Reflections on turning 30
I recently realized that next month (January, 2009) will mark my 30th anniversary in publishing.
I got my first publishing job in January, 1979, when I interviewed with the personnel director at G. P. Putnam’s. I had decided that there was no point in continuing with my graduate school studies (the job market was awful, and I was getting pretty tired of academia), so I had this vague notion of becoming an editor.
So I visited an employment agency, which sent me to meet with Dorothy Rudo, Putnam’s personnel director, to interview for one of their perpetually available publicity assistant jobs. Dorothy quickly decided I wasn’t cut out for publicity, but she liked me. I think what clinched a job for me was the typing test I took. She asked me to sit at her typewriter and type a sample, which I did with no problem. I then discovered that this was a brand new electric typewriter that she hadn’t figured out how to turn on yet, so my competence with the fancy new technology landed me a job!
I spent a year and a half working as Dorothy’s assistant and as assistant to the president, doing a little bit of everything. It was a great, practical introductory course in publishing.
When I decided it was time to leave New York, I approached Putnam’s sales manager to see if there were any openings for sales reps. I had no selling experience, but I had worked in a bookstore during college, and I got a shot at a territory in St. Louis (which was used for several years as a “training territory” by many publishers).
I found the job suited me very well, and I enjoyed it a lot. I mean, what’s not to like about driving around, visiting bookstores, and talking to them about new books coming out? Just about all my customers were friendly, and I very much enjoyed working out of my home, on my own schedule.
After a year and a half in St. Louis, I took a territory in Southern California, and (aside from a brief, disastrous year back in NY) I’ve been here ever since.
Meanwhile, the job of a sales rep has changed dramatically since I started. I initially worked for mid-sized publishers and covered territories with 80 - 120 customers; I saw each customer once a season (with two or three selling seasons per year) and each sales call took maybe a half a day, except for the stores where I did a complete inventory of their stock (which typically added another half a day).
I almost never saw customers more than once a season (except for the largest ones in my immediate vicinity), and my only other contact with them was by mail and (occasionally) phone.
A few times each week, I’d gather up all the orders I’d collected (on NCR pads for new title orders and in multi-page booklets for backlist orders) and mail them to the warehouse.
Since then, the number of independent bookstores and local wholesalers has shrunk dramatically, and publishers have consolidated so that there are very few “mid-sized” houses left. Now the average sales rep for a large publisher has perhaps 10 to 20 customers, each customer is seen several times during the season, orders are placed electronically (either through the stores’ own computer system or through the rep’s laptop), and the rep probably spends more time discussing marketing plans than actually selling books.
Instead of selling a list of perhaps 100 new titles and 500 - 1,000 backlist titles, today’s large publisher rep has a list of 700 - 1,000 titles per season and a backlist of 5,000 - 10,000 titles!
And of course communication with accounts is now mostly by email or phone. About the only things that are mailed these days are catalogs - and it looks like within the next year or so even catalogs will be replaced by “e-catalogs” (always up-to-date, with lots of bells and whistles - but harder to circulate among a staff of buyers, and a lot less portable . . .).
Despite the drastic changes, the rep job is still one of the best in the business.