A publicist's life isn't all merriment and drinking - as some would have you believe. As a publicist for genre fiction, life is a little harder but a hell of a lot more interesting.
Publicists normally get the raw end of the stick.
Most people in publishing believe that our job is fairly easy. Apparently all we do is mail books to journalists and they then get reviewed. Press releases need to be written, mailing lists created, books sent out and then follow-up calls need to be made to convince the journalists to look at the book in the first place. Of course there's also pre-publicity, such as trying to place stories and interviews in magazines, and so on. Hard, sometimes demoralising work.