Julia Callahan has worked as a field rep for Hachette for only two years, but she’s certainly made her mark on her roughly 90 accounts, which are primarily indies with a sprinkling of university bookstores and museum gift shops.
Several California booksellers nominated Callahan—who covers Southern California, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah—as rep of the year, including Mallory Groff, a buyer at Warwick’s in La Jolla, who describes Callahan as the perfect example of a publishers rep. “She knows our store, our staff, and our customers,” Groff wrote in her nomination, “better than some staff do.”
Mary Williams, general manager of Skylight Books in Los Angeles, also supported Callahan, writing that she is “always there when we need her, and her follow-through is second to none.” Skylight’s assistant events manager, Mick Kowaleski, called Callahan “an incredible, thoughtful rep with a knack for problem-solving” when he, too, nominated her for rep of the year.
Callahan’s journey to becoming a Hachette field rep was somewhat circuitous. “I’ve done it all,” Callahan says. “When I was younger, I worked on the docks in San Francisco and trained with my dad’s catering business.” After graduating from UC-Santa Cruz in 2005 Callahan worked for a year at Paramount Pictures, leading studio tours and working on Dr. Phil McGraw’s television talk show. She also worked weekends at Book Soup, as part of the events planning team coordinated by Tyson Cornell.
“I realized that I didn’t like film production, and that I liked bookselling,” she recalls. So, she quit her job at Paramount to work full-time at Book Soup. When Cornell left Book Soup in 2009 to launch an indie press, Rare Bird Books, she followed him and stayed there for more than 10 years, first as an editor and then working in marketing and sales. “But I needed something different at the tail end of the lockdown era of the pandemic,” she says. In 2021, she applied for a job at IPG, when it launched its first in-house field sales team. “I absolutely loved repping,” she says. And after two years at IPG, she moved on to Hachette.
Pointing out that Hachette has always published the kinds of books that are targeted by right-wing extremists, Callahan praises indie booksellers for countering book bans by selling such books. “Whatever small part I get to play in that is an honor,” she says, noting that she keeps a small stack of “queer books” next to her computer, “to remind me of why I do the work that I do, and that I play a small part in getting these books into the hands of queer kids. That’s what keeps me going in these dark times.”
