The Sales Meeting

Last year, my friend Kara, who is the Marketing Assistant on both of my book lists, came into work on a Sunday to paint a cardboard cutout of an ocean.

What does a blue-painted ocean have to do with publishing you might ask?

Well, it doesn’t relate at all except that my Michael Scott-like boss tends to have grandiose ideas when it comes to his presentations for the National Sales Meeting.

Most of the Acquisitions Editors and Marketing Managers present in lecture format; sometimes, they will do a little extra and bake cookies to please the crowd.

We do not peddle our books to customers at the sales meeting, rather it’s an internal meeting where we push the books on our sales representatives and prepare them for how to sell the product. Because most of the sales reps don’t have a background in mathematics, many are intimidated by selling the higher-level books like Calculus, especially when we have four different versions of the book that accommodate to individual professor’s needs.

Most of the sales reps cannot differentiate between each of the books we have to offer. There is an early transcendentals textbook, which means functions are covered from the beginning of the text, a later transcendentals textbook simply titled Calculus, discussing these functions in the latter part of the text, and two separate condensed versions of each of these books.

My boss, Tom, an awkwardly tall, goofy man who tends to avoid real work at all costs, wants to make selling calculus easier on these reps, so he thinks way out of the box in order to have the presentation resonate in the reps’ minds long after the meeting.

This year our team discusses the plan (or rather we listen to him ramble on about his absurd ideas). We appease him (because he is in charge of our year-end reviews… wait a minute, last year it seems I wrote my own review and he signed off on it) and agree to a sketch where he dresses up as a chef from the Italian region Sardinia, with a specialty in cooking geese, and a love for Italian opera composed by Bellini (yes, he creates a whole irrelevant back story). As the head chef, he is going to “cook our competition’s goose.”

He builds his own prop kitchen out of cardboard boxes, black Sharpie® markers, and duct tape for the actual presentation. He wants the rest of us to dress up like chefs, bring in kitchen utensils, and take photo ops for the creative services team to make a chroma (basically what we call a full color cardboard cutout).

I agree to dress in white, but I will not wear a chef’s hat and I refuse to bring in any of my wares!

Of course, Tom is prepared with cooking tools for our entire book team. Conveniently, downstairs in our office building is a kitchen store, with every person’s dream customized kitchen on display. We are all coerced into going downstairs, already dressed up in our culinary garb, as if we were going to contend for a spot on Top Chef (or maybe Hell’s Kitchen).

For whatever reason, the clerk at the kitchen store obliged to our request to take photos at one of the kitchens. Surmising our relationship, I held an egg beater; my boss held a butcher knife.

I haven’t felt this embarrassed since my mother forced me to take a picture with my college mascot, a wildcat, at parents’ weekend brunch for the freshmen class. As you can see from the photo above, I conveniently tucked myself away as close to the back as I could get.

Kara and I often apply the ludicrousness of our work life with that of the television show The Office. Then, the week before the sales meeting our feelings were reaffirmed (albeit with a stretch of our imaginations) by an eerily coincidental episode of The Office that involves Dwight’s plan to cook his road kill goose.



Tom stands in front of sales reps from each region of the country, as well as the VP, who is his boss, and in a butchered Italian accent he tells of the importance of reinforcing Algebra concepts if students are to succeed in Calculus.

He is professional despite his guise and makes his point as he places the competition’s textbook in his makeshift oven. And while this book is baking, he takes out his secret weapon, asking sales reps for volunteers.

He whips out the “Orgasmatron,” a backpack device reminiscent of the Ghost Buster’s Proton Pack.

The oblivious sales rep volunteer is told to put on the Orgasmatron and with each question answered correctly about the “assets” of our book and the “shortcomings” of the competition, the rep gets to shoot at the goose, which of course by this time is cooked medium-well.

Tom puts on a potholder and takes the competitor’s book out of the oven (the book is now magically charred with pages torn up, a bait and switch move).

He asks the first question, “What does early transcendentals mean?” The sales rep responds, “logarithmic and other functions discussed earlier on in the book.”

“Correct, you may now shoot the Orgasmatron,” he says. As crazy as this all seems, he gets the job done in having the reps retain all of the complicated information to sell these books.

A Nerf ball flies out of the vacuum like tube (how the heck did he create this thing I will never know).

“Feels good, doesn’t it. Maybe you’d like a cigarette now?”

The Design Meeting

“That icon looks more like a pen than a pencil. The desktop computer figure looks outdated, can we change that to a graphic that looks like a laptop?”

“Add more cyan or magenta for the annos?”

“Can you even read this? This b-head is too small, increase the font.”

Design meetings last the longest of all publishing meetings because everyone has an opinion. Often this leads to arguments over minor details, such as choosing a color scheme. “Go with the light green.” “No, I like the slightly darker light green.”

However, in textbook publishing, especially for collegiate mathematics texts, the design meeting is as creative as it gets.

In our cover meeting for our best-selling Business Calculus title, my boss suggests the artistic direction for the cover. He wants some sort of architectural design that represents applied calculus, perhaps a building with a lot of glass windows.

I have an idea in mind. I traveled to Berlin a few summers ago, and I remember this intertwining helix of glass that you walk up a spiral ramp to view.

When I return to my desk, I scour Corbis and Getty Images (two photo stock websites the company subscribes to in order to avoid the hassle of royalty fees, permissions and licensing as this is included in the subscription fee) for pictures of the glass dome at the top of the Reichstag, the German parliament building in Berlin.

My team agrees to use the image for both the cover of the book and as a recurring image in the heads in the interior of the book. Aside from having your name printed on the copyright page once the book is published, this is the next best feeling of pride that makes the job worth it.

In all my glory, I take the book cover design (yes, I choose the image, but our designer created the cover) to show the VP, who is reluctant to be in favor of any cover that contains too much black, dark purple, or white (black being too morbid and white making scuff marks more visible). So, to get a second opinion without informing me that he was getting a second opinion, he has me show Rick, the VP of Sales for the Secondary School Division.

Rick, being quite blunt and the litmus test of all things positive and negative, says “looks great, as long as there is no one having sex in those reflections.”

The Millennials

I am part of Generation Y, also called the Millennial Generation. We are described as having been raised by cajoling parents who have coddled their children too much. As “narcissistic praise hounds,” as the 60 Minutes episode notes, we lack responsibility and often still live at home with our parents while in our twenties.

This episode, which first aired in 2007, does not take into account the economic woes of the times. As a twenty something who lived with my parents for a year after college, I feel that it was the only plausible and affordable solution as it took me 6 months after graduating to find a full-time job; this was in 2005 prior to the official announcement that we were in an economic recession and long before 60 Minutes covered the story.



Although our generation spends time “playing computer games at work while (they) wait to grow up,” there is also a lot of good in our work ethic. Millennials have a can-do attitude, want a variety of assignments, and easily multi-task, taking on more than one can handle but succeeding in completing all tasks. (Taking on more than what is asked of us sounds a bit grown up to me.)

However, we approach a job wanting positive reinforcement and praise from our superiors, and with all of our new technology knowledge, (again, despite the economic climate) we have the attitude that we can move on to another company if our structural needs and praise-seeking are not being met.

When someone else describes this generation, it sounds like we are pretty whiny and unlike our grandparents we are unwilling to accept situations the way they are; instead, we want it all from a job. So, I understand that I fit into this type in many ways, I too want recognition for my work (doesn't seem too much to ask for) and I enjoy the social aspects that accompanies a job. I do not necessarily, however, have the best technological skills compared to my peers. 

I always had support from my parents, although I wouldn't necessarily define it as coddling. I succeeded well in school, so my parents were never the type to have to call up my high school teachers and complain about a bad grade until the teacher gave-in to some sort of extra credit, although I did hear about this happening growing up. I’ve always been able to measure my merits through grades, but in the work force the way to really do this is by achieving a raise.

My first boss quit and now I am reporting to his boss, the Editor-in-Chief, in the interim. However, the Editor-in-Chief is so wrapped up in her own workload that I have to keep on top of all our books. I develop the five-year-plan for the book list and the revision plan for our Mathematical Proofs text.

The marketing manager for our book team is out on maternity leave and her assistant also quit, so I am in charge of completing the feature walk-through (a marketing tool shown in the inside cover of the book that demonstrates how to use the book’s features). I coordinate the e-mail campaign to market our newest books to our current customers.

Olivia, the boob-exposing, self-loathing Editorial Assistant gets fired a few weeks after HR put her on probation but not soon enough. I am left to take over her book lists and fix her mistakes like collaborate with Accounts Payable to redo the $1,000 purchase order she put in for a photocopy job. How the common sense that photocopies would cost that much money escaped her, I do not know. (Annoyingly enough, she is now in a Creative Writing program at NYU.)

No one ever stops to thank me or asks if I need help with all of these projects. I thought by doing all of this work it would get me somewhere, but I seem to still be on the first rung of the ladder.

So, I go to the VP of the company, who I had also been working for as an administrative assistant part-time, and tell him that I deserve a raise.

I explain all of the jobs I am currently doing, and the ways in which I succeed in performance, like bringing in a $170k sales order by being on top of the book adopters needs, and representing the company at the JointMath conference.

He informs me that he isn’t quite sure if I am ready to be a full on Editor, and there is no money for a raise at this time.

For the first part of defending myself, I am able to hold back tears, but after being shut down, my eyes start to swell.

I leave his office defeated; I know more than ever that publishing is just another business and I am just another expendable worker-bee in the trade.

Perhaps, I should move on as Millennials do when they feel unwanted.