Wednesday, 17 March 2010  How Books Are Sold  Commercial
publishers achieve their high sales levels by ensuring that they
have a good stock of books and an efficient distribution system
which will get their titles from warehouse to bookshop shelves
as quickly and as cheaply as possible.  This backs up the
efforts of their sales teams, which use a combination of
telesales calls and store visits to take orders from booksellers
across the country.  The sales staff are supported by the
publisher's marketing staff, who produce full-colour catalogues
for the sales teams to refer to. These catalogues list all
titles from backlist to front runners, including books planned
for publication in the future, and are sent free of charge to
distributors, wholesalers, bookshops and anyone else in between.
The marketing staff advertise books to the book industry via the
trade press, and promote the books to potential readers by
buying advertising in national and niche publications; by
producing promotional goods like posters,