Job Title: Part-time Sales and Marketing Assistant (three to four days/ week).
Salary: £20,000 – £24,000 per annum pro rata, depending on experience.
Location: Sheffield (while some office work is necessary, home/remote work is possible for many tasks)
Start date: We are looking for someone who can start as soon as possible.
Application deadline: by end of Wednesday 4th May 2022
With some flexibility on our side as to the exact remit of the post, this will be a good entry-level or second job. Though it will cover many areas of publishing work, there will be a focus on marketing and sales operations. The successful candidate will work closely with all members of the team, but especially the publisher and UK publicist. The successful candidate will also be responsible for our website’s direct sales and our subscription book club.
What type of person are we looking for?
Our ideal candidate is someone who is creative, organised and proactive, has an interest in the publishing industry and contemporary literature, is thorough and methodical and, not least, is looking to be part of our team and stay with And Other Stories as we develop.
We are a small team and there is ample opportunity for the successful candidate to progress and to become involved in other areas depending on interest (eg acquisitions meetings, advisory board meetings); however, an interest in other areas is not a requirement of the job.
The successful person for the role will:
- Be confident with phone and in-person communication
- Be good at noticing the details of a situation or text
- Be patient with customers and tactful
- Be computer literate and good at problem solving
- Thrive in a busy environment and have the ability to prioritise competing demands
- Be pragmatic; self-motivated; have a ‘can do’ approach; be able to find solutions
- Meet tight deadlines and be a self-organizer
- Work well in a team and on own initiative
Desirable but not essential:
- Experience within the sector (former positions and/or internships) is appreciated
- A good eye for design and experience using InDesign and Photoshop (designing promotional materials; POS, catalogues & proofs)
- Content Management System (eg WordPress) experience
- Working knowledge of social media and other digital platforms as sales and marketing tools
- Copywriting
Responsibilities of the Role
This role involves a lot of different tasks, but it is worth reassuring candidates that most of them are occasional or seasonal, rather than weekly, and that training will be provided.
Retail and Direct Sales
- Collate and distribute regular sales and marketing reports on retail and direct sales (including gathering of sales data for bi-annual royalties and quarterly rep commissions)
- In collaboration with the publisher and UK publicist, create information sheets for our sales reps. Update regularly for frontlist titles.
- Provide customer support for individuals, authors, and key customers, including processing of direct website sales.
- Maintain and grow bookseller contact database, including direct outreach to UK and Irish booksellers in collaboration with the publisher and UK publicist. This includes creating and processing individual bookseller proof mailings for all titles, obtaining early bookseller endorsements for lead titles and arranging bookshop partnerships (e.g. for Indie Bookshop Week)
- Ensure that our UK warehouse has the correct and up-to-date title information data for it to feed out to other sales platforms.
- Provide administrative support to the team (including prize submission admin, support the day-to-day running of the office, managing general And Other Stories inbox, ordering stock and mailing supplies and other adhoc admin duties). This also includes regular mail-outs of proofs to booksellers and finished copies to contributors and website buyers. 2-3 hours /week. This responsibility includes managing the mailing systems (eg Royal Mail Click and Drop).
Subscription Book Club
- Manage subscription inbox: general queries, website orders, subscription orders, ebook orders, subscription specific queries.
- Arrange subscription book mailouts for UK, Europe and USA with the relevant mail service companies. (Checking in with subscribers for updated addresses, updating addresses, splitting data by mailout country, and getting quotes from mail services, ensuring copies and inserts arrive at mail services and are mailed in time for set deadlines.)
Marketing
- Organise and put together our monthly newsletter in MyEmma (content written by team and guests).
- Support the publisher and UK publicist throughout the campaign process for all titles from initial concept to delivery.
- Ensure subscription timeline is up to date on the website and collaborate with the team to market the subscription via newsletter and other means, liaising with the publisher on our subscriber goals per title by the subscription deadline, and helping to meet the goals, eg via social media posts incl. cover reveals, author newsletters, insert swaps, newsletter swaps etc.
- Help with any other aspects of sales and marketing as needed. e.g. with with author book tours and events.
Potential Future Responsibilities / Areas for Growth
- Social Media: In collaboration with our publicists and publisher, be active on our Instagram, Twitter and Facebook accounts.
- Design: Assist with the design of: 1/ point-of-sale materials for bookshops and promotional materials such as postcards, 2/ ads for print and digital use, 3/ Amazon+ assets and social media channel assets, 4 / seasonal catalogues, working from a template, and 5/ proof covers.
- Publicity and marketing planning: in collaboration with the team, help to plan books’ campaigns.
- Blog content: Sourcing content for our Ampersand blog (eg features such as Bookshop of the Month, Book tip of the Month, Eco Post, or designer or author interview), using knowledge of the books and of wider discussions they feed into.
- Bookshop.org content: Plan and source lists for both our UK and US bookshop.org pages.
Our Company
This is an exciting opportunity to work with a great team at a well-known independent publisher. You’ll be working with some of the most exciting authors and translators in the industry such as Tice Cin, Mona Arshi, Preti Taneja, Juan Pablo Villalobos and Nichola Smalley.
We strongly believe in the importance of anti-racism work and equality advocacy. (More on our actions and goals on our Inclusivity page.)
We are ecologically motivated with a can-do, must-do mentality. (We are committed to cutting our carbon emissions and influencing others in the industry to do so too. Read about our actions for the climate in our Sustainability Statement.)
Our Commitment
We are an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are actively seeking job applicants who reflect a broad representation of differences, including race, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, physical ability, neurodiversity, age, family status, economic background and status, geographical background and status, and perspective.
Please send as three attachments the following:
- your CV,
- a covering letter detailing your fit for the post and your interest in And Other Stories and when you could start work,
- and – if you have this experience, which is not a requirement – an example of publicity/communications/blog materials you have written, by end of Wednesday 4th May 2022 to publisher Stefan Tobler at stefantobler@andotherstories.org with ‘Sales and Marketing Assistant Application‘ in the subject line.