The Big Five publishers—as well as many other sizable publishers—have in-house sales teams responsible for pitching books to retailers, wholesalers, distributors, libraries, and more. Sales staff work in collaboration with marketing and publicity departments and typically have a voice during the acquisitions process. (At the publishing company Jane worked at, sales had the power to kill any project they believed wouldn’t perform well.)
At the US Book Show in May, a panel of sales people discussed their role and offered insights into today’s sales process, mainly to help the agents and editors in attendance better serve their books and their authors. Some basic lingo to know: accounts refers to specific buyers of books (Amazon, Ingram, Barnes & Noble, Target, and so on). Sales conferences happen two or three times a year; publishers review the season’s titles with sales reps and/or distributors, highlighting the positioning, marketing, and publicity for each one. Selling in or sell-in refers to publishers pitching accounts with new books to buy for placement in store. POS refers to point-of-sale data, or book sales made through the register at an account.
“We are the eyes and ears of the market,” said Kelly Roberts, the vice president and deputy director of sales at HarperCollins. Sales staff receive regular feedback from reps and accounts about consumer buying habits, both before and after the book is on sale. For that reason, sales collaborates in an ongoing way with editorial and marketing alike on the book’s positioning, title, format, cover design, on-sale dates (often optimized for important accounts), timing of announcements, pre-order campaigns, and more. It’s not just about a handful of sales conferences each year.
Key to selling in a book: the story behind it, said Gary Urda, senior vice president of sales at Simon & Schuster. “Every title will have a different story. Sometimes you’ll get them [accounts] to pay attention, and sometimes you won’t.” That story might be about particular publicity plans or what media the publisher or author is able to generate. He warned no one should underestimate how accounts can understand a book’s potential. “Our accounts are very savvy. They’re watching Amazon bestsellers more than we are, BookScan more than we are, authors on TikTok.”
If a book does well at Account B, but Account A passed on it, it’s common for Account A to then jump on it. But Jennifer Edwards, vice president of children’s sales at Macmillan, said there’s still a need for constant conversations, where the sales person tells the account, “There is something here—you should be taking advantage of this.”
If a book releases and doesn’t perform well, sales needs a story to tell before they can effectively pitch that book again. Urda said, “If the hardcover didn’t work, why’s the trade paperback going to work?” If the publisher is releasing with the exact same package or the exact same marketing plan, that’s not a good story.
While the retail marketplace is alive and well, accounts are less flexible than they’ve ever been, said Urda. Twenty-five years ago, it was possible to pitch all the accounts with the same story about why they should buy a book. But that doesn’t work any more. “What’s going to work at Costco isn’t going to work at Walmart,” he said. Or, he offered another example: “A large national chain believes that certain books will only work in trade paperback, so we don’t do hardcover of certain books.” (He was obviously referring to Barnes & Noble; see our coverage.) Urda also brought up the pressures of increased minimum wage, which affects sell-in for accounts. “I’m not going to be able to merchandise all your books from day one,” he told the audience of agents and editors.
Some accounts are setting their buying and merchandising schedules further in advance than before, another factor that affects sell-in. Many authors and publishing outsiders complain about how long it takes publishers to release a book, but it was clear from the panel that if authors want their book to have the best shot possible at retail merchandising and placement, the publisher needs a long runway, not least because the accounts demand a long runway.
Also, publishers (and authors) have a responsibility to drive customers into stores. Roberts said publishers can do this by creating exclusive products or gifts with purchases. She said authors can assist by using social media to amplify any special offers that can be found only in stores and/or to amplify the signal of important accounts supporting the book.
Authors tend to hate the industry’s emphasis on comps, but comp sales influence accounts’ buying decisions. “POS is an invaluable if fallible tool,” said Christine Edwards, senior vice president of sales at Abrams Books. “So much of what we do in this business—we spend a lot of time looking in the rearview mirror.” Meaning: Historical POS or comp sales are an indicator for the success of a future book. “When we look at POS, we look at it from the lifecycle of a book. Recent sales history of books in the market inform our sales assumptions for a book.”
While this method is fallible, as Edwards pointed out, the sales team can’t ignore decision-making tools used by accounts; they have to be able to speak to their data and their needs. Once a book is released, POS can affect future decisions by the publisher, such as timing of the paperback. (Paperbacks will be delayed as long as a hardcover continues to sell well across multiple channels, or vice versa.)
Additionally, Edwards said, “POS is really valuable as a predictive indicator of what consumers will be looking for at a particular moment in time.” This can be used by publishers as a way to expand distribution of backlist by telling accounts that consumers will be going into stores to buy specific things at specific times—because they do it every single year. Since the children’s market is predominantly a backlist business (80 percent of children’s books sold every year are backlist), POS data is very important to publishers from a supply chain perspective. There is also a lot of seasonality to the market. Jennifer Edwards said, “Children’s books have to be printed a year before the holiday, so we use that POS as a predictor of what we will need that holiday season. … It’s something I look at every single day.”
Data can also be used to convince accounts to buy when they’re reluctant.Christine Edwards told a story about trying to sell in a book about pickleball just when the sport was starting to take off. She said at first the accounts pushed back, but that’s when sales reps would point to the growth of the sport, from 19 million to 65 million players in a short period of time. By showing evidence of what consumers are doing, publishers can get account support.
Additionally, in the cookbook market, there was a belief on the account side that sales just go to Amazon if the author is predominantly online, as opposed to on TV. So Christine Edwards put together a case study looking at authors with the biggest online platforms and was able to show that a certain type of author—like Smitten Kitchen’s Deb Perelman—was overindexed at independent bookstores. In other words, Perelman’s audience was made up of people who prefer to buy from indies. “Just because an author’s platform is online doesn’t mean there isn’t a bricks-and-mortar play. I think accounts understand that now, but at the time, we needed the data,” she said. Urda pointed out that sometimes publishers’ sales reps can be guilty of buying into the accounts’ ingrained assumptions without looking at the data themselves.
What advice do the sales people have for authors? Roberts said, “We try to tell our authors to do what’s authentic to them. … We try to advise authors to engage with their audience. If you’re not comfortable with it, it’s not going to be effective, [but] it’s great to develop that relationship with your readers. We invest a lot of time and effort in our divisional social platforms, but readers want to hear from the authors.”
Bottom line: Speaking mainly to the editors in the room, Roberts said if editors aren’t certain what their biggest book of the season is, if editors don’t know what will help sell a particular book, then sales will struggle to communicate that to the account and won’t be able to speak with confidence. The others agreed: Sales needs to know why editors bought a book and why they are excited about it. You put all this work into it—why? Where do you see it in the market? Does it fill a hole in the market? Urda advised editors, “At a sales conference, give us that two-minute pitch, but tell us, What are your expectations? Where do you think that book is going to go? Be open-eyed and go through stores. Everything you need to know [about book sales] is in a store. … Walk more stores.”
For authors: Make sure you’re on the same page as your editor in the answers to these questions and that you communicate your expectations as well.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
