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.
