Rick Simonson

The Road These Ways
July 24, 2007

A few weeks ago, Adam Schnitzler, the fine new rep who is selling Perseus - what we have called Perseus Books Group and had just started calling Perseus Distribution Services - up and down the West Coast to accounts of a certain size, was here, making his seasonal call for the first time.. I'll leave it for another piece to speculate on what we're supposed to call Adam and Cindy Heidemann, who has been what we've called our Transition Vendor nee Publishers Group West rep. She now sells the whole caboodle (what Adam sells plus what she sells) in various other accounts here, and now, more distantly elsewhere. As of the last announcement I think I got, they're both to be called Perseus reps? Not even Perseus Purple and Perseus Azure? Something more distinguishing would help there, though they each do have distinct e-mail personae.. For that, another time.

With Adam at lunch, there was getting further acquainted. He was up here from San Francisco, his bookselling roots (years of working at Green Apple) still very close to heart. With him, as with no one else who's come calling this season, it was interesting to talk the changing terrain of where reps in the west are now, and where they go.

The Bay Area - and Northern California - for seemingly forever, was the heart and anchor of what happened in book sales, in terms of retail, wholesale, and where publishers based their house reps. The larger houses, depending on when we're talking relative to various mergers and acquisitions, would seemingly employ reps in squadrons there. Most of those houses had at least two reps; a question would be who got what accounts, how they were divided (by geography, alphabet, seniority ...). As territories with travel went, it was one with little overnight going. Some might make an overnighter or so of a northern swing along the coast ... usually reps from Los Angeles or Seattle would get on planes to do Hawaii or Alaska, the balance of business in place was such.

Now it is utterly different. Tower is no more. Bookpeople, L&S - the two larger wholesalers - are gone. So is A Clean Well Lighted Place, from multiple stores to one to none. Cody's on Telegraph. Printers Ink. Probably an array of university/college stores, none more of a visible loss to the rep circuit and independent bookselling than the Stanford store. There are others. It's still vibrant, there's still, obviously, so much there, in general bookselling retailers, speciality accounts, museum stores, still heartier by far than most anywhere else in the country. But sometimes people focus more on what's been lost. 

Adam talked of how it was to have so many fewer reps, and so many of them coming from out of town. Reps based (basically) out of Seattle cover the Bay Area for Simon & Schuster (she also goes to Las Vegas!), Norton, Houghton, Oxford. There are also some based in Los Angeles who work their way up, do the whole West Coast.

It occurred to me while we were talking that what's happening can't/shouldn't all be laid at the feet of what's transpired in the Bay Area. It's endemic to how things are done everywhere - the lessening of accounts, yes, but also the tendency to try and make it seem evermore can truly be done with ever fewer resources (people, etc.). And, this coverage of the Bay Area by book travelers (that is the old vernacular), has much with individual situations. With Norton, Houghton, and Simon, it was reps stepping down or getting out. Had it been Seattle-based reps doing the retiring, it would surely have gone the other way - reps from the Bay Area would be coming up here, and we would be remarking upon that. As it is, one company made noise about its Seattle rep moving down to cover the Bay Area when this change was coming about; a problem set in when it was realized that the publisher would have to come up with a hefty houising allowance to cover the change in costs between an already-pricey Seattle real estate market and an exorbitant Bay Area one. On top of that, there's the loss of income by a spouse having to quit the job that's here, and find new work, in time, down there. So far, no move. 

The spread in territory, having more reps come from afar does have its affects, as our Bay Area colleagues are finding out. There's scheduling, for one, as reps try to cobble together travel, making appointments, and the calendar (always, with the big houses, at the interruptive whim of the big add-on or sudden meeting). As a buyer, you sometimes find yourself piling on to accomodate someone's schedule that way. Too, there is less time for the incidental - cruising by, getting a sense of the store on a non-appointment day, working with other stuff, whether it's task-oriented (accounting, receiving, co-op) or knowing other staff members' reading and handselling inclinations first-hand.

It's what we're all living and working with now. I have more than my share of frustrations with it; on the other hand, it does widen the pool of conversation, whether it's general gossip or fishing around for a position to take on a title, to inquire as to how the Tattered Cover, Book Passage, Vroman's or even the people in Las Vegas might be seeing things.

Posted by Rick Simonson on July 24, 2007 | Comments (0)