I have been officially Missing in Action for the last few weeks, making sure all our key books are in the best possible positions in store for Christmas. It goes without saying that as sales in our business are so skewed to the last few weeks of the year, it takes about the same proportion of a sales persons' time and energy.
No doubt you may have already read about the marketing charges the chains charge us for those slots. However, with only a small percentage of our titles going into these coveted and much-competed for positions in the front of the store, what do we do with those titles which we love and certainly have their market, but don't have a storming TV series or a celeb's story of years welded to the crack pipe to promote them? These are the titles we like to call our "passion-sells." They are titles we hand-sell to the retailers, sometimes picking up the phone or sending early copies plus a letter from the author or editor to a head office buyer, store manager or an independent bookshop buyer. There is such a grassroots love of good books in this industry, that they, like us, look for titles which can give them a point of difference from the cacophony of big discounted Christmas titles.
A good example is Penguin's Poems for Life. This is the type of book I remember receiving as a gift when I was a young: a treasury of wonderful poetry, bringing together classics with contemporary poets, all organised along the seven ages of man from birth through childhood and love to death. We've had a fantastic response from our field sales reps, whose customers really enjoy a book which isn't dependent on anything else but it's own quality to recommend it, especially if it has appeal for all the family. It's the type of book which might get some nice reviews or mentions in gift recommendation round-ups, but what will really make someone buy it is discovering it in a bookshop. For me, that moment of discovery is one of the pleasures of shopping for books, and if we only shop to compare discounts then it's a pleasure lost. It's by making sure that somewhere in your local bookshop such treasures are waiting for you to discover, that we'll be manning the phones in the next few weeks.
Fiona Buckland, Penguin Press Sales Manager
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Oy! There's a difference between "coveted" and "coverted", you know!
Posted by: Ng Yi-Sheng | October 29, 2007 at 04:47 PM
Oops, slip of the keyboard. Now fixed. Thanks Ng Yi-Sheng.
Posted by: Colbie | October 29, 2007 at 04:55 PM