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To Charlie Boswell, PW's Rep of the Year, success on the job can be measured in love, not dollars. After all, being very good at what he does got him the girl.
In 1988, Boswell was named Workman Publishing's top sales rep, an honor that came with an exceptional prize: a 10-day trip to Paris for two. Armed with what amounted to a prepaid honeymoon in Paris, Boswell persuaded his girlfriend, Cary, co-owner of Cincinnati's Cary's Bookmarket bookstore, to marry him. The two are still together, living in the appropriately named town of Loveland, Ohio, and have between them five grown children, nine grandchildren and a pair of cats. Cary, now co-owner of the Bookshelf in Cincinnati, remains his toughest customer. "I know all his tricks," she jokes.
Boswell has developed numerous fans at publishing houses and bookstores since 1977, when he began repping for Heinecken & Associates, one of the largest commission sales groups in the Midwest, and where he still works. As part of Heinecken, Boswell sells the Workman and Houghton Mifflin lists, as well as Harcourt, Gibbs-Smith, Holiday House, Meredith and Globe-Pequot, among others.
 Covering six states, Boswell makes sure his trunk is always well stocked. |
From Loveland, he covers stores throughout Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky, and parts of Michigan, Tennessee and North Carolina. In a typical year, Boswell will visit each of his 70 client stores three times, putting some 45,000 miles on his Toyota Camry and giving him plenty of time to listen to the latest books on tape. He recalls an earlier time when "rural roads were so empty, you could drive your car and read galleys simultaneously. But not anymore."
Making It Personal
Boswell, now 63, is a soft-spoken and polite Midwesterner. He's also a devout Christian, albeit one fond of a good glass of wine, who says that the hardest part of being a sales rep is finding good restaurants on the road that are willing to treat a solo diner right.
One day in March, Boswell called on a trio of stores in and around Cleveland, including the Learned Owl, Mac's Backs Books and the local outpost of the six-store Joseph-Beth Bookstore chain that is headquartered in Cincinnati. As he walked through the bookstores, it was immediately clear that Boswell was intimate with the predilections of the individual booksellers as well as their stock needs.
Suzanne DeGaetano, co-owner of Mac's Backs Books, says that the composition of her urban, hipster bookstore in Cleveland Heights, Ohio—lots of literary journals, used paperback novels and hardcover politics—means she doesn't need to see too many reps. Boswell is one of the few who call on her, and she appreciates his "ability to anticipate the needs of my customers," who include college professors and students from nearby Case Western Reserve and John Carroll University. Seeing him in person means that she listens to Boswell when he tells her she needs half a dozen hardcover copies of Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, rather than the single copy that might be her typical phone order. It is also his willingness to push the "little books" as fervently as the blockbusters that engenders respect. Sorting through samples in his trunk, he offers DeGaetano a pair of hardcover Harcourt poetry books, much to her delight.
The Learned Owl, in Hudson, Ohio, is a markedly different store. Situated in a well-to-do Cleveland bedroom community, it serves a clientele just as likely to be looking for a gift for a grandchild or a book club title as the latest from Believer Books. Owner Liz Murphy says that she "hardly ever [sees] house reps—some of whom seem to cover half the country," adding, "though many of them do correspond when there is something I need." Murphy says the difference in physically seeing a rep like Boswell is that he "knows my particular niche in the community and won't try to sell me books that I can't sell in my store."
Customers Come First
 At Joseph-Beth’s Cleveland store, Boswell is embraced by (l. to r.) bookseller Richard Gildenmeister, fiction manager Amy Rosenfield and general manager Marci Blankenbaker. |
The great irony of being a sales rep is that you have to serve two masters: the publisher, who pays you, and the bookseller, who also, in a sense, pays you. Striking a balance between these obligations is the key. Boswell says that the priority goes to the customer—that is, the bookseller—and if you listen to customers and tailor the pitch to their needs, they will buy.
"Booksellers rarely ask about the print run," he says. "What's more important to them is the two-page spread in the catalogue. Even if you tell them a book has a 70,000-copy print run, it doesn't matter. They will order as many as they need for their store."
Peter Workman often sends new hires to travel with Boswell to watch him sell firsthand. "Charlie's invested intellectually and emotionally," says Workman. "And even though Workman cuts across different lines, he always understands the idea behind the book." But in the end, according to Workman, it takes more than "getting it" to be a success as a rep. "Charlie's accounts respect his counseling because they understand he does what he thinks is right. There's no bullshit in Charlie."
Charlie's response to books is emotional. "There was a book by Avi about a snail [The End of the Beginning: Being the Adventures of a Small Snail (and an Even Smaller Ant)] and every time I sold that book I couldn't get through it without crying," Boswell admits. The same thing happened when he was making rounds selling The Gift: A Fable for Our Times by Carol Lynn Pearson and The Polar Express by Chris Van Allsburg.
But not all booksellers find this tactic persuasive. Michael Boggs, owner of Carmichaels Bookstore in Louisville, Ky., a self-described "cynical and cranky buyer," says he has had some "fierce arguments" with Boswell over his "weakness for 'charming' books." But he adds that Boswell is "the only rep who has been selling to me since my store opened 27 years ago." Now, he says, the men still have some of the same disputes, but it's more like "two old retirees arguing over which restaurant has the better senior early bird special."
It's a testament to his ability as a rep that Boswell's greatest praise comes from Jen Reynolds, director of publisher relations for the rep's biggest retail customer, Joseph-Beth Booksellers. "During staff presentations and store visits, his passion would come through so much that I would be completely inspired to go out and sell whatever he talked about," says Reynolds, who nominated Boswell for rep of the year. "Not many reps get so emotional about their books that they will do a public recitation from them, or start to tear up during a presentation of a title. He has a lot of heart, and that's not something that you learn." That quality, coupled with what she calls a "second sense" about what will sell—from Workman's Bad Cat to The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker—combine to make him a truly "remarkable rep."
