The Company

Usborne is an independent, family business. With over 280 staff based across our London, Oxford, Wolverhampton and German offices we publish over 300 distinctive, engaging, accessible new books each year, and have nearly 3000 titles in print. These range from books for babies such as the bestselling That’s not my… series to YA fiction from acclaimed authors such as Holly Bourne – with everything from Magic Painting to Politics for Beginners in between.

The Department

The Usborne UK sales teams sell our fantastic books throughout the UK & Ireland. We do this by nurturing strong relationships with national bookshop chains, supermarkets and digital retailers.  Our separate field sales team dedicate their time to working with a broad range of independent booksellers, toy shops, museums and galleries – plus many more. All UK sales staff posses in-depth knowledge and wide-ranging expertise of our publishing, our markets and our retailers.

The Role

You’ll be playing a  key support role within the wider UK sales team by assisting on the day-to-day administration and operations of the team and our customers. This is a superb opportunity to join a high performing sales team at the UK’s largest  independent Children’s publisher and to work in a vibrant and successful publishing sales environment.  

The role will involve:

• Assisting on retailer and customer account administration, fielding queries from prospective or current customers and processing orders through our distributor and warehouse

• Working closely with Usborne field sales team to provide office support

• Preparing customer presentations using Powerpoint

• Preparing title slides for internal sales team briefings including our bi-monthly Sales Conference

• Preparing sales figures and reports for the sales team and senior sales colleagues on request

• Preparing title sales information when requested

• Providing support for regular and ad hoc business analysis including annual business reviews

• Responding to requests for catalogues, book samples,  book jackets, reprint dates and stock availability as well as anything else that may be requested.

• Checking bibliographic information on book covers and printed materials  before the go to print

Skills required

We are looking for an individual who can respond well to working in a fast-moving department who is well organised, enthusiastic and confident communicator and possesses excellent time-management skills and attention to detail. The successful candidate will ideally have at least one years’ experience in Publishing or the book trade environment.

• Excellent communicator who is confident with dealing with people at all levels, particularly on the phone and over email

• Excellent time-management, prioritisation and organisational skills, with a close eye for detail and keen awareness of deadlines

• Experience  of multi-tasking and prioritising a busy work-load with competing demands on your time

• Ability to adapt to changing daily tasks and priorities

• Strong  numerical skills are key to the role

• Strong IT skills, particularly Microsoft office including Excel, PowerPoint, Word and Teams.

• Confidence using and learning new software and systems and experience of systems such as Biblio, Nielsen and Horizon would be an advantage, though not essential

Location and benefits

We offer a 35-hour working week from our Farringdon office in London, where after a successful probationary period we offer a hybrid working mode of 3 days in the office and 2 days working from home.

In addition to our transparent salary grading structure, for this role we also offer a range of benefits including:

• 25 days paid holiday entitlement rising with service

• Generous Pension Scheme

• Employee Assistance Programme

• 50% Discount on Company Books 

• Life assurance

We particularly encourage applications from Black and minority ethnic candidates who are currently under-represented in publishing.