From: Christine Taylor-Butler <kansascitymom_at_earthlink.net>
Date: Thu, 06 Feb 2014 13:29:19 -0500 (EST)

I do get your point better now. Actual sales speaks more volume than suggestion. We are on the same page about that.  But early in my career editors warned me that sales and marketing is part of why ethnic books fail to get through acquisitions. Make no mistake on that one, they do drive part of this problem. Sometimes rigid adherence to corporate and business school models may be what broke this machine in the first place. In laymen's terms - readers are not widgets nor are their elasticities of demand always predictable or quantifiable on a spreadsheet.

But yes - money talks. Loudly.

This is a chicken and egg situation, however. We've already trained the market (all ethnicities) that books featuring "us" will be issue oriented. So much so that even students don't want to read them outside of a class assignment. Won't look for the ones that aren't. We don't market the books as mainstream. They aren't celebrated as if they are just one of many good selections. We need those books - mostly commercial and speculative, to exist first and by the right people.

I'll give as an analogy the Tree of Life series of cards released by Hallmark by a well meaning team of people who were not Jewish and used "marketing data" to design the card line. When rolling out the product in a corporate meeting they couldn't pronounce the word "L'chaim" as "La Cheem" until I raised my hand and corrected them. The marketing manager said "Are you sure? Wow, you know a lot of trivia."  Later, the first black card line was released without a single black writer or illustrator on the team (see the pattern?). The line failed because they put them only in stores a radius of only five miles around known predominantly black neighborhoods rather than stock them in all their stores including those where middle class and affluent blacks lived (but were a minority) And to make matters worse, didn't advertise the new line nor check them for cultural accuracy. The CEO at the time, who had no social expression background but instead hailed from a railroad corporation said to an meeting of minority salaried employees that blacks don't buy the cards. One young woman stood up and pointed out that she was from the marketing department. She told him that marketing and sales believed the same thing and therefore eliminated ethnic people from the focus groups. Said the CEO "You mean we don't know whose buying our cards and why?"

Most of the cards failed because they were just white cards with black faces and the word "Mom" or "Mother" changed to "Mama" (which they believed to be the ubiquitous black greeting) I pointed out that my father - a fan of jazz - for instance, would have preferred a card with a jazz illustration to feature a short message: articulate and jazzy. Hallmark opted to insert one of their ubiquitous long flowery, sugary sentiment instead making the card unsaleable in the market.  Then later balked at fast tracking a Kwanzaa card. Said the manager, "If I haven't heard of it, it must not be that big a deal." A decade later, the company is now shutting down plants and laying off people because the male dominated management team pooh-poohed the suggestions of women managers (including me) who asked to shift our business model to include a digital component and online presence as far back as the late 1990's. They should have turned social expression into a Facebook environment long before Zuckerberg was out of diapers. Now they are playing catch-up too late in the game.

Because Hallmark allowed people who weren't the target audience to make decisions about the preferences of the consumers who were. And missed the new demographic completely.

Hence publishers fight the same wave of change. Asking CCBC members to buy more books to send a signal about economic clout makes sense if the books consumers of all ethnicities wanted actually existed in larger varieties - in the form we wanted them and were visible to those used to being shut out as consumers.  Buying more of what we don't want doesn't change the situation.

People of color often are raised "bi-lingual" in terms of their own and white cultures but are pushed through an editing process where their cultural nuances are scrubbed out by editors who try hard and are well meaning but don't recognize the language patterns, norms and cues because they haven't had to do the same.

How does one buy what one doesn't know exists? Or why would one buy a book in which identity has been scrubbed to the point where it is in "name" only?

....Christine, who also has a sales and marketing background among other things.

-----Original Message-----
From: Charles Bayless
Sent: Feb 6, 2014 11:26 AM
To: 'Christine Taylor-Butler' , 'ccbc-net'
Subject: RE: [ccbc-net] A "no cost" way (my Charles rebuttal)

I actually think we are in agreement and I am not sure what is getting in the way of that.

 

I think you are saying the same thing.  “If publishers don't get that message - that acquisitions is not currently fulfilling the need of a growing diverse populations”  - The problem is that saying there is a market and proving that there is a market are two different activities.  Arguing that theoretically there is a market for a product is, in my experience, less effective than showing (with qualified leads and prospects) that there is a market.  My suggestion is show them that there is the market that you believe there to be.   

 

 

CB

 

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Received on Thu 06 Feb 2014 12:31:25 PM CST