Dustin Ross: Special Markets Sales Assistant

This week's staff post comes from Dustin Ross, our Special Markets Sales Assistant.

WHAT IT IS TO BE SPECIAL           

I am not a writer.

I didn’t get into publishing to write or advise others how to do so.  I only knew I wanted to work in books.  Fortunately, publishing does offer a whole world of options beyond Editorial.  Special Markets is one of those worlds.

When people ask me what I do, I like to tell them that I sell books to “not-bookstores.” They don’t always get it at first, so I explain how books can be sold just about anywhere, and actually make for a cheap and easy addition to a customer’s product mix.  Citing Urban Outfitters usually works to give them a good sense of what I’m getting at. 

Of course, Special Markets is far more than that.  Urban Outfitters fits into a division of Special Markets that we call Special Retail/Wholesale, where everything from your hometown’s local gift shop to national chains such as Gap and Pottery Barn is handled.  This avenue is really about traditional bookselling in non-traditional outlets.

Sometimes customers want to give books away.  Although we sometimes have to remind them that we do not work on the same business model, we are happy to sell them the books at a generous discount.  Our Corporate/Premium department handles these orders, and it turns out that there are quite a few customers out there willing to buy our books in order to give them away.  One common scenario for this type of order is the Freshman Year Program. In this case, a college or university may order hundreds or even thousands of a book to give away to their incoming freshman class.

Corporate/Premium also works with customers to create customized editions of our titles.  When customers want an edition of a book with their company’s logo on the cover or a letter from their executives, this department handles that.  Often this requires coordinating across numerous departments throughout the company and going to press for a customer-specific print run.

Personally, I work in the Special Mail Order Catalog department.  Apparently, before the Internet, people would buy books from ink-and-paper catalogs that came to their house.  Nowadays, there are still catalogs that offer such services, but ordering can often be done through the Web.  Furthermore, there is a slew of online-only catalogs to which we sell.  Everything from kitschy novelty Web sites to gardening and seed-supply sites runs through us.

In addition to catalogs and online retail, I also work with educational wholesalers.  These companies sell to schools and teachers, and often work with school districts to create curricula for students.  Since these accounts work with all grade levels across all disciplines, I actually get to work with every children’s imprint Macmillan has to offer.  This is of course quite daunting, but also incredibly fun.

So, as you can see, Special Markets is an extremely eclectic sales division.  I only stumbled on it by chance, but have found it exciting and rewarding.  In a way, it is nice waking up every morning and not knowing what my day is going to look like, or what new idea will come across my desk.  Given the current state of our industry, it is comforting to know that there is still plentiful opportunity for bookselling out there.  Sure, we may take sort of a long-tail approach to it, but we are seeing tremendous growth when elsewhere the industry sometimes struggles to remain flat.  Not all of our orders are for enormous quantities of books and our business isn’t exactly focused on what’s on the New York Times bestseller list.  However, it is truly heartening when that little family-owned gift shop, specializing in one specific niche market out there in Middle America, gives me a call and I find that we just happen to sell a book that would be perfect for their store.

And, you know, that’s really kind of special.