Books are my business: Brookside Publishing Services sales and marketing manager

Michael Darcy: 'Brookside has a wide range of clients that publish everything from children’s books to poetry to fiction to law books.' 

Michael Darcy is sales and marketing manager at Brookside Publishing Services and lives in Goatstown, Dublin. 

Founded in 1987, Brookside is a sales and marketing agency serving trade, academic and specialist publishers throughout Ireland.

How did you get into publishing?

I studied English literature at Trinity and then dabbled in a post-grad. Waterstones bookshop on Dawson Street was literally down the street and I'd while away many an evening in there.

They were looking for staff, and I applied and got a job there. It was a great place to work, part of the fabric of Dublin bookshops and bookselling. 

There were people there who went on to be writers, like Paul Murray and John Boyne and others who went on to work in publishing one way or another. 

I got to deal with the reps from publishers and I bought books for sections of the shop. That gave me more of an understanding of how it all worked. 

I also did some front-of-store stuff and helped organise launches and things like that for a while, and I did some of the library supply. 

One of the reps I dealt with was from Brookside and he mentioned that he was moving on to something else. I had a chat with them and the next thing I knew, that was my new job.

What does your role involve?

Brookside has a wide range of clients that publish everything from children’s books to poetry to fiction to law books. 

We try and get their books into the right hands, where they need to be. 

We help bookshops find what they might be looking to stock and what will fit their needs. 

Brookside was set up by Edwin Higel, who also founded the publisher New Island, so they are sister companies. 

As well as New Island, I’ve been lucky enough to work on distribution for a great range of indigenous Irish publishers, such as Merrion Press, Tramp Press, Salmon Poetry, Lilliput Press, and more recently smaller publishers like Skein Press and Bullaun Press. 

My job is either very boring or very exciting, depending on where you stand. 

We put together sales kits, assemble information from all our clients, try to marshal all of that into something that we can show to booksellers, and plan out visits either in person or online. 

We pore over sales reports to see what went well or what didn’t. There are little fires that have to be put out from time to time. 

If books are late for an event, we might have to step in and get them there, or go to the warehouse to pick something up in the dead of night. 

We’ve also done launches for some of our clients and we’ve sold books in a variety of weird and wonderful places all over the island.

What do you like most about what you do?

I like the engagement with publishers, they’re all great creative people. I also like dealing with the bookshops, big and small, all over Ireland, north and south. 

There’s a variety of fantastic characters that run them and that buy books for them, and choose very carefully the stock that they sell.

They're an amazing, hardy bunch of people — they have to be because of the nature of what they do. It’s also a good feeling to see something that you’ve sold in being reordered.

What do you like least about it?

Possibly the never-ending amounts of data and sales reports. But they are useful — we need to be able to know what’s worked and what hasn’t. 

Also, when a book doesn’t work it is disheartening because of the time and energy that has gone into it.

Three desert island books 

I got obsessed with Ulysses by James Joyce when studying my degree. It’s the great big book that captures everything, one way or other. 

It’s obviously not an easy read, but I do find myself coming back to it. 

I’m a big fan of Cork poet Victoria Kennefick, and we’ve been lucky to sell her two volumes to date, Eat Or We Both Starve and egg/shell.

There’s lots of literary fireworks going off in her work, very visceral stuff, and also these quiet realisations. 

And the third one is a totally different type of book, one I enjoyed immensely, Two Brothers by Jonathan Wilson, which is about Jack and Bobby Charlton, and the world that they came from. 

It really captures a time and place. I would recommend it to anyone — it’s not just about sport, it’s a social history as well.