List Management and Sales Prep
In week four, we discussed the preparation needed for marketing and sales rep presentations and we looked at reprint reports (or ‘birthday lists’ as they are sometimes called) in terms of managing a list as a commissioning editor.
Sales and Marketing Presentations
Just like a commissioning editor, the personnel in sales and marketing will probably not be an expert in the subject area of the academic monographs they are selling. Nevertheless, they still need to feel confident about what they’re selling and who they’re selling it to. It is the commissioning editor’s job to provide them with all the details they need to do this.
Tony explained that at sales rep events, there are normally hundreds of books to be presented, so each book ‘sales pitch’ needs to be a maximum of 2-3 minutes. The presentation needs to summarise the book, explain where it fits into the market and explain some of the unique selling points, which can then be passed on to the target consumer. We practised this task using a couple of MUP books as examples. I presented Jill Liddington’s book ‘Vanishing for the Vote’ to the class and found the exercise fairly straight-forward and easy to present. However, it was probably easy because I was interested in the subject matter and enjoyed researching the title. I imagine it would be rather more difficult to have to present numerous titles, some of which could be (personally) less appealing. I think in that situation you, as a commissioning editor, would need to really tap into the mind-set of the target audience and talk about the book from that perspective.
The only thing Tony picked me up on following my presentation is that I ran the risk of speaking for a little too long – it was about 3 minutes, but in the context of a sales conference, that may be too long to get through all the titles on the list. I normally rehearse presentations with timings, so would do this in future for sales rep presentations, as there’s no room for extraneous waffle!
List Management and Reprint Reports
In the second half of the session, we discussed list management, not in the sense of commissioning a coherent title list, but in terms of stock management - assessment of sales and decisions about reprints, new editions and pulping of stock. We were given an example of a reprint report or ‘birthday list’, which shows the publication date, the amount of stock remaining, the number of sales in the last 12 months (hence the name ‘birthday list’) and the total life sales. We were asked to analyse the list and make recommendations as if it was our list to manage. We then went through the list as a class, compared our answers and then compared our thoughts with Tony’s to see how far off our assessments were.
In general the class tended to agree with each other and were fairly close to Tony’s assessments as well. For me, the only issue I hadn’t fully appreciated was the need, at times, to pulp books. For example, one book on the list (line 9 on the picture above) had 745 units in stock, with previous year unit sales of 8 and only 323 lifetime sales since 2003. My suggestion was simply not to reprint, but Tony’s recommendation was to pulp the remaining stock. This makes sense, of course, as having books sitting in a warehouse is an expense in itself, but for me, it felt very unnatural to recommend the pulping of books. I think it would be interesting to see what the actual cost of storing books in a warehouse is and where the viability threshold for pulping books would be.
I also think it’s interesting to consider alternatives to pulping. For example, the north-west company Total Reuse (http://www.totalreuse.co.uk/) often take unwanted textbooks from universities and libraries and reuse them in creative ways. Could the books recommended for pulping be used in a different way?
