My CANSCAIP Interview with: Denise Anderson, Director of Marketing and Publicity, Scholastic Canada
How did you become the director of marketing and publicity for Scholastic Canada?
My background is journalism and public relations. My first job in the book industry was with Coles Bookstores in corporate communications, first as an assistant to Kelly Duffin (a great mentor) and then as the editor of their bi-monthly consumer magazines.
I then moved to Scholastic as their publicist briefly before heading to Vancouver to work at Raincoast and Douglas & McIntyre. When I returned to Toronto in 1998, I worked at D&M, managing special sales and Candlewick Books, which they distributed at the time.
I returned to Scholastic in 2002 to work in marketing. Scholastic Canada had decided to focus on growing its trade presence. Many of the people I’d worked with were still there and now running the company, and the others brought on board were people I knew from so many years in publishing –it made for a very comfortable transition!
What advice would you give to someone who wanted a career in marketing or publicity for a publisher?
You have to be willing to do anything: work nights, weekends, get coffee, lift boxes. If you go to an industry party, you’re not there as a guest. You have to be alert and make sure things go smoothly. You have to be a multi-tasker who pays attention to detail.
When hiring, I will look for people with retail experience who have also taken publishing courses. But the most important factor is that you have a passion and knowledge of books. You are surrounded by book people and if you don’t love that, it’s hard to take the pace.
Can you describe the qualities of a dream author to work with?
These days, it is crucial to be connected on social media. An author must have online presence. They must be accessible to their audience. Having said that, they don’t have to spend all of their time on Facebook, Twitter, and blogs, but there are so many exciting possibilities for promotion and this is often the way readers find you.
In the world of children’s books, it’s really important to have a website where teachers and librarians can go to get information about you: your books, your biography, whether you do school visits.
Authors who are “out there” doing events and appearances are fantastic. The ones who tell their publishers what their doing and when, with plenty of time for us to help promote and get books where they need to be are even better!
Dream authors also know that there is a fine line between promoting a book and harassing about a book. They are respectful of everyone’s time. It’s great to let the local bookstore know you have a new book out, offer to sign stock or whatever they’d like, but going in every day to see if they’ll bring more in doesn’t generally earn you any friends.
And now describe an author from heck.
An author from heck is one that plans events on their own but doesn’t let us know until a day or two before and then expects us to somehow have books in place and do promotion for them.
They are too aggressive with their needs. There is a fine line between promoting and irritating, and the author from heck is blind to that line. I don’t know any publicist who doesn’t wish there were more hours in a day and who doesn’t do everything possible to get the word out about their books.
It is completely understandable that not everyone is super tech-savvy these days, but it’s very important to at least have a basic knowledge. “I don’t have email” doesn’t instill confidence in an author’s ability to help spread the work about their books.
Authors are almost by definition introverts. Do you get frustrated by authors who won’t do publicity things for you?
It does no one any good to put an author into an uncomfortable situation. We respect the various personalities of authors and try to make sure that what we ask them to do is in keeping with their comfort levels. While not everyone looks forward to getting up and talking in front of a crowd, I would say most of the authors I’ve worked with are as happy as I am to get out of the office and talk to people.
Can you describe your typical day?
There isn’t really such thing as a typical day, although every day seems to involve a lot of email and meetings! It could involve meeting about our websites, signing off on ads and catalogues, working on authors’ tour schedules.
Our department tends to get a lot of general questions and complaints sent our way, on top of the usual tasks. It varies at the time of year as well. If a sales conference is coming up, I’m preparing presentations and gathering sales and marketing materials; meeting with our team to create marketing plans; and organizing the “social” part of conference.
September is “book festival” month, so we are arranging for author appearances, getting promotional materials to our retail partners at the events and manning booths on weekends. It’s also when we have a lot of authors on tour. Summer is also surprisingly busy, prepping for the fall events.
What advice do you have for a first-time author?
Join CANSCAIP.
Connect with other authors and illustrators. It is a small but generous community and there are lots of mentors who are willing to share their own experiences.
Be nice to everyone. Canadian children’s publishing is a small community. You never know where someone may turn up next. Also, word gets around, so make sure the words about you are positive ones.
Hone your presentation skills. Being able to do school and library presentations is absolutely key. The first step may be doing one for free at your own kids’ school.
If you could generalize, what would be the most common problems you run into?
Many new authors have unrealistic expectations about bookstore signings. We read about line-ups out the door with mega-author bookstore signings, but unless you’re Dav Pilkey, the reality is that most authors will get few people out. Even relatively well-known authors will get few people out. But if that happens, appreciate those who showed up and spend some quality time with them. Sylvia McNicoll wrote a great blog about book launches recently.
A better way around it is to plan a community event that is creative and interesting. Invite your friends and family, neighbours, students, teachers, and the local media. And ask your local independent bookseller to be the vendor. This brings attention to you and your book, and it helps your local bookseller as well.
We are always on the lookout for new ways to connect authors with bookstores in a successful way.
Peer into your crystal ball and tell me what you see in the future for publicity in children’s publishing…..
Now is like the wild west. It’s an exciting time in book publicity. There are so many new opportunities and they are constantly changing. It is crucial to be flexible and adaptable.
I love the bloggers. In the last couple of years, they have become the new way to promote books. I have had more fun marketing books in the last two years than ever. There are so many cool new venues out there and hardly enough hours in the day to keep up with it all. Not necessarily every new online venue will be successful, but it is so fun to try.
Some of the challenges? We need to support authors and illustrators more with training on Skype and other online tools. Ebooks are on the rise, even in the children’s book industry. I hope that means people will just buy more books in different formats.
Marsha Skrypuch is the author of sixteen books for children and young adults. Her two most recent are One Step At A Time: A Vietnamese Child Finds Her Way (Pajama Press, 2012) and Making Bombs For Hitler (Scholastic, 2012). She is thrilled to have two Forest of Reading 2013 nominated books: Silver Birch Fiction for Making Bombs, and Red Maple non-fiction for Last Airlift.
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