To Market, To Market

Yesterday at my internship I got to visit marketing. Very exciting.

When I asked one of the editors what the people in marketing do she said, “They seem to send a lot of mail.” Mysterious. I pictured a clandestine organization, scurrying through corridors, loaded down by large piles of misshapen brown packages being sent to unpronounceable destinations like Ulaanbaatar and Putrajaya. No one knows what goes in or out.

This image was more appealing than my secret fear that those in marketing might actually be retired shoe salesmen. I like shoes as much as the next person, but there’s a reason I own only one pair of tennis shoes and three pairs of the same shoes in different colors. Pinstriped suits, oiled hair, too-friendly smiles: the sales approach isn’t really my thing.

So I was relieved that when I arrived yesterday morning that the people in marketing weren’t visibly much different from those in editing three rows over. No trench coats. No bow ties.

They did have real-friendly smiles, and they answered all my questions. They were in the middle of getting ready for the next big book conference: NCTE in the middle of this month. In the morning I got to write a cover letter for advance copies of a novel being sent to a select group of reviewers. It was fun! I didn’t have to put on the wheedling selling voice and drip with dishonesty. Instead, I just wrote about a new book we had and why we liked it, which was easy to do. I also got to read through a number of marketing plans and promotional materials, write an excited introduction for an book review site, and pull together cover letters and copies of some of our picture books to be sent to the Caldecott committee. I knew my experience was complete when I got to take it all to the mailroom and pack the books up myself, sending them off to all sorts of places . . . like Provo, Utah.

Some general observations about what it might be like to work in marketing:

• Money pressures: Not only are those in marketing constantly looking for ways to get the book to sell, but they are also doing so in a tight budget. You’d be always looking to place ads that would enable you to reach the right people, but you’d have to do so for as cost as possible so you could also advertise your other books.
• Human dimension: While, from my observations, the bulk of the editors’ work is focused on manuscripts, the people in marketing seem to spend a lot of time making phone calls, organizing events, etc. They do some writing, but much more talking.
• Fleeting approach: I was surprised by the dramatic temporal shift I felt from editorial marketing. The sense of time and the books we talk about in both places was really different. While the editors are looking at manuscripts that may appear on shelves in two years, and are also celebrating recently released titles, the focus in marketing was concentrated on the more immediate: how are the new releases being received right now, and what are we doing for the books coming out in the next six months.
• Glowing view: While I personally have felt, reading through the submissions stack, that I’m on the look out for any serious problems with manuscripts that would prevent us from accepting them, the people in marketing are looking at nearly finished books and have to look for what they like about them so they can talk about it. Yesterday I read one of our new titles that I had previously skimmed while in editorial, and was surprised by how different my reading experience was both times. During the editing read, I was on the lookout for elements that worked and didn’t, and I found both; during the marketing read, I discovered more and more things about it that I loved.

Last night I wrote Alicia, my missionary sister, about my day in marketing and she replied: “go be a sales man who cna spell.” I just might.