Ah, summer. The sun is out, and so are the legs. About half the emails you get in any one day begin “I am out of the office until…” and sometimes – just sometimes – there’s even a free seat on the tube. Kick back, relax, let work take a back seat until September. Right?
Not if you work in the book trade. September and October are the biggest months of the year for us, as every publishing house releases the books they hope will take wing and fly to the dizzy heights of the bestseller charts for Christmas. Something like 80% of book purchases are made in the last three months of the year, and the competition for attention, shop space and media coverage is fierce.
As Rights Manager here, my job is to kick off the publicity campaigns by securing that elusive beast the “serial deal”; licensing a book extract to a newspaper or magazine with the dual aim of getting the maximum media exposure for the book whilst simultaneously giving readers enough of a taster to draw them into the shops to buy it.
Newspapers and magazines tend to start planning their content around three months ahead so June, July and even August are the busiest months of the year for me, and no less so for my colleagues in the Publicity, Marketing and Sales departments working on similar schedules.
My summer passes in a whirlwind of embargo letters (for the really juicy stuff), stuffing manuscripts into jiffy bags, firing off emails and negotiating deals. When do they want to run the piece? How many words is it going to be? Can the author do a photoshoot? Not to mention talking to writers, and their agents, discussing options, timings, offers.
Then there’s the follow up; negotiating the contract, getting the print-ready version of the book text over to the paper, sending over pictures and checking copy. Frankly, it’s exhausting. Whilst the rest of the world, it seems, is chucking flip-flops into a suitcase and heading to the airport, I’m chained to my desk with phone clamped to my ear and fingers welded to the keyboard.
There is, however, nothing quite like the satisfaction of opening a weekend newspaper supplement to see a full-colour, multi-page splash on the book that you put there. In fact I’m looking forward to doing just that over the August bank holiday weekend, before I come back here in September and start thinking about January 2011…

Penny Liechti, Rights Manager