The sales reps for business book publishers have a difficult job. It’s a crowded market with powerful resellers (the big bookstores) who have the clout to call the shots. And while many business books contain valuable ideas, they tend to be similar in title and appearance, making it hard for a rep to make the case for a big wholesale buy of any particular title.
In most cases, the only way that a business book can break through the noise is to have the author interviewed and quoted in business publications, thereby creating pull-through demand. Believe me, both the authors and the sales reps really, really, really want this kind of attention.
Since publicity is absolutely critical for business book sales, you’d think that business book publishers would make it easy for the business press to contact authors. But you’d think wrong. Here’s a direct quote from the press relations page from Wiley, one of the world’s largest business book publishers:
We thank you for your interest in John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Please complete the form below and someone from our publicity office will contact you. Because of high volume, requests may require up to 14 days to be fulfilled. Inquiries that are not made though the indicated channels are subject to additional delays, as they must be re-routed. For reporters on deadline, please fax a request on your press letterhead to (201) 748-6817.
Here’s what’s idiotic about this:
- The form. When reporters are researching a story and have the Internet at their fingertips, they can find another source — one with a telephone number and an email address — in seconds. So the first response that any reporter has when seeing this kind of “fill out the form” request is to find another source. Result: lost publicity and lost sales.
- The timing. Fourteen days, eh? What’s the problem here? Can’t the scriveners in Wiley’s back office get their coal scuttles warm enough for their quill pens to work correctly? Or maybe their carrier pigeons caught bird flu? Seriously, how difficult can it be to forward an email to an author with a “ya wanna do this” request?
- The letterhead demand. I guess old Bartleby in the back office must have missed the fact that today’s business publications rely heavily on freelancers, who aren’t going to have a letterhead handy for their client publications. And what’s with required use of a fax machine? Does anybody still use those things?
- The threat. Wiley’s PR folk obviously know that their policies are annoying to reporters — as evidenced by the threat of further delays if the reporter dares to subvert the publicity-prevention mechanism. The statement simply drips with disrespect of the business press — the people who make it easier for Wiley’s sales reps to get Wiley’s books into the stores.
So, here, once again, we have a marketing group that can’t manage even the simplest of all public relations tasks — connecting a reporter with a source. But rather than doing what’s both obvious and easy, Wiley has built roadblocks to the very activity that would generate demand and make life easier for their sales reps.
And Wiley is far from unusual. Maybe it’s just me, but I keep seeing marketing groups that are actively preventing sales reps from doing their job. I keep running across marketing executives who talk big about brand image and “driving sales” but who wouldn’t know a real sales lead if it crawled up their large intestine and starting singing the blues.
Is it me? Am I going nuts? Or has the Internet smoked out a lot of really bad marketing?
