “How I became a …” digs into the stories of accomplished and influential people, finding out how they got to where they are in their careers.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
From the time she was a little girl, Crystal Patriarche knew that her heart lay with telling stories and the creative world. From her beginnings working for an engineering firm all the way up to doing public relations for high-tech companies such as Microsoft, Patriarche worked her way up to following her dreams: eventually founding and running SparkPoint Studios, which includes everything from public relations and three publishing arms to cultivating a community of female readers and writers.
USA TODAY caught up with Patriarche to talk about helping make people’s dreams come true.
Question: Who has been your biggest mentor?
Crystal Patriarche: There’s two things – I believe in mentors, and I believe in pillars – and I think there’s a bit of a difference. I work with so many women, and I support so many women. That’s my career: supporting and uplifting women storytellers. But, interestingly, my mentors are male.
My first bosses after graduating college and starting (at) my first real public relations agency – I had to tell these men about a month into hiring me that I was pregnant. I was mortified and embarrassed, but they did not skip a beat. They supported me the whole way – and this was 18 years ago – they let me work from home so I could be with her a few days a week, and on Fridays they let me bring her into the office and she would just sit in her bouncy seat next to my desk while I would do PR for Microsoft. I’ve never forgotten that – that wholehearted support. One of them I still talk to today – Tim Fry – anytime I want to bounce some ideas, I still call him, and it’s been 18-plus years.
Q: What’s the coolest thing you’ve ever done?
Patriarche: In my career, I get to make people’s dreams come true for a living, so that’s incredibly cool and satisfying. I work with a lot of female clients who are storytellers, influencers, and a lot of authors, and helping them get that into the world.
Q: What does your career path look like, from college to now?
Patriarche: It started with failure. When I was in college, I went on an engineering scholarship. My family couldn’t afford to send me to college, so it was the only way, and in my heart I knew I wanted to do something with books and writing. I would sit at this typewriter my grandma bought me and just type stories and paste together book covers. I spent all my high school sending Random House letters to be an intern. But that wasn’t a viable option for college – I had to go on a scholarship.
So, I spent my first three years of college in chemical engineering classes, and I can remember just taking notes in the class but instead of paying attention, I was writing poetry on the side of my notebook. ... I quickly lost the scholarship, I failed, and I ended up moving out to Arizona with an engineering company who, luckily, saw something in me. They sent me to the Paris Air Show and I got to talk about these airplane engines and the technology I had learned about in some of my classes in the engineering assistant position, and I was one of the only people who could talk about the technology and communicate. Engineers are typically very introverted, and I wasn’t. When I came back, they said, we heard so many incredible things about you and your communication skills: We think you should be in PR. We’re going to send you to go back to school. I took that failure of losing my scholarship and being away at college and was able to turn that into a situation where I eventually found my calling.
Even then, in my early days being a publicist, it was for high-tech companies because I had been in aerospace and chemical engineering. I did PR for Microsoft and some other companies, and I learned a lot.
Eventually, I was able to take stock and step back and think, what am I passionate about? It’s always been books and stories, especially by women. I started freelancing and taking on clients, and eventually got a book client, and people said, “Who did that for you? We’ve never seen that before in book publicity.” That’s been over nine years, and since then I’ve done over 600 book campaigns.
Q: What does a typical day look like for you?
Patriarche: Publicity is not typical – it’s not a job where there is a typical day, which is what makes it so exciting. Because there’s so many deadlines and launches – I have a client on a TV show, another launching the second season of her food show, 17 authors on book tour right now, and three authors who just had major announcements about their books being optioned for film (and those days are always crazy because the announcement is under this cloud of secrecy for so long and then, boom, it’s out in the world, you’ve just to hit the ground running).
Q: What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned in your career?
Patriarche: In publicity and PR, any kind of client service business, you have to have thick skin. There’s a lot of rejection, a lot of client expectation.
To be grateful. I feel grateful every day that I get to do what I love. I’ve built this business doing publicity word-ofmouth, and that tells me that people like my work.
Q: What advice would you give to someone who wants to follow in your footsteps?
Patriarche: Failure is your friend. People fail all the time. I started my career from failure – perceived failure, anyways – and your ability to fix mistakes and get over failure is far more valuable than being somebody who doesn’t make mistakes at all.. I read something that said, “People who aren’t making mistakes aren’t making much of anything,” and it’s so true.