Publishers: please may we request that you don’t send reps to us without an appointment. We also really don’t want to have loads of point of sale and proof copies dumped on us. We don’t use POS material we haven’t requested, if we can’t give it to a school, it just gets recycled. 
We already get far more proof copies that we could ever read. You are producing far too many books for this. There are times in the year when you are, between you, sending us 200 proofs a month. We don’t even look at them let alone read them. If we want to see books, we’ll ask.
It is extremely busy in the bookshop. Publishers who send reps to us unannounced make us feel that they actually just have no understanding of, or respect for, retail. To you we may be just ‘shop assistants’, but we are also your sales volume and a huge part of your publicity.
When you send your senior staff to come and meet us a week before Christmas it is both unhelpful and unfair. We would love to spend time chatting to directors but this is the busiest trading time in ALL retail. It isn’t a secret and or specialist knowledge.
We’d have liked to have time to meet your senior staff properly. But at that moment, if we have to choose between your Group Director and our customers, the customer will very definitely be our priority. It’s unfair and disrespectful to expect us to do otherwise.
If your group FDs could see all the proof copies in dusty piles, and all the unopened POS packs stacked in bookshops around the country, they would put pressure on your Boards to have a radical rethink of spending.
The world has changed. Social media is now far, far more important than A2 posters and bunting. And yet not one of you - really none - seems to be investing any time or energy at all in getting it right. In fact almost every single one of you is getting is badly wrong.
There seems to be an overriding approach among publishers which can be summed up as ‘but we’ve always done it like that!’ which is completely exasperating for booksellers who are working their socks off to use social networking to sell and promote your books.
While we are all doing this (and authors too are working hard to get social media activity right, when for many of them it doesn’t come naturally), you don’t even retweet posts about your OWN events, or about your own books. THAT is the extent to which you have just not got this.
There is really an extraordinary and damaging disconnect between booksellers and publishers. Please could we ask, as a matter of importance, that you all consider very seriously at how you promote books and how you communicate with booksellers.
We’d also ask that you consider actively recruiting more people at a management and senior level who have genuine experience of retail. Someone who ‘worked at Waterstones one summer’ doesn’t count. You need people with long and deep experience of being at this end of the process.
Thank you for your attention.
