Welcome to a new instalment of our blog series, Tech Forum to-go, where we put past sessions back on the menu. Today’s turn is for the 2017 session Minding the Gap: Advanced sales strategies for diverse lists.
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Minding the Gap: Advanced sales strategies for diverse lists
For this presentation, we were joined by Tan Light from the Literary Press Group (LPG) and John Toews from McNally Robinson Booksellers, with Léonicka Valcius moderating a collaborative brainstorming session where they came up with practical strategies that sales reps, marketers, and retailers can implement in order to have diverse lists.
Here are six key takeaways from this session:
Takeaway 1 — Pay attention to your audience, their demographics, and its changes
As Tan Light mentions here, at LPG they take the demographics of the audience into account when determining where their books can potentially sell more and where the audience of a book might be located in Canada.
This includes paying attention to the pockets within urban and rural areas where people from specific backgrounds or shared lived experiences might be more present, as well as understanding how the demographics in Canada are constantly changing thanks to the significant number of immigrants and refugees the country welcomes every year.
However, paying attention to the demographics is only the first step, taking this information back to retailers and bringing to their attention how the population around them is changing is just as important and can encourage them to stock on books they’d normally not offer to their customers.
Takeaway 2 — Don’t assume you know who your customers are or what they like
In this part of the session, John mentions how dangerous it is to make assumptions about what customers like or who they are when choosing what books to buy for their bookstore. An approach that has worked for McNally Robinson is to think of who can they reach with a book and what other books are being offered that can support that book.
Takeaway 3 — Good and complete metadata are key for discoverability
As mentioned here, at McNally Robinson Booksellers, they use metadata as a way to identify books that might not be directly about diversity but that still reflect their community, for example, books that feature diverse families and adults, as well as diverse environments.
Takeaway 4 — Take extra steps to highlight diverse books
Taking extra steps can help you ensure diversity is top of mind. At LPG, for example, they have sell sheets tailored around different topics. Some sell sheets, for example, are about African Canadian, LGBTQ+, or Indigenous voices. Having these sell sheets ready every season allows them to offer these diverse books to retailers in a more direct and effective way.
Initiatives like All Lit Up where readers can find and purchase books by LPG’s members and where they actively share content about a wide range of books including many diverse titles have helped them promote more actively diverse books to their audience.
LPG has also offered professional development opportunities to their staff and members resulting in the development of style guides and tools informed by people from underrepresented communities that ultimately, in their case, help publishers seek opportunities to work directly with diverse authors.
Takeaway 5 — Listen to your customers and staff
Paying attention to what the community and your staff are telling you either about the books you’re offering, the books you’re missing, the events you’re hosting, etc., can help inform the decisions you make. In fact, John explains here how they also rely on staff and their interests to inform their book buying decisions, many times leading to buying diverse books that they’d have otherwise probably missed.
Takeaway 6 — Take chances on books and authors that you think are outside your scope
In this part of the session, Tan Light mentions how it’s important for booksellers to take chances on books that they might believe are not for their audience and open up the opportunity for their customers to be exposed to new stories and to give the audience of a book the chance to get to know their bookstores. She mentions how many publishers, bookstores, and readers are in the same geographical space but not in the same cultural space and removing those roadblocks and creating room for diverse books and their authors is important for the community.
Watch the full session below
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