Small, Feisty
at AAP
FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (MARCH 2004)
The
AAP’s “Annual Meeting for Smaller and Independent
Publishers” was devoted, as it has been for the past
6 years, to the small and feisty. Executive Director
Pat Schroeder skipped her intro to go attend
an “urgent” meeting by the Higher Ed Group to discuss
textbook prices, but the conference proceeded with an
ebullient and always impressive Dominique Raccah,
who revealed the strategies that have made her 17-year-old
Sourcebooks a 60-plus person operation with 387
titles—including its first bestseller Outsmarting
the Competition, which is still in print. She told
the audience to be realistic about the industry’s stagnation,
and to focus on market share. Meanwhile, to help realize
her lofty ambition of doubling revenues in two years,
Sourcebooks has just signed a deal to publish the new
Encyclopedia Britannica Almanac.
After a working lunch (participants joined whichever
roundtable offered a topic of interest), NBN’s
Jed Lyons presented the first Miriam Bass
Award, which went to Alexander Skutt of McBooks.
Skutt said he should have been awarded it for the “creative
survival skills” he used when his distributor went bankrupt.
He gave thanks to Edwards Brothers printers (as
did Texere’s Lee Thompson) for being patient
as well as creative.
The afternoon was spent reviewing cost-effective methods
for small presses to sell, market and generally get
business done on shoestring budgets. Eric Yaverbaum,
President of the PR agency Jericho Communications,
handed out four very different press releases for his
book, Leadership Secrets of 100 of the World’s Most
Successful CEOs, all aimed at different audiences
and demonstrating a very cost-effective way to deliver
the message. In a segment on sales, Bloomberg’s
John Crutcher claimed that by focusing on special
sales last year, they rose from 21% to 32% of total
sales. And Sterling’s Marty Schamus said
he made up some of the lost special markets sales after
its sale to B&N by recruiting Sterling’s publicity
people to pitch for him.
Sandra
Killen, president of Tech Materials, got
the most laughs when discussing export sales—she was
once asked by a US publisher, “what part of Turkey is
Oslo in?”—an area where the US has not made much of
a name for itself, despite recent advances. After years
living and working around the world (not in publishing),
she returned to the US and in 1985 founded her company
where she acts as an intermediary between US publishers
and the international bookselling community. She is,
she said, “paid by foreign retailers so they do not
have to deal with US publishers.”
The session ended with discussions of how to increase
staff productivity when most of them are virtual or
part time. The former head of HR for Madison Square
Garden terrified everyone when she talked about
working for an organization that grew from 900 to 18,000
employees and 132 union contracts.
©2004
Publishing Trends
