Books are my business: Bloomsbury Ireland head of sales Lorraine Levis

Lorraine Levis: 'I’m the head of the sales team for selling into Ireland.'

Lorraine Levis is head of sales for Bloomsbury, Ireland, and is based in Naas, Co Kildare.

How did you get into publishing?

I was always a big reader, which is down to my mum. There’s was always a budget for books — if I finished a book, we would go to the bookshop and pick out another one.

It was a very important part of my daily life — I grew up on a farm, we were always outside but I distinctly remember bringing my books down to the bottom field, because there was a rock there in the corner where I would read and there was a stream behind me. 

It was so picturesque, it was like something out of Enid Blyton.

Originally I was going to be a vet. I had to do work experience in fourth year of school and I managed to get two weeks with a vet. 

Then my mum said to go to my local bookshop, Barker and Jones, and see if I could do a couple of weeks with them.

She still takes credit for my entire career because I went there for the two weeks and I didn’t leave for six years.

I stayed there working part-time and then when I finished college. I ran the café there for six months, because I just wanted to stay in the bookshop.

One of the buyers in there had worked for Dubray and he said if you want to get into the buying side of things go work for them. 

So I got a Christmas temp job in Dubray on Grafton St, then I transitioned to Dubray in Blackrock, where I was the children’s bookseller for three years.

I left there to go work for Penguin, where I was the children sales exec, then went from there to WH Smith where I was the book buyer, and now I’m at Bloomsbury.

What does your role involve?

I’m the head of the sales team for selling into Ireland. Bloomsbury is the biggest independent publisher in Britain, and in the last two years, they acquired Head of Zeus, another big independent publisher.

They were both using independent sales agencies so they decided to bring in more in-house, international sales teams.

Ireland was one of the big ones, which was really exciting because I’ve worked with the Bloomsbury and Head of Zeus lists for years.

There are three of us in the team — myself, Lara, our key account manager, who is in Belfast, and Hannah, our assistant, who is from Kerry, but is based in the London office.

I look after Eason and a few of the other bigger accounts, and then I mostly work with the Britain team on acquisitions, projections, budgets and all that exciting spreadsheet stuff.

What do you like most about what you do?

I love acquisitions, and the excitement of having a proposal come in.

We do have to be level-headed, in terms of the amount of copies we think we can sell but I love shaping what our year is going to look like in books. 

Every autumn is so different, you never know what’s going to be the big hitter and to have something that you can see grow and do really well is so fun.

What do you like least about it?

I hate when something doesn’t work because you can’t predict what customers are going to buy. 

When you put your heart and soul into a book and you know the author’s brilliant and then it just goes flat for whatever reason, that’s very disheartening.

Three desert island books

The Coast Road by Alan Murrin, which is one of the debuts that we published this year, is so good. 

It is set in the 1990s, around the time of the divorce referendum and is about a small coastal town and what happens when a woman who left her husband and family returns to the fold.

The next one would be A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J Maas — romantasy is massive at the moment and this series is great, it’s so readable.

The classic one that I would go with is Matilda by Roald Dahl. It has always been my go-to even though there are so many brilliant modern kids books — I have a Matilda tattoo. 

It’s about a girl who reads so much that she gets magic powers and how could you not love that?