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The Book’s The Thing

June 28, 2007

If I told you this is only the tip of the iceberg, what would you think?

Directors of marketing/publicity at the big publishing houses have great jobs. They get to pack and ship books to me all day.

One thing I’ll say for them, they’ve found some creative ways to avoid saying, “Dear God, it’s not YOU again…”

They’re unfailingly polite. Usually they’re pretty obliging, too.

Occasionally I will get, “Umm… The ten books I sent you last week weren’t enough?”

To which I’ll respond with blog statistics, which on my freelance blog are currently topping out at around 4,500 every month. That’s a lot of book buyers looking for advice on what to pick up next.

So they usually won’t argue the point with me, which I figure justifies me to be pretty doggone grabby. In a polite, obliging way, of course. There’s a lot of turnover in the publishing industry, but a marketing V.P. irritated one day will very possibly be a person I’ll encounter again, working for another publishing group.

I’m pretty respectful of the hand that feeds me, or in this case, enables me to get my hands on the cream of the new book crop before these books hit the stores.

As my daughter said to me just yesterday, watching me rip into the latest padded mailer the FedEx guy dropped off:

“I wish I had your job. I was I was a …. whatever you are.”

My sentiments, exactly.

posted by Lisa at 4:09 pm | Comments (0)