Nicole is the Publisher at Penguin Canada, an editor and has a great affection for the Penguin brand and history. We are thrilled to be able to share some of her insight with our Penguin fans and growing Penguin Shop family. Q: What do you think makes Penguin so recognizable? A: I think our flippant yet dignified little logo is easy to spot and completely irresistible (and I’m not at all biased, obviously), but more importantly, it’s what that logo stands for. Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin, launched Penguin with a commitment to making creative and intellectual excellence affordable and available so now it’s our responsibility to uphold his vision. This is something I think of almost every...
Scott is Associate Publisher and Director of Marketing Strategy, working on marketing and publicity for select books, as well as acquiring books. In addition to all this, Scott volunteers his time in the Penguin Shop, always ready to provide excellent recommendations with his evident passion for and deep knowledge of our books. Q: Does volunteering in the Penguin Shop help you do your job better? A: I think volunteering at the Shop gives me a connection to people who read. It also provides an opportunity to meet and talk about books with customers and provides an opportunity to pick their brains about the kind of things they like to read and the kind of thing they’re books they are hoping...
Kirby is Project Manager for Consumer Insights. He analyzes web statistics, sales data, and surveys to help connect readers to great books. With this role, Kirby brings a unique perspective to the time he spends volunteering in the Penguin Shop. Q: Does volunteering in the Penguin Shop help you do your job better? A: I think that volunteering in the Shop – just getting access to consumers and what they want and what they’re interested in and the real life experience of shopping and loving books, is just a great window into how people are actually interacting with the stuff we sell. It’s one of those things where it’s easy to get trapped in kind of a bubble....
Today is a two-part interview with both Max and Taylor. Max is a Publicity Manager, working with specific authors, including David Mitchell and Pasha Malla, while Taylor is on the National Accounts team. Both can be found in the Penguin Shop regularly, sharing their knowledge of our books and authors. Q: How does what you do make you good at providing customers with recommendations? Max: I’m lucky, I get to spend time with the authors and sometimes an anecdote about an author or maybe an insight that the author gave me about their book might be extra sort of ammunition in in getting someone to read a certain book. And sometimes, actually, authors will give me recommendations on books...
Léonicka is a Title Analyst, which involves both selling books to major digital retailers and analyzing how specific titles are doing. Léonicka tracks sales over time and figures out what made them sell. Q: Does volunteering in the Penguin Shop help you do your job better? It’s nice to see how people talk about books, what questions they ask about books, what words they use to describe their favourite books, what they remember – like I had a customer come in and he gave me a book title and he was quite confident about it, but the title was wrong. So he used a synonym, I think it was like “walking” and he said “strolling” instead, and I was...
