Many buyers at Barnes & Noble (both in their retail/trade and college divisions) rely on Edelweiss to provide all bibliographic title information and collaborate with their sales reps in their frontlist buying process. For them, Edelweiss is an integral (and integrated) buying tool that is helping them realize significant time-savings.
If you are a B&N sales rep, we suggest that you follow these steps to begin to engage with your B&N buyers using Edelweiss:
1) Add all of your B&N buyers to your Edelweiss contacts lists so that you may…
2) Share marked-up collections with them
and
3) View the notes they opt to share with you via Edelweiss.
If your publisher has had the ‘B&N Feature Set’ turned on for your account, you’ll have access to categorizing your titles using the B&N Category hierarchy, add weekly sales forecast, print run, hometown, and other B&N-specific title information. **Please note, this information can now only be added by B&N buyers**
Read on for more details!
You can share marked-up collections of books or whole catalogs with your B&N buyer the way you would with other accounts. Collections allow you to use any group of titles from Edelweiss catalogs as a kind of custom catalog, which for off-season and specialty buying is usually better than using the standard publisher catalog, so often collections will be more appropriate for B&N. **Please note B&N is set up differently than other retailers. You should include any suggested order quantities in your markup note field rather than in the regular suggested order field as you would for another retailer**
B&N Best Practice:
For B&N Trade/Retail, name every collection with your (rep) name, the buyer’s name, pub month & year covered, and appointment date, e.g. “Jane Rep – John Buyer – December 2015 – June 16th appt.”
For B&N College, name every collection starting with pub month & year covered, publisher/imprint name, buyer name, and (if more than one rep covers that publisher/imprint, rep name), e.g. “Sept. 2015 – Penguin – John Buyer – Jane Rep”.
…But we recommend confirming with your individual buyers how they prefer their collections to be named!
If you have not already, you should add your B&N buyers to your Edelweiss contacts, which enables you to share markups with them and see notes that your buyer may have added to the titles you sell.
Share your markups with the B&N Merch Group Account. In the Share Markup screen, choose Accounts in the dropdown menu and click on Barnes & Noble Merch Group. This will share your collection/markup with the entire Merch Group with a single click. Note that this is an update to the process of sharing markups with your Barnes & Noble buyers! Learn more about sharing with accounts here.
While viewing your collection for the buyer, select the Barnes & Noble Merch Group account from your Accounts list in the markup toolbar at the top of the page, as you’d do with any other account, to be able to see any notes that the buyer wants to share with you. Details on this process can be found here: Navigation for Sales Reps and Markups for Sales Reps.
General Tips:
- Be sure to highlight the most relevant comp title for each of your title entries. Details on doing so can be found here.
- Suggested order quantities should be included directly in the markup note.
Troubleshooting Tips:
- If you have trouble seeing any of your B&N buyers’ shared notes, first confirm that they have actually opted to share them with you.
- Then, confirm via the References area for that title, that this title is in an active catalog belonging to your company.
- Lastly, confirm that you have that buyer in your Edelweiss contacts list.
- Check your Accounts list on your People page! Be sure that the B&N Merch Group is set as an Active account:
