The question was raised in the post below from another thread--what could be done to improve this sale?
Thanks for the feedback. There's no intentional gender discrimination going on here. These are the criteria we used:
- The author has lots of books available in Logos that we are able to discount up to 75% off. (Customers are disappointed when we don't have many options to choose from for each author.)
- The author's books are among our bestselling products. (We want to ensure the sale has books that most people are going to be interested in.)
- We pick 32 living authors and 32 dead authors.
Using those criteria, we didn't end up with any women authors in the running this year (or previous years?). We didn't intentionally include or exclude any authors based on their gender, race, age, marital status, nationality, denomination, theological positions, or any other discriminating factor.
We're absolutely not opposed to including women authors, but we just don't have many with a wide selection of popular products.
Would you prefer that we use a different set of criteria for next year? Should we not be concerned about the number of books an author has in Logos (that we can discount up to 75% off)? Should we ignore how well an author's books sell? Our current thinking is that this would compromise the overall effectiveness of the sale, but we're certainly open to rethinking things.
My idea(s), also from another thread, is below:
The thematic concept (brackets similar to college B-ball) was novel a few years back, but I think Logos would do better sales if they just offered customers two components: 1) a list of approved authors not unlike what is offered during MM but much broader in scope, and 2) a series of percentage-off choices (again, similar to the current MM options) that could be applied by customers to the authors of their choice.
In this way, every customer could craft their own sales--satisfaction would go way up, acrimony would go way down. I could apply my 75% to Walter Brueggemann to my great glee, thus actually getting to spend some money to Logos's great glee, while some slow-poke who hasn't already picked up Carson's or Wright's stuff for whatever reason can buy those author's until they're coming out their ears and noses.
By "approved authors" I'm just referring to the comments from Logos in one of the other threads (the one about the lack of women in the MM brackets, I think) that pointed out that they have certain criteria they apply when picking authors, the main one being they have to have publisher approval for the deep discount offering. But in the scenario I'm suggesting, whether an author has a ton of resources in Logos isn't a big deal since each customer is going to hold the cards in how and with which authors they want to apply their best sale percentages. If somebody with limited resources is happy applying their 75% to a single resource from an author with only one offering, it's no skin off anyone's nose.
The one addition Logos could add is the possibility of offering a few approved collections or series as well. That would be awesome in my financially-strapped world.
The element of chance is removed, but wouldn't that make you happier with the process and what its outcome could be?
