Rep of the Year Finalists Mark Fleeman

Meet some of the industry’s favorite road warriors. The winner, as selected by a panel of judges, will be announced at a virtual reception during the U.S. Book Show on Monday, May 22, 4:30–5 p.m.

Emily Bates, senior manager for in-house sales of Penguin Random House adult titles, calls herself a “jack-of-all-trades” rep. Her responsibilities include sales and service to a variety of indie bookstores across the country—the Mysterious Bookshop in New York City, Beagle and Wolf Books & Bindery in rural Minnesota, the Ripped Bodice in Los Angeles—necessitating, she says, “always checking the time zone before I call.”

In an email nominating Bates for PW Rep of the Year, Barbara Peters, who owns the Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale, Ariz., lauded her and her colleagues in PRH’s sales department for “ensuring that orders flow, that event orders and special orders keep pace, that damaged returns are facilitated—this is a specially thorny issue to handle—differently than overstock returns, that tracking numbers are sent and deliveries are followed up.”

Much of Bates’s business with booksellers is done via phone and email, and “a couple of stores do Zoom,” she notes. But she does call on two indies near the PRH warehouse and office in Westminster, Md.: Curious Iguana in Frederick, Md., and A Likely Story in Sykesville, Md. “I adore in-person calls, just to throw a wrench into things.”

She’s kidding, of course—the work is the same regardless of mode of communication: “learning and remembering the formula each store uses to perfect their collection, and understanding what I can do to fit PRH titles on their shelves and augment their sales to maximize their profits.”

It was perhaps inevitable that Bates, who calls herself “a legacy rep,” would end up working for PRH—her mother worked as a Random House customer service representative in Westminster for 20 years. After graduating from Western Maryland College (now McDaniel College) with a degree in art history and museum curatorship, Bates worked for a decade as a bookseller. She started at Waldenbooks in Westminster; transferred to a Borders Books & Music outlet in Austin, Tex., to work as a display manager; then returned home to Westminster two years later as an assistant manager at Borders Express.

In 2009, Bates’s mother suggested she apply for a telemarketing position at the Westminster facility. “I thought it’d be calling people during their lunch hour to talk up books by John Grisham,” she says.

“But my mom said, ‘It’s an amazing job.’ And it was: I was the right person at the right time. It was a great fit.” To complete the circle, Bates’s first week on the job coincided with her mother’s last week before retirement.

Bates works with “a wonderful mix” of accounts, ranging from booksellers who’ve just opened their doors and have never previously spoken with a rep to seasoned booksellers with whom “I can talk in shorthand and they know what I mean.” She adds, “It’s very fulfilling and there’s something new every day.”

Memorable interactions with booksellers include one cited in Peters’s nomination letter: Bates and her colleague Tracey Davidson worked hard last year to assist Poisoned Pen with successfully executing an “overambitious and overextended project with Diana Gabaldon,” promoting her latest Outlander novel, Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone. “The challenges were daily,” Peters wrote. “They began in November 2021 and extended through March 2022 and I can’t even detail all the complications of completing it without their cooperation.”

This past year, Peters wrote, Bates, Davidson, and the other members of the PRH team have provided excellent customer service to Poisoned Pen and other indies as they “navigate the challenging terrain transitioning back to a more normal supply chain, but also stay nimble and flexible so that shifting author event dates and publication dates don’t torpedo plans.”

Bates says her expertise also made a difference when she was talking up Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner to Curious Iguana’s book buyer. “I had to sell a little harder because they were going to take a low number. There’s an H Mart in Frederick, and I told the buyer that customers are going to know what H Mart is; I knew this book was probably going to be a perennial bestseller for that store.”

The Curious Iguana has sold almost 50 copies of Zauner’s memoir. “I really enjoyed that sales pitch,” Bates says. “The book just came out in paper. I can hardly wait to go by there and see how it’s doing.”

Mark Fleeman of Fujii Associates introduces himself on the company’s website with a few words that succinctly encapsulate his 35-year career as a commission rep: “I’ve been with Fujii since 1988, many stories, and many miles.” Indeed, Fleeman’s repping career as part of a group that covers 17 states in the Midwest and the TOLA region (Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas) is set against the colorful backdrop of an evolving publishing world, peopled with industry notables of the 1980s and ’90s whose names still resonate.

The Anderson, Ind., native says that as a youth, he loved books and bookstores, even though there weren’t many in his hometown. After graduating from Indiana State University in 1982 with degrees in history and geology, Fleeman worked in circulation for the Knight Ridder newspaper empire in Gary, Ind., before being transferred to the company’s headquarters in Miami to take part in a management training program.

After Fleeman determined that his future wasn’t with Knight Ridder, he allowed fellow Indiana State alum Jerry Stroud to “lure” him to work as a Fujii rep assigned to the TOLA region; Stroud had acquired the company in 1976 from founder Hank Fujii. Eric Heidemann now heads the company.

“I went down there with a handful of publishers in my bag,” Fleeman says. “I called on everything, probably 300 stores in a four-month period.” Noting that such an itinerary was “a little difficult,” he adds that he ended up “cutting it back to 125 stores.”

After moving to the Twin Cities area in 1995, Fleeman switched to covering

accounts in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Dakotas. “I fell in love with those accounts,” he says, rattling off the names of legendary but long-gone Twin Cities indie stores—Odegard’s, Baxter’s Books, Hungry Mind/Ruminator Books, and the wholesaler Bookmen. “One of the greatest honors in my career was calling on Bookmen. Norton Stillman, Ned Waldman—they were able to find their customers and keep them happy,” with amenities including shopping carts for local booksellers to use while browsing in the wholesaler company’s Minneapolis warehouse.

Fleeman also name-checked David Unowsky and Tom Bielenberg, respectively the owner and long-time store manager of Hungry Mind/Ruminator in St. Paul. “They knew when I was doing something wrong and they’d correct me,” he says. “I learned so much from those two.”

After moving back to Indiana in 1998, the same year that Stroud sold Fujii to Don Sturtz, Fleeman settled in Valparaiso and serviced accounts across the heartland. He currently covers his “natural territory”: Indiana, Kentucky, Chicago and central Illinois, and Wisconsin between Madison and Green Bay. From 2006 to 2013, Fleeman also serviced accounts in Louisiana, but, he says, “it became too much, even though I loved those accounts.”

While much has changed in the 35 years since Stroud persuaded Fleeman to become a rep, “the approach for commission reps is still the same,” he says. “What’s changed are the mechanics,” such as Edelweiss and other digital tools. While commission reps no longer have to send “30 pounds of catalogs to 50 bookstores,” the expenses incurred by commission reps on the road continue to rise, forcing him and his colleagues to “learn to adapt by finding creative ways” to save money while continuing to provide their accounts with excellent service and face-to-face meetings.

The time has long passed since reps could spend days at accounts, but Fleeman says his accounts—a mix of indies, museum stores, and wholesalers —still want to see their reps. “We’re needed now more than ever: the accounts want to know what’s going in the business, what’s big, and what’s not.”

Reps build community by sharing information with their accounts, Fleeman notes, and also serve as conduits between publishers and retailers, advocating for their accounts with publishers when necessary. The importance of reps was amply demonstrated during the pandemic, he adds, when publishers offered special discounts and made other concessions to beleagured indie bookstores. “The publishers really stepped up. We reps communicated to the publishers that the indies were struggling, they were working as hard as they could. And the publishers responded in a big way.”