MAARTE GIRLS

Do you take rejection personally? Maybe a client you’re working with, someone you’ve made your entire presentation to, decides to talk to your competitor and says he’ll call you next week. Not only does he fail to call you, he changes his phone number and firm name. When you get back to him the following week, he’s already bought from the competitor. Or you meet someone who says, “I’m really interested,” and when you arrive a week later for your appointment, they calmly inform you that they’ve been enjoying another brand of your product since the day after your meeting. Has something like this ever happened to you? If it hasn’t yet, keep on plugging—it will.
That’s sales. That’s the business world.
You can’t prevent situations of this kind, but you can train yourself to take them in stride. Successful don’t take rejection personally.

Characteristic of great sales people is also true of their companies. They all believe in continuing education. They study technique. They learn new skills. The company managements encourage their salespeople to go to seminars, to listen to cassettes, to watch videotapes, and to read books. You never have to push a successful person to invest in his mind. I he or she knows that if you put better ideas into your brain, better performance will come out. Successful person know that the place to start improving one’s environment is inside one’s own skull. Invest more time, money, and effort into your mind, and finer things will start gravitating to you. You’ll take more enjoyable trips, live in a more comfortable and prestigious home, and have more of the goodies that money buys. I’m not giving you a new
Benjamin Franklin said, “Empty the coins in your purse into your mind, and your mind will fill your purse with gold.”

Idea meetings are usually attended by a combination of a publisher’s editorial and marketing people, and the attendance may vary by who is available on any given day. Although they may be scheduled for the same day and time each week, these meetings are basically informal and unstructured, more like group discussions. They usually don’t have a written schedule or agenda; everyone sits around a table and the atmosphere is collegial, relaxed, and frank.
Editors inform the group about book proposals to generate discussions in which everyone chimes in. The group asks questions, gives opinions, and volunteers information about similar or competitive books. Idea meetings are essentially exploratory. Their purpose is to challenge proposals by closely examining them and chipping away to see if the proposed project would make a good book for the house to publish. They discuss whether they think the firm should commit further time and resources to each book discussed. At idea meetings, proposals can be rejected, but they cannot be given final approval.
What is the book about?
Is there an audience for the book? If so, who is that audience?
Where will it be shelved? Books that don’t have clearly identifiable places on bookstore shelves get lost. Booksellers don’t know where to place them, and potential buyers don’t know where to find them.
Can the book be produced so that it provides value for readers? For example, if all the books on a subject are priced in the $30 range, can the publisher deliver this book with a higher word count or information not in competing books and sell it for
$12.95?
“A book has to be clearly identifiable as something new in the marketplace,” according to Gary Krebs, the publishing director at Adams Media.”New in the marketplace means that it can be on the same topic as something that already exists, but there has to be a new spin, a new direction, which sometimes can be just a format change. Or, you could spin an existing topic for a new demographic such as businesswomen when all the other books were primarily aimed at men.”
All decisions are market driven; the group must believe that the book proposed can make the company money. Editors as well as marketing representatives usually won’t support a proposal unless they believe that the book can be commercially viable.
If the proposal survives the idea meeting, the editor who championed it usually prepares a presentation report or packet for another committee; one that has the authority to acquire the property. The report or packet includes research on sales figures, competing books, comparable history of the publisher’s other books, recent publishing trends, and whether this proposal fits in with its overall vision of what they did in the past and want to do in the future.
At these meetings, the group wants to see if the book has a strong hook and how it is positioned.