In praise of reps

16.11.11 | Tim O'Kelly

Bookselling, like most retailing, is at bottom a fairly simple operation. If you sell the right books at the right price at the right time, you should not go far wrong. I misquote the principles of marketing because having the right books today, rather than tomorrow, is absolutely vital when Amazon/TBD (The Amazon Depository?) can nearly always deliver next day.

Price as a marketing tool has been used with varying degrees of success by the larger operators, but this is not usually an option for the independent sector. The key factor, therefore, for this part of the trade is to get the right book into the shops at the time when customers want to buy.

It is this skill that makes or breaks bookshops and is the reason why centralised buying is so fraught with difficulty. With thousands of titles to choose from each month, it is also the hardest of skills to acquire and this is where that underrated species, the publisher's rep, comes into play.

The days when wizened old gentlemen (known quaintly as "travellers") would stumble into the bookshop clutching a pair of pilot cases crammed with books have long gone—as distant as the Waterstone's Sub and the apology for having left the returns pad at home. The new style of rep is looking at growing sales in the medium term, and they hope to achieve this in a number of ways. Most importantly a good rep knows your shop, what authors will sell, and whether or not their new book is any good. They will let you know when a big author is in the area and might be able to slip in to do a signing between events; when that television series has been brought forward; or if that big American writer makes an unscheduled visit.

Unsexy things like appropriate backlist promotion can make a big difference—in particular the use of comparative data from similar bookshops to demonstrate which subject areas in the shop should be expanded or refocused (and of course it doesn't hurt that they are normally armed with the discretion to offer extra terms).

The best way to get the right titles in your shop is, of course, to read them all. This being tricky, the next best option is talking to someone who has and is able to find you that quirky title that is nowhere to be seen in the chains, but which your customer will remember you for.

Recent years have seen dramatic falls in this almost extinct beast. The weak have gone and only the fittest survive by adapting to a much-changed bookselling landscape. It takes more time to sit down with a rep than to go through a wholesaler's catalogue, but booksellers need to take advantage of this resource. So don't forget the humble rep; we will miss them if they go.

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