Seattle, hometown of Starbucks, consumes an estimated 25% of the world's gourmet coffee. Random House BDD rep David Glenn, the 40-year-old father of two-year-old Isabella, with another baby on the way, may drink a good portion of that. He confesses to operating on only four or five hours sleep per night. Though he doesn't say so, he may get the best nights of sleep when he makes an overnight trip to visit one of his 30 customers throughout Washington and Oregon.
The BDD list, which encompasses the Bantam, Doubleday, Dell, Broadway and Delacorte titles as well as various audio imprints, is a good match for Glenn, who, like the list, is thoughtful but accessible. One might even say he has a "mass market appeal."
Though he appears laid-back—the driver's seat of his company-issue, gold Toyota Camry is set back at an angle more suitable for cruisin' than confronting the notorious Seattle traffic—when he meets PW at a downtown Seattle hotel, he's precisely on time. Within 10 minutes, we're pulling into the driveway of his suburban home, where he maintains an office in the basement. He's had the car for four years and has accumulated a tad over 50,000 miles on the odometer—a fairly modest allotment for a rep. Clearly, the short commute to three of his biggest clients—University Bookstore and Elliot Bay Books in Seattle, and Third Place Books in suburban Lake Forest Park—helps keep the mileage low.
When we come through the door, his cherub daughter greets us with a big smile, followed by David's very pregnant wife, Janet, herself a 10-year publishing veteran and freelance editor for Seattle's The Mountaineers Books.
First things first: coffee. Like any good Washingtonian and self-described foodie, Glenn grinds his own beans, though he adds what his wife describes as a "scary" amount of sugar and a splash of nonfat vanilla Coffeemate. The prevalence of coffee guzzlers may belie Seattle's image as a bastion of mellowness, but it must be remembered that this is the same city that produced two of the most successful high-tech companies in the world: Microsoft and Amazon.com. Clearly there is aggressive energy beneath the city's laid-back exterior.
Glenn, who was born and raised three blocks from his present home, has seen the city transform from one dependent on manufacturing companies, like Boeing, to one dependent on computers. He tells PW that high-tech development hasn't necessarily been entirely good. Seattle, for example, has the second highest rate of unemployment of any major city in the U.S.—around 8%—even though it's only the 17th biggest metropolitan market in the country. Microsoft and local dot-commers who got-rich-quick also helped drive up property prices in the city to levels unsustainable for the other million or so local residents.
Moreover, Amazon can reasonably be blamed for the closing of some independent bookstores. Glenn tells PW, "It's not true when they say they are 'creating new readers.' That's just not possible when the number of people who read shrinks statistically each year. They are poaching book buyers." He says he understands that some people find Internet shopping convenient—just point and click and the next day your book's there in a box—but "the Washington Bookstore pioneered a similar service—phone orders—10 or 20 years ago."
One Rep's Beginnings
Glenn graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in speech communications, but it wasn't until three years later that he found a job as a book rep. His first job was in advertising at Seattle ad agency. He says, "I thought myself enormously clever and always fancied myself a snappy advertising writer. After about six weeks, I remember thinking, 'I suck.' The daily pressure to be creative, to be snappy, to be brief, was too much. So I went in and quit." This kind of self-awareness was to pay off for him, but not right away. After leaving the agency, he took a job with a construction company, working on site and driving a forklift.
He says, "One day I was standing in the pouring rain, pounding nails and thinking, 'How did this happen?' This is not how I envisioned my 20s." Salvation came in the form of a classified in the Seattle Times from HP Books looking for a "Book Rep." He sent in his résumé and, as fate would have it, was the top candidate out of 300 applicants.
Glenn adds, "My mom always said to me, 'You'd be a good salesman.' But like a lot of people, I didn't exactly have a glowing notion of salesmen. All the stereotypes about car salesmen, insurance salesmen—I wasn't sure the notion of being a salesman appealed to me in the slightest." Still, Glenn's mother, a grade-school English teacher, was right. "November 21, 1985, was the day I started selling cookbooks," he says.
Glenn took over a vast territory that included Washington, Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Alaska, into which he sold HP's cookbooks, gardening, home repair and other guides. "There were a lot of books about things like how to put together your small-block Chevy. Those were certainly books I had no great interest in, but it was a job and it was different." After nearly a year, HP moved him to San Francisco and then promptly was bought and consolidated into a larger company. Having a bad feeling about the change, Glenn started interviewing and landed a job repping Random House children's books in Northern California. "Great territory, all driving," he comments. "I used to take six highways just to get from my home in the East Bay to the center of San Francisco, and I got lost all the time. Up here [in Seattle] there are two highways: I-5 goes north and south, I-90 goes east and west. If you get lost in this area, you're a moron." Restlessness got the better of him and after two years he quit, grew his hair long, and moved to Europe for six months to travel and write.
A combination of homesickness, guilt and the onset of the Gulf war brought him back to Seattle. "I feared that résumé gap, but traveling by yourself around Europe is not unimpressive. I've always been a self-confident person, but finding yourself in a train station in Istanbul, trying to figure out where to go, where to stay, and not speaking the language is an unbelievable experience."
After a year hanging out in Seattle coffeeshops at the height of the grunge rock period, that same self-confidence landed him another job—he cold-called Vito Perillo, the head of the now-defunct book distributor Pacific Pipeline, who agreed to allow Glenn to develop clients for him in the Bay Area. After 18 months back in San Francisco, Glenn was able to set up a "brisk business" for Pacific Pipeline, though he confesses, "I was waiting for an opportunity to get back on the publisher side." Soon thereafter, as Glenn tells it, "Out the blue, a prince of a guy named Jack St. Mary from the New York office of BDD called. They were starting a new children's merchandise division and wanted to know if I was interested." He took the job and, in 1992, he was offered the chance to jump to the adult side, covering Washington and Oregon, where he's stayed since.
General Glenn
Glenn is not the kind of rep who carries a trunk full of merchandise. Instead, he utilizes a custom-built office in his basement that suits the needs of repping. He calls it the "The Operation." Though he hasn't served, military analogies loom large in Glenn's vision of repping. He refers to selling a first-time novelist into a store as "establishing a beachhead"; a new list is "a campaign." In his office are two desks—one for him and one for Janet; one bookshelf is dedicated to signed first editions, another to ARCs and galleys, and yet another to his collection of writings about the Greeks and Romans, a passion. Replica Greek plates and vases decorate spare shelves, and a photo of David standing before the Acropolis hangs over the printer. An organizer unit with letter slots holds all his order forms stacked neatly at arm's reach. Also close at hand is the phone, which is propped up on an ergonomic foam wedge.
The basement is strictly off-limits to Isabella (for now at least). "Janet and I made an arrangement that when I'm home working, I have to act as if they aren't home." Glenn is clear about setting limits between his job and his personal life, as well as between his own strategy and that of his bosses. It's his way of coping with the changing demands of the job.
"The fact of the matter is that I know what my job is, and I know what I need to do and determine how it gets done," he says, adding, "10 years ago it was almost verboten to stay in the office. You were supposed to be out on the road doing two or three appointments, whatever you could get. But the mechanics of the job are different now."
The constant flow of information demands that he spend a couple days at his desk each week. At present, in addition to sales calls, Glenn is responsible for co-op, submitting contracts, approving local marketing expenses and helping booksellers request authors for tours, then collating that information and sending it to New York. He is stoic about facing down the paperwork: "You can't do an adequate job in the field if you don't do a decent job at your desk."
Heeeeere's... David
Still, sales calls are clearly Glenn's strongest suit. His biggest account is currently Powell's in Portland, which he inherited from a rep who retired last year. He spends much of his time working with area bookstores.
At Third Place Books in suburban Seattle, frontlist buyer Amanda Tobier is a fan. When prompted to describe what makes David special, she says, "It's mostly his enthusiasm that's so different. He knows my taste and knows the community, which gives him the insight to know when to push a little bit to get us to try something different."
Glenn has gone so far as to host his own events at Third Place Books. One night, under the rubric "Books to Remind You Why You Learned to Read in the First Place," he spoke to 45 book club members about his favorite backlist titles, both Random House's and others'. "If I like something, I'll get up out of my chair and act something out, and that's not artifice," he says. That's what he did, for a full two-and-a-half hours.
"He was so charismatic and well-learned that afterward people lined up and asked for his book," says Tobier. "It was on our calendar—we billed it as 'Here's David Glenn, our local sales rep talking about books that he loves.' And people were buying everything. Frank Conroy's Body and Soul—one of David's favorites—was a book that we'd never had in the store new, but since then we've been selling it and so many book clubs have picked it. That's a tangible way to measure if your initiative is working." Glenn's suggestions have been so well-liked by customers that, in a coming month, the store is dedicating a display table to books of his choosing. Putting a positive, er, spin on the phrase, Amanda calls him "a spin doctor." She says, "I never hear David say, 'I didn't read it, but I heard it was good.' What I hear him say is, 'From what I read...' He'll spin it around a little bit."
Glenn enjoys performing for groups. "Put me in a room with 1,000 people and my heart rate won't go up," he jokes. His Communications degree has clearly served him well. On one occasion, at Third Place Books, he helped explain a new cookbook, From Simple to Spectacular by Jean-George Vongerichten and Mark Bittman, by cooking herb-crusted tuna for the staff in the store's exhibition kitchen.
"It's one of those things that if you do it well, staffs remember and it pays off handsomely. Countless times people come up to me and tell me that they heard my presentation about a book and that they picked it up, read it, and sold tons of it," he says.
At the independent University Bookstore at the University of Washington, the largest college bookstore west of the Mississippi, he knows the lock code to the staff room and jovially butts in on a staff member using a computer so he can check inventory. Clearly, here, too, he is well loved. Mark Mouser, general book manager of University Bookstore, says, "Although David appears very youthful, he's actually been in this line of work for a long time. What I value in him most is that he retains exuberance about bookselling that in this day is especially rare. It makes him a trustworthy ally in our bookselling endeavor. With the tough retailing times we've experienced the past few years, we've come to rely on him to raise our spirits, and most times he can do that simply by walking through the door."
It's All About the Books
Some might think selling a list that features John Grisham, Danielle Steel and a dozen other brand-name authors would be a breeze. Glenn admits that there's a certain amount of inevitability to his list: "When I call to make an appointment with a bookstore and say, 'Hi, it's David with Random House,' what are they going to do? Not see me? You'll see me—believe me, you'll see me." But he ramins vigilant: "At times, the aims of editorial and sales aren't necessarily parallel," he says. "The editors are chasing a finite number of books. They can't all be Grisham, Frank McCourt or Ian McEwan. Editorial has to treat them all as if they are bestsellers. But that's not the way with sales. You have to make distinctions about what the store can buy and sell through. Plus, if you get them to take three of this book, that means you'll get three less of something else you really want to sell in."
In order to survive, many of Glenn's independent customers have been forced to cede a certain part of the market to the chains. Most indies can't compete on New York Times bestsellers and they cannot discount 20%—40%. Glenn points out, "A couple of years ago, I might sell a couple hundred of the new Grisham into the University Bookstore. Now they might buy 48. They know that that book is being printed at 2.4 million copies and it's being sold at Costco, Sam's, the other big-box wholesalers."
Glenn is always aware that it's physically impossible for bookstores to buy every book on the list. He describes a successful sales meeting as one at which "some books are going to get skipped. If you're worth your salt as a salesperson, you, not they, determine the ones that are going to get skipped." It's all a part of the deal, he says: "You make a bargain that you're going to skip a couple books earlier in the catalogue, you've given them a couple of victories. So then you can say, by god, I really believe in this and you're taking eight, no, make that 12, no, in fact, you're taking a case, and it's going to be displayed at the front of the store. That's part of the give and take."
Getting the books into the store is just half of the battle. He says, "Up to that point, editorial has done a great job; marketing and publicity have done bang-up jobs in New York; sales force has done their job getting the books in—but nobody's made any money. Now what we need is for somebody to come in, buy the book, take it out the front door and not come back... unless it's to buy another book." Mouser from University Books points out, "There have been so many books that we initially would have overlooked if not for David's insistence on their merits. One that comes to mind is Steven Pressfield's Gates of Fire, which he raved about. And we ended up selling a ton of that book right off the bat." Most booksellers would agree that is the true measure of a successful sales call.
The Future of Reps
Glenn has witnessed numerous changes in bookselling in his 17-year career as a rep, not the least of which is the threat to his own position. "Ask any rep what their biggest fear is," he says, "and it's that we all know somebody in New York is sitting there trying to figure out how to teleconference all the buyers together." He points out that some of the stores he covered early in his career—particularly in rural Alaska, Montana and Idaho—"probably haven't seen a rep in years." Nevertheless, he thoroughly believes that his role is not merely "useful" to booksellers and publishers but is a necessity for the health of the industry.
"My feeling has always been, you can send out all the catalogues you want, but if you leave it up to buyers, they may or may not get around to them," he says. "You can send them out to buyers and follow up with a phone call from a telemarketing rep, and you'll get some more orders. But I guarantee you, if you send me in there, I will get an order—every time."
His logic, just like his list, has an air of inevitability to it. It also wisely acknowledges that the independent bookseller is a proud animal. Glenn says, "They know what I read. I know what they read. They trust me not to recommend crap. Who would the buyers rather deal with? Someone who's in their store once a week, three times a year at least? Or someone they've never met 3,000 miles away who's presuming to tell them what they need in their stores?"
