A day in the life of a Marketing Manager
Caoimhe O’Brien is Marketing Manager for Endeavour Press. Prior to this she was Endearvour’s Marketing Assistant, after working in the publicity and marketing department at Phaidon Press.
7.45am I eventually manage to get up, get ready and negotiate the tube.
9am I make it to the office. After the stress of the rush hour the first task is to make a strong coffee!
9.15am – 10am – The first hour or so of my morning is spent going through my emails. Sometimes, thankfully, this can be quite painless, but on certain days, Mondays usually, there can be quite a long list… I usually have lots of emails from authors asking about marketing plans for their books. I have a pretty in-depth ‘hints and tips’ sheet that I send out to everyone, with advice on how to set up Amazon, Goodreads and Facebook author profiles, smart Twitter tips, and steps on how to create a basic author website; but most authors still have lots of questions for me about how to help make their book sell as many copies as possible. As we manage a huge list of authors, all keen to promote their book as much as possible, my job involves a lot of author management.
10am –1pm – Most of my day today will be spent planning and booking promotions for next week. As it’s coming up to Christmas – one of the busiest sales period of the year – this is more important than ever. I am responsible for promoting our huge list of over 3000 books, and, at the moment, this involves working with more than 200 books every week (my spreadsheet is pretty intimidating!). To most publishers, this volume sounds crazy, but over the years we have put such great systems in place that things run smoothly (most of the time!). The main way I promote our books is through price promotions. At the moment, we publish exclusively with Amazon, and all of our books are enrolled in KDP Select, so I make the most of their Free Book and Kindle Countdown Deal promotions.
1pm – 2pm Lunch. Today I am taking out an author who I recently helped sign up, to discuss a marketing strategy for her book. This is her first book with a digital publisher and she is keen to learn as much as possible about how digital marketing differs to traditional print marketing. We work right opposite Borough Market, and there are loads of great lunch places, so I like to invite authors in as much as possible as an excuse to make the most of them!
2pm – 4pm Once I have set all of my Free Books and Countdown Deals, I submit those books to various online deal sites. Some of those are submitted quite far in advance (I pick a selection of around 100 books to submit to Amazon every quarter for them to include in Amazon Daily and Monthly Deals; and I also submit to BookBub once a month, when I think books have enough reviews to be considered for their mailing list), but others can be submitted fairly last minute. The main sites I use on a weekly basis are EReaderNewsToday, BookSends and ManyBooks, though there are plenty of others out there.
4pm – 4.30pm I’m responsible for Endeavour’s internship programme. We have two interns here every month. I receive around 5 CVs each week and read them carefully to find the right interns for Endeavour. We like to think that interning here is a fun and educational experience. Interns at Endeavour don’t make tea or run errands; they get involved reading submissions, helping with social media campaigns and learning about the business. At the end of their time here, I like to bring each intern for a coffee to chat about how the internship went, answer any questions they might have and offer some advice about getting work in publishing.
4.30pm – 5.30pm Once a month, I compile sales figures for the previous month. KDP is quite an easy platform to use and it makes checking sales pretty easy, but it’s still a mammoth task tracking the sales of such a huge list. Our books are available for sale worldwide on Amazon and it is really interesting seeing how different books sell in different countries. I also track the results of the weekly promotions that I run using Ereader News Today, BookSends and ManyBooks. Seeing the success of these promotions is one of the best parts of my job!
After work And now for everyone’s favourite part of publishing – socialising! Tonight, I am going to the Crime Writer’s Association Christmas Party in the booklover’s paradise, Goldsboro Books. Events like this are great for chatting to fellow book enthusiasts and for finding potential new authors.
Jaclyn Swope is a Publisher Account Manager on the Book Research team at Nielsen BookScan, where she assists a variety of publishers with understanding and utilising both retail sales and consumer data, through training sessions, presentations and bespoke analysis of book industry trends.
Among other things, Emily has worked as a picture researcher, a freelance copy editor, proofreader and indexer, and has also contributed to several books on fashion and design, including The Fashion Dictionary and Fashion: The Whole Story. She’s now a Commissioning Editor at RotoVision.
