Fierman Passes on Six-Month Plan; Changes DC Sales Dept. Right Now

For someone supposedly facing a massive learning curve, recent Senior VP hire Stephanie Fierman seems to have found her way and has begun what most observers suspect could be a pretty major restructuring of the DC sales department. Heidi MacDonald does great work in plumbing those DC sources and reporting on the memo-driven circumstances, and gets some initial insider response. Newsarama followed up today with some extra don't-attribute-me reactions well worth looking up. I could pull the main points, but they did the reporting, so that would be jive.

Unlike these well-respected industry reporters, I have no friends or contacts at DC; I must substitute wild speculation and bile.

Actually, I don't. I think this is all pretty straightforward for now. DC wants to sell more books, Fierman has targeted the graphic novel as a format with a greater upside than what's been realized, and she seems to believe that the same kind of store to store attention given the DM should go to the mainstream outlets for DC's book. All the minor moves announced thus far make perfect sense in that context; I'm only slightly surprised by news that sales and marketing will be split, but that makes sense, too. Fierman's background is such that she may want to try a very different approach to marketing and may want to hire some people that are more in tune with some of the things she did at previous positions.

The things to watch I guess would be 1) how sweeping the changes end up being, particularly what the next one is; and 2) whether more attention of this fashion to bookstores will even work.

If there are any comic book retailers or ex-retailers out there, I'd love to know about one fear that's been expressed: that DC sales reps working both bookstores and comic shops won't have as much time to call retailers as they used to. I'm curious... can someone explain to me how important that attention has been, and what you stand to lose if it goes away?

Dan Shahin wrote in.
 
posted 10:39 am PST | Permalink
 

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