(no subject)
My dad just told me an amazing story about himself so I feel the need to document it.
He's been a sales representative for several publishers for a very long time; several decades until he retired. And he actually got somewhat famous, so to speak - constantly winning awards, and even now everyone from those companies loves him. He's like a sales rep legend.
Anyway, I asked him about how this began, and he told me about it. He was working selling insurance at the time but didn't really like it much, and one day he came home and looked at the jobs section of the paper, where there was an advert for a sales rep job at Corgi. He had absolutely no idea what that involved and didn't really care about anything at the time, but decided to apply for it anyway because he was sick of things.
The night before the interview (he had to go down to London for this), he stayed up the entire night listening to Quadrophenia and doing painting by numbers (this is my favourite part of the entire story). So he went down to London with no sleep, no knowledge of what he had to do or anything... and he got the job.
For the first year or so of it all he did was exactly what he was told to do. He didn't really have a clue about publishing, so he just winged it, basically. There were times when he had to do things like sell a certain amount of books and he was utterly clueless about it so he just guessed things and took chances, and yet, he still succeeded and managed to win Rep of the Year award TWICE IN A ROW which had never happened in the history of the company, stealing it from under the nose of far more experienced reps.
And that, as they say, was that. He had a very successful career and technically is still involved in it - even though he's retired he gets books from some of his old friends in the publishing world and sells them on Amazon, which he makes quite a bit from.
That's the end of my story.
He's been a sales representative for several publishers for a very long time; several decades until he retired. And he actually got somewhat famous, so to speak - constantly winning awards, and even now everyone from those companies loves him. He's like a sales rep legend.
Anyway, I asked him about how this began, and he told me about it. He was working selling insurance at the time but didn't really like it much, and one day he came home and looked at the jobs section of the paper, where there was an advert for a sales rep job at Corgi. He had absolutely no idea what that involved and didn't really care about anything at the time, but decided to apply for it anyway because he was sick of things.
The night before the interview (he had to go down to London for this), he stayed up the entire night listening to Quadrophenia and doing painting by numbers (this is my favourite part of the entire story). So he went down to London with no sleep, no knowledge of what he had to do or anything... and he got the job.
For the first year or so of it all he did was exactly what he was told to do. He didn't really have a clue about publishing, so he just winged it, basically. There were times when he had to do things like sell a certain amount of books and he was utterly clueless about it so he just guessed things and took chances, and yet, he still succeeded and managed to win Rep of the Year award TWICE IN A ROW which had never happened in the history of the company, stealing it from under the nose of far more experienced reps.
And that, as they say, was that. He had a very successful career and technically is still involved in it - even though he's retired he gets books from some of his old friends in the publishing world and sells them on Amazon, which he makes quite a bit from.
That's the end of my story.