IPG SALES CHANNELS

Book Clubs and Foreign Rights

IPG's book club and foreign rights specialist meets personally several times a season with 26 buyers at Bookspan for 33 different clubs and with buyers at Scholastic Book Clubs, QPB, BOMC, and a wide variety of other clubs. She also forwards publicity and notifies club buyers of titles of interest that are selling well in the trade, negotiates sales prices, reviews contracts, acts as liaison and troubleshooter between publishers and book club personnel, and maintains records of sales, inventory, contracts pending, and payments. Publishers are always consulted before any offer is accepted.

Foreign rights sales are nonexclusive per the IPG publisher agreement. For those publishers who choose to have IPG sell foreign rights for them, IPG presents their titles to foreign publishers and subagents from all over the world at the Frankfurt and London book fairs, where IPG has a major booth in the general publishing section. Such contacts continue throughout the year, and review copies and promotional materials to elicit offers are sent as needed. IPG collects the fees (typically an advance against royalties and a graphics fee for artwork if appropriate), handles taxes, and ensures that royalties are paid each year.

"What will it take to double our book sales through IPG?" I questioned Mark Suchomel and the IPG team in the summer of 2004 during a meeting to review our fall titles. Two and a half years later, having met that goal and now happily setting some bigger ones for the future, I look back at that meeting as a turning point. It was the start of really using the IPG expertise that was there all along but that we were probably too resistant to before. Lots of good suggestions. Most we took, although in some cases our core market needs outweighed what we were willing to do for the bookstore market. Some suggestions stung a bit, as IPG challenged us to raise our standards to compete with the big guys. No one likes to hear that their baby is ugly! Recently, we purchased some important book rights and acquired a small publisher in our field. In both cases, the advice from IPG staff-on pricing, positioning, sales potential-was very helpful. We consider them an extension of our sales and marketing team. Alan Giagnocavo Fox Chapel Publishing East Petersburg, Pennsylvania