NBN G s West
Judith Rosen -- 5/22/00
After a kidney transplant this winter and six years of exile on the East Coast at NBN headquarters in Lanham, Md., just outside Washington, D.C., Miriam Bass, v-p marketing and business development, decided it was time to move back to California. On April 1, she made it official and inaugurated NBN's West Coast office in LA. The company also has satellite offices in New York City and Toronto.
April 1 also marked the soft launch for NBN's newest division, BigInterview.com, the brainchild of Bass and PW freelancer and publicist Lucinda Dyer, who has been named COO. "The site is a conduit between publishers and the media," explained Bass. "Right now it's free, but starting July 1, it will cost $250 for a three-month posting." At the site, producers and journalists can access press releases and contact information for hundreds of authors listed according to the category of their work, from business to living well. Not that NBN has abandoned its print roots entirely. BigInterview.com sends out postcards featuring new books twice a month and d s flash faxing to the 25 key book markets. "Our publishers are very excited about it," said Bass, "and they get a very good discount."
Clearly living up to its tag line "America's fastest growing distributor," NBN is also expanding its warehouse space in Blue Ridge Summit, Pa. According to NBN president Jed Lyons, "The new 100,000-square-foot addition to the NBN warehouse is well underway." He anticipates that the 50% warehouse expansion, to 300,000 square feet, will be completed by the end of June. He's also looking forward to a similarly large increase in sales. "NBN is projecting a jump in revenue from $44 million to $55 million this year," he noted.
IPG Doubles Space
Next month Independent Press Group (IPG) will more than double its warehouse facilities when it moves from its current 40,000-square-foot space into the 90,000-square-foot former Tootsie Toy factory in Chicago. "We've grown so dramatically over the last several years," IPG president Mark Suchomel told PW, "that we'll be expanding our office space in the next month and a half, too." The 29-year-old distributor saw a jump in sales of "over 40% last year, and we're looking at some big increases this year as well," said Suchomel. "We've been able to maintain our returns at 20%." Some of the increase is attributable to several foreign customers, including the newly added O'Brien Press in Dublin, Moliere in Paris, and Zero to Ten and the Ebury Press in the U.K. IPG has hired a publicist to help its overseas customers promote their books here.
Other presses that have been added effective June 1 are: GLA Publications Avenue, Gingerbread House, Invisible Cities Press, Lerner Communications, Ltd., NDE Publishing, Parabola Books, Sweet Dreams Bilingual Publishers, Trellis Publishing., Vermont Folklife Center and Mars Publishing.
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