Eloquence Help
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This page is intended to cover topics related to eloquence that are of importance to the entire community.
Pub Dates & Status
If you monitor nothing else on the feedback reports that come from eloquence, you need to watch for situations where the status is still NYP, but the pubdate has passed! If you are going to be late with a book, please update the pub date to a later date. If the book is cancelled or postponed, please update the BISAC Status!
It may be hard to believe, but we're still getting comments from partners about pockets of publishers who consistently don't pay attention to this very important matter. The effect on the supply chain is punishing, and your credibility as a vendor can really take a major hit! If you want the major accounts to buy your books, you need to pay attention to this.
Baker & Taylor Moves to Category Buying - BISAC Subject Categories are more important than ever
In September, Baker & Taylor made some pretty major shifts in the way they buy books. Just about that time, I was speaking with Eleanor Fanicase of B&T, and she was asking that we inform our community just how important BISAC Subject Codes are to this shift in buying. I asked her to send me an email explaining this, and she did, so in her own words:
"Since we have moved to category buying it is imperative that publishers apply the most specific BISAC Subject to their titles. We would like to see the most specific code in the first BISAC Code position. The BISAC code in the first position of the data feed will determine the buying category code.
Each title on our database has been given a buying category code, based on the first BISAC code. This will help the buyers determine the initial buy and reorders. A publisher submitting a title as fiction general when the title is actually fiction mystery may not get the initial buy quantity that they were expecting. Or they may get a bigger buy and a large return in the end. We are hoping that category buying will put us more on target with our initial buys and keeps our returns to a minimum.
Previously our buyers were assigned a group of publishers and would buy the entire publisher's line. With the change to category buying we have split the categories by adult and juvenile and fiction and non-fiction. This will give our buyers a chance to see what is being published in fiction throughout the industry instead of the fiction being published by a specific publisher. It will give them a much better sense of the competition and where the buying dollars should go. Category buying is a dramatic change for our merchandising group and one we hope will be beneficial to B&T and the publishers."
Thanks, Eleanor!
Remember the Supply Chain at Release Time
Another conversation I had recently was with Joe Gonnella of Barnes & Noble. We had a ranging discussion, and I'll endeavor to cover all the points of that meeting in the future. But one point Joe made, I think was really important to consider.
Joe was explaining to me that he is responsible for making sure that inventory is available both to the bricks & mortar stores, and to bn.com. The toughest balancing act he has to play is making sure that both of his constituents have product available for consumers at exactly the same time. As Joe explains, if online has the books before the stores, then the stores lose business, and if the stores have the books before bn.com, then bn.com loses business. When either of these entities lose business, then books come back.
It's been my experience that publishers often make books available on their own websites as well, often long before the books show up at a store. This kind of practice also gives your credibility as a vendor a black eye. Sure, you want to drive people to your site, but if they read about it, and then go to the bookstore to buy, and its not there, you have probably lost the customer.
Joe said that several of the largest trade publishers (including Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, and Macmillan) have gone to a practice of semi-monthly laydowns (much like the music industry), so that the books have more than a week to show up at all the stores across the country. They couple that practice with setting a "hard on-sale date" equal to the pub date in their ONIX feeds. This lets everyone know that the book cannot be shipped to a customer prior to the hard on sale date. While this practice is more expensive, the consistency and sell through advantages often mitigate those costs. Joe wishes that more publishers would look into this.
The take-away here is that you should be using the "On Sale Date" field in title management, and it should be equal to the pub date.
