Creating a Profitable Catalog: Everything You Need to Know to Create a Catalog That Sells

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Summary: Comprehensive Overview
Review: A wonderful overview of the catalog world with plenty of real-world examples including: ROI calculations, promotions, customer segmentation.....
Worth its wieght in gold!

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Summary: Terrific book
Review: Great guide to the numbers behind starting and running a successful catalog-based business. What it will cost. Where you can save money, and calculating how time to profits.

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Summary: The ultimate handbook of catalog selling
Review: If you want to read only one book on the catalog business, make sure you pick this one.

I've read more than 5 books in English and German on the catalog subject and Schmid's book is in a class of its own.

It promises to cover the entire catalog process, including strategic planning, merchandising, creative, marketing (circulation), fulfillment, testing, and measuring response and ROI. And it delivers on the promise to an extend that I've never seen before. I spend this summer in Cannes, France, and enjoyed Schmid's book in the hot sun. Just couldn't put it aside...

His 11 pages long spreadsheet model in appendix includes everything for a new catalog start-up feasibility study ... and provides insight for the budgeting process to more experienced catalogers. [Why doesn't he provide a downloadable version in Excel on his homepage?]

The only competitor to this book is probably Katie Muldoon's 1995-publication, which is out of print (her home page says that a new book on the strategic aspects of catalogs is forthcoming).

One weakness that all books on cataloging have so far is their unserious treatment of the Internet. Schmid's book is from 2000 and it shows. It doesn't contain solid work on dynamic publishing, which is exploding via the Internet these years. It's not that Schmid doesn't accept that the Internet will be a phenomenal factor, but in this area so much of the catalog processes have been digitized since 2000. Thus, on this promise it doesn't deliver.

I still recommend this book as the best source so far to understanding all the catalog processes and hints to improving the bottom-line.

Peter Leerskov,
MSc in International Business (Marketing & Management) and Graduate Diploma in E-business

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Summary: That Why My Products Didn't Sell
Review: This book is to die for. After ten years in the candle making business I had big catalog publishing companies telling me that "My product were the reason for not selling". I read this book and bingo it wasn't my products it was my prsentation of the products. Don't waste your time on big catalog publishing companies, just read this book and learn a greater insite of your products and how to sell them.

Rating:
Summary: Don't start a Catalog until you've read this book!!!
Review: This is such a great book for a company that is starting a Catalog business or thinking about it. It covers all aspects of the Catalog business and gives you a checklist of all the necessary tasks to launching a successful catalog. Great book...

Rating:
Summary: Don't start a Catalog until you've read this book!!!
Review: This is such a great book for a company that is starting a Catalog business or thinking about it. It covers all aspects of the Catalog business and gives you a checklist of all the necessary tasks to launching a successful catalog. Great book...