As the director of library marketing for adult trade books at Macmillan, Talia Ross is out “in the real world all the time,” visiting libraries to meet with collection development staff and attending library conferences. Her relationships with librarians help her understand how library patrons respond to books. “Librarians are the most fun, enthusiastic readers I have ever met,” she says and they can spot someone going through the motions in a flash. “If you're not authentic, if you're not excited, if you don't love what you're doing, they know right away,” Ross says. “They've helped me trust my instincts. When I would recommend books in the beginning, I was nervous. I'd think, 'What if they don't like it?' And you know what? It didn't matter. They just loved that I was honest.” And, she notes, “The fact that we're paying so much attention to librarians—their reaction is unbelievable.”
Booksellers may be used to getting attention from publishers, but librarians haven't always been high on many publishers' radar screens. They have a few people looking out for librarians; Random House, HarperCollins and Grand Central all have respected library marketing departments, and the women who run those groups serve as mentors to 29-year-old Ross. In particular, she looks up to Virginia Stanley, director of academic and library marketing at HarperCollins. “She and Marcia [Purcell, of Random House] both pioneered this outreach to libraries idea. The librarians just adore her. She's smart, she's funny, she gets [the library market] like nobody else does.”
Ross worked in corporate communications at Penguin Putnam and academic marketing at the Perseus Books Group, then at Springer-Verlag before Peter Janssen, v-p of academic and library marketing at Macmillan, hired her in August 2004. At the time, there was no one dedicated exclusively to library marketing for the house's adult books. Ross met Macmillan's publishers—Farrar, Straus & Giroux; Holt; Macmillan Audio; Picador; St. Martin's; Tor—and set to figuring out what worked for each one, because an effective marketing strategy for commercial St. Martin's might be disastrous when applied to literary FSG. Ross says determining how to market each house's books to libraries involves a number of choices. Should they hand out galleys at library conferences? If so, which conferences? Should a book get an e-newsletter, direct mail campaign or feature on MacmillanLibrary.com?
Ross's primary focus now is midlist mysteries: “Mysteries are the bread and butter of some of these library systems. I want to make sure to keep those authors going.” They're also a personal passion of hers. “All the librarians I know will tell you that I have a dark side,” she says. “That's my passion: the psychological, hard-boiled, police procedurals and thrillers. It's funny, when people meet me they're like, 'You like the gritty and gruesome?' Debut authors and adult books that appeal to a YA audience are also very important to Ross.
There are dozens of conferences for librarians around the country every year, and Ross attends many of them. She organizes Macmillan's exhibit on the show floor and books author events during the convention. Sometimes she's invited to speak and has given talks with Nancy Pearl, the famous librarian who has an action figure named after her.
All Ross's efforts go back to making connections with her customers. As she says, “To have [a librarian] sitting in front of me telling me, 'We bought 87 copies based on your recommendation' or 'We bought 87 copies because I just love that you sent me a galley'—that's priceless.”
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