Edelweiss for
Small Publishers
Edelweiss is an online digital platform that allows publishers to efficiently manage their catalogs and review copies as well as their sales and marketing processes. It's a great place to reach book professionals and generate buzz about your titles! Small publishers often have questions about how to take advantage of Edelweiss services in the most cost-effective way. Depending on your team's capabilities, goals, and budget, it may make sense to partner with a distributor instead of subscribing independently. Let's discuss:
Sales Reps
Edelweiss is an amazing sales tool. It allows reps to share marked up catalogs full of personal recommendations with their accounts and accept orders via Edelweiss. Do you have your own sales reps or partner with a sales rep group? If you do not have sales reps with existing relationships with accounts, this functionality is not as useful, and it may make sense to partner with a distributor whose reps will sell your titles from their catalogs on Edelweiss.
Marketing Support
Do you have a devoted marketing person/team? Hosting catalogs, titles, and review copies on Edelweiss makes them discoverable to 200,000+ book professionals, but the real power comes when this is combined with your own marketing efforts - driving traffic to Edelweiss from email marketing, your website, social media, and ad campaigns. Distributors often take ownership of many key marketing functions for their publisher partners.
Tech Savvy
Subscribing publishers send their title metadata to Edelweiss in the form of ONIX files via FTP. While data can be added manually as well, we strongly recommend using a data feed to increase accuracy and efficiency. While we have documentation and details on file specs, we find that publishers with tech support in-house are most successful. Distributors take care of data feeds for their publisher partners.
Bandwidth
Managing publisher pages, titles, catalogs, and review copies in Edelweiss is fairly intuitive, but it is a new responsibility on top of everything you already do. On-demand training materials that include step-by-step instructions and short videos are available, and these resources meet the needs of most users who take full advantage of them. Personalized training is available for an additional fee if needed. However, if learning these new tools feels like it may be overwhelming or you may need additional support, then working with a distributor may be beneficial to you.
Budget
For many publishers, it is most cost effective to partner with a distributor that posts their titles on Edelweiss on their behalf. In addition to taking advantage of the distributor's sales and marketing services, distributed publishers can take advantage of discounts on additional services. For example, they can add an independent publisher listing, at a significantly discounted rate. Distributed publishers also receive a discount on review copies. Here is the pricing for independent publishers, and here is the pricing for distributed publishers.
Below are some examples of distributors that use Edelweiss to sell and market their clients' titles. This list is not comprehensive, so please ask your potential distributors about their Edelweiss services!
