The role:

Are you great at building relationships? Are you pro-active and curious with a passion for books? 

As our new Regional Manager, you’ll work closely with bookshops and other retailers across the North of England & Scotland, including Edinburgh, Glasgow, Northumberland, and Cumbria.  You’ll use your communication and negotiation skills to build relationships and influence decisions, to see our books featured with impact across the region you manage.

You’ll be required to regularly visit independent bookshops and other accounts to ensure they’re maximising sales of our titles and using their significant power of recommendation to drive word of mouth success. 

You will be expected to spend 3.5-4 days per week visiting bookshops and other retailers and work the remaining time remotely. A company car will be provided and a full clean driving license is essential.

What you’ll bring:

To succeed in this role, it’s crucial that you’re comfortable in brokering relationships with booksellers, flexing your style to the requirement of the retailer and business. You’ll often work autonomously, so being a self-starter and able to use your own initiative are key to your success within this role.

You might have already worked in a similar sales or business development role, but you won’t need prior publishing experience. We’ll teach you everything you need to know to be successful, all we ask is that you bring your curiosity, tenacity, and interest in how to market our books to a wide and engaged audience.  You’ll be selling a wide range of titles across Fiction, Non-Fiction and Children’s.

The team:

Internally, you’ll be a part of a team of 10 and you’ll confidently build relationships with colleagues across our Editorial, Marketing, Publicity and Sales teams in our publishing houses. You’ll regularly share market insights and use social media as a tool to proactively source new retailers within your market, and as an opportunity to establish and enhance relationships with current and emerging book retailers.

About Penguin:

We’re the UK’s largest publisher; made up of some 2,000 people and publishing over 1,500 books each year. Our doors are open to all kinds of talent. In a constantly evolving industry, we work hard to stretch the definition of the word publisher. Here, you’ll work with a breadth of talent who all play their part to make each of our books a success. Together, we make books for everyone because a book can change anyone.

How to apply: Please apply with your CV & Cover Letter by 23:59 on Sunday the 28th of April.

Salary: circa £33,000 depending on how your experience and skills align to the role

Competitive benefits package: Our people are the heart of our business, and we work hard to support a culture of responsibility and recognition.

Our benefits include:

• Financial – income protection, life assurance, childcare allowance
• Wellbeing - healthcare cash plan, critical illness cover, health checks
• Lifestyle – enhanced parental leave, tech scheme

For our full benefits list please visit: https://www.penguinrandomhousecareers.co.uk/what-we-offer/

Hybrid working: While our offices across the UK are places to connect, collaborate and celebrate with colleagues, we recognise that flexibility around where you work is just as important. For this role we expect you to visiting customers most days during the week and work remotely 1-1.5 days per week.

We would also expect this person to live in the region that they would be managing as a key part of the role is visiting customers on the area in person. 

The recruitment process: You can read about our recruitment process at https://www.penguinrandomhousecareers.co.uk/how-we-hire/

As a Disability Confident Committed organisation, we're part of the offer an interview scheme. This is where disabled applicants who meet the essential criteria for the role can opt in to get to the next recruitment stage. There may be some situations where volume of applicants means we can't take all eligible candidates to interview.

We encourage you to tell us about any reasonable adjustments you may need by emailing PRHCareersUK@penguinrandomhouse.co.uk. Remember, you only need to share what you are comfortable to for us to support your request.

Please note, we are not able to accept agency CVs for this role. Any CVs sent speculatively will not be eligible for a fee.

Company: The Random House Group Limited 

Country: United Kingdom 

State/Region: Sheffield 

City: North England & Scotland 

Postal Code: EH1 

Job ID: 269742