In connection with our posting (see Repjep) about the endangered species called traveling sales reps, we’ve just come across a moving open letter to publishers on the subject, issued by the New Atlantic IndependentBooksellers Association (NAIBA). We feel it’s worth reprinting in full.

An Open Letter to Publishers from NAIBA

We are alarmed with what appears to be a trend in the sales division of publishers – the removal of field sales reps to independent bookstores. This draconian move against our bookselling segment will be responsible for the disappearance of book culture.

Field sales reps are a crucial part of our business. Each regional independent booksellers association and Publishers Weekly honors an outstanding field rep each year. We can’t think of another publisher position that gets this recognition. We devote countless hours at conferences refining the sales rep/bookseller relationship. They are that crucial to us. Restricting field reps to large stores will give publishers a skewed view of what is a very diverse world –independent bookselling.

Sales reps take the time to know our stores, what our customers like, and what is on our shelves. They are the industry worker-bees, travelling the region, taking ideas and trends and pollinating other stores. We learn about other stores from them, what others are reading and loving; what is selling; marketing tips; event ideas; what the publisher is doing; and what authors have books coming out in the next season. They make fans for authors out of our frontline booksellers. They cut through the catalogs to make sure we carry what we’ll be able to sell, and their endorsements are why we buy what we might have ignored. These reasons are why cuts in field sales reps devastate us. Have you really thought about what this stricture will mean to you? Fewer books sales.

Without a doubt, we are not ordering as much through telemarketing. We are definitely not focusing on your backlist through tele-sales, and we definitely miss titles from the frontlist. We also don’t buy as much direct, which makes independent bookselling a less profitable business. The vicious cycle is that we buy less because we don’t have sales reps, and then you devalue our business because we aren’t buying as much as we used to.

We understand the corporate need to save money. There are more efficacious and less exclusionary ways to cut your budgets. You know what they are because independent bookstores have been telling you what they are for years. Cut multiple ARC mailings. Do away with promotional gimmicks that go from mailbox to garbage can. Consider publishing fewer titles, fewer hard covers, fewer copies. Take a hard look at celebrity advances.

We exist to sell your books, those unique and hard to place titles, not just the established authors. Field sales reps are the tools we need to do that for you. As much as you would like to think a tele-salesperson is doing the same job, you are sadly mistaken. A field sales rep is far more than a person filling in an order form. Don’t cut our lifeline to your books.

Sincerely,

The NAIBA Board of Directors

.

Reps are in jeopardy.

One of the most devastating changes wrought by the upheaval in the book business has been the shift from traveling sales representatives to telemarketers. (See Howdy, Brownsville, New York Calling. Have We Got a Great Bio of Spinoza for Y’all).

“Travelers,” as they were originally called (and still are in some circles), are an endangered species holding on by their fingernails.  Their fates are inextricably attached to that other threatened breed called independent bookstores, and with the advent of computerized ordering, heavy big-box-store discounting and all the advantages offered by Amazon, traveling book reps find themselves in the same position that itinerant knife-sharpeners held a century ago.

“It’s a great irony,” one member of the traveling clan told Publishers Weekly‘s Judith Rosen, “that physical bookstores that carry thousands of books that readers want are losing out because cutting people out of the transaction is rewarded with the lowest prices. It’s the great devaluation of people in the financial transaction that is hitting the bookstores especially hard right now.”

A book industry that depends on human beings?  Preposterous!

But, reports Rosen, travelers are a rugged clan and they’re starting to fight fire with fire. “In addition to iPads stuffed with digital collateral material that not so long ago filled an entire car trunk, many groups rely on sophisticated database systems to let buyers know about previous seasonal ordering patterns and what similar stores are doing with a particular title.”

“To the extent that we still have small publishers and small bookstores, I’m going to have a job,” said one rep, who thinks of himself and his colleagues as “the missionaries of the church that is publishing.”

To which we say a fervent Hallelujah!

Richard Curtis

Have you heard the joke about the traveling trade book salesman?

Actually, that’s the joke.  The publisher “sales reps” that once traveled to independent bookstores in assigned territories, armed with catalogs and advance read copies of books, have become an endangered species.

The reasons are many and complex, but chief among them are the dwindling number of independent booksellers; the growth of centralized, computerized ordering; the rise of e-books; and a bleak trade book economy that makes commissioned salespeople an unaffordable luxury.

Finally, telemarketers are replacing what’s left of a once proud cadre of “travelers” who intimately understood the tastes and reading habits of customers in their territories. (see Howdy Brownsville, New York Calling.) In fact, many of these same forces drove the independent wholesale distributors out of business in the late 1990s. (See The Rise and Fall of the Mass Market Paperback Part 1 and Part 2.)

Finally, the economy has applied the coup de grace. “Contractions in the book business in response to the Great Recession led to cuts in sales forces for large houses like Simon & Schuster,” writes Judith Rosen in the New York Times, “while commissioned rep groups that service independent publishers have also felt the pinch.”

You can read details in Rosen’s Can Sales Reps Survive?

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.