Sales Literature Publishing System – Products database

The core of the system is a Product database, which stores all the details of your products, and the various pieces of text you want to use to describe them.

For each product, you can store:

• Basic bibliographic information such as title, subtitle, series, edition etc
• Detailed product information such as ISBN/ISSN, Binding, Extent, Operating System, Frequency of Issues/Releases etc, as appropriate for the type of product
• Publication and production dates, so you can keep track of forthcoming products and their progress

• Multiple prices, so you can have as many prices as you need for a product, including time-limited special offers, future prices etc, each of which can be in several currencies
• Saleable items: each product may be made up of several different saleable items such as minor variants (e.g. hardback/paperback or Macintosh/Windows) or related/bundled items (e.g. book, CDROM, book with CDROM or teachers book/student book). Each saleable item may have its own detailed product information, but shares the bulk of the product information with the others.
• Links to next/previous editions, so it is clear which products are soon to be (or recently have been) superceded, and by what

• Author details including links to an author database (and the ability to cope with editors, contributors, etc)
• Production information such as the staff working on the product (e.g. promotion executive) and status of the product
• Links to related products, to point customers to other products which may be of interest
• Market categories, such as subjects, target readerships, academic levels, geographical market areas, special features - all searchable so you can easily produce specialised lists or catalogues of products
• Marketing copy, including any number of user-defined types of copy text (e.g. long blurb, short blurb, contents, short contents) to be used in sales literature. The system can automatically pick different text according to rules for a particular output (e.g. short blurb for older books, long blurb for new). For certain types of copy text, you can implement a system of publisher sign-off and/or author approval.

• Review text, extracted from published reviews of the product, to use as quotes in publicity material, ranked so the best reviews appear first
• Competitor product details, with comparisons to your product, is particularly useful when providing information to your salesforce
• Product notes which customer services, marketing, or other staff may want to record about the product - so there is a single place to look up complaints, suggestions, etc

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