When my father, Leonard Shatzkin, was appointed Director of Research at Doubleday in the 1950s, it was a deliberate attempt to give him license to use analytical techniques to affect how business was done across the company. He had started out heading up manufacturing, with a real focus on streamlining the number of trim sizes the company manufactured. (They were way ahead of their time doing that. Pete McCarthy has told me about the heroic work Andrew Weber and his colleagues did at Random House doing the same thing in the last decade, about a half-century later!)
Len Shatzkin soon thereafter was using statistical techniques to predict pre-publication orders from the earliest ones received (there were far fewer major accounts back then so the pre-pub orders lacked the few sizable big pieces that comprise a huge chunk of the total today) to enable timely and efficient first printings. Later he took a statistically-based approach to figure out how many sales reps Doubleday needed and how to organize their territories. When the Dolphin Books paperback imprint was created (a commercial imprint to join the more academic Anchor Books line created a few years before by Jason Epstein), research and analytical techniques were used to decide which public domain classics to do first. Read more…
This story is from a gold mine produced by The Idea Logical Company and their newsletter “The Shatzkin Files.” It’s a free subscription any publisher or marketer should receive. Excerpted are two recent stories i found full of value. http://www.idealog.com