German Bros

A little over a week ago, I was able to attend a presentation by the international sales coordinators at Big Corporate Internship. Unfortunately, there were some distractions. For one, lots of facts and figures rather than what it is that they do. For another, a very attractive young woman in a low cut blouse who kept reflexively putting her pen in her mouth and taking it out every 20 seconds or so, always holding it ever so lightly. Fortunately, I’m a master of looking at one thing and listening to another and I still got most of what was going on. Here’s some highlights-

-International Sales are still strong. If anything, they’re getting stronger. Europe likes indie stores, and the rapidly expanding Asian Market (comprised largely of people learning English) favors big, fancy, world class operations. Everywhere the sales are pretty big and expanding. Hooray?
-International Sales’ return rates are very low. Part of it may be how they do business abroad, but mostly it’s the high shipping costs to everyone from the Publisher, to distributors like Baker and Taylor, and then to the stores themselves mean that they don’t buy if they aren’t pretty sure about what they want. Compared to sales in America where things are bought, returned and re-bought before they were even paid for the first time, it’s a pretty favorable model.
-The England office handles most of the sales in Europe and former British colonies, but has also moved on to producing about 80% of its own material for the domestic British market. Their original materials have a tiny share of their native market, but it’s increased at an extraordinarily rapid rate considering they’ve only been doing their own acquiring and editing for maybe five years.
-Canada insists it’s better than America in everyway including but not limited to education, pollution, crime rates (with the exception of car thefts), hours worked per week (28?) Vacation days per year (20?), average amount of sex, and average disposable income. What a snooty lot. They’re still just distributors for headquarters though. Uppity Canadians better remember that America is the media exporter and Canada the importer. Where’s their superiority now? That said,dude did make it sound like a wonderland, so if they had equivalent media production I just might move there myself, long’s I don’t need to deal with self important nationalists.
-Germany buys more books in English than any other foreign country which doesn’t speak English as the primary. Thanks guys. According to the presentation, 2 of BCI’s books are in the top 20 at the German Amazon right now- The Bro Code and the Play Book both by Barney Stinson of How I Met Your Mother fame. Weird. On another interesting note, South Korea was number two or three, with a similar proportion to another mid-size Asian Nation. You’d think given that Japan’s population is triple that of the ROK’s that they’d buy more, but I guess they’re media exporters just like us (#5 in sales I think). But then again, so is Korea just on a smaller scale. Korea, you’ve impressed me once again. Shame about that whole divided history thing. Remind me one of these days to try and convince my country to give a rat’s ass about what you’ve been doing since the war. Some day when I have lots of time and don’t mind wasting it on an unconcerned Joe Public.

Well. I was going to finish up the Strange Query mini-series here, but I think I’ve been babbling for too long already.

So Join me next time for “The Query to end All Queries” OR “Five Days and Four Nights in Fabulous Rejection Pile Part III.”