Winter Internship Experience Featuring Monique Lallier: A Retrospective

By: Siera Troiano

Over the last few weeks at Oak Knoll Books, I have been working on a publishing project focused solely around the book Monique Lallier: A Retrospective. My goal was to gain some more attention to this book that showcases all of Monique Lallier’s bookbinding’s over the past forty six years. I targeted specific groups of people and different organizations that I thought would be most interested in this book. With the help of my supervisor Erin Evans, we compiled a list of contacts from the Oak Knoll database and emailed each person an email campaign that I made specifically for this book. Starting out with this project I struggled a bit trying to figure out who exactly would be most interested in this book and why. I started my search off with local bookbinders, but quickly realized that my search wasn’t broad enough. So, I decided to reach out to people all over the country and specific organizations such as the MET and the American Print Museum. Much to my surprise, I found that some of these contacts already had a previous relationship with Oak Knoll prior to my marketing of this book. We were able to check the database to see if any of these people and organizations had bought this book before. We discovered that none of the contacts we planned on reaching out to had purchased this book which only made my marketing more important!

            The number one thing that I learned throughout all of this was how important knowing your audience is. Without that, you won’t have much success in selling something because you aren’t focusing on the people who most likely want it. This just goes to show how important good marketing is for whatever company you’re working at. One of my favorite things thus far in my internship experience at Oak Knoll was finding out that Rob had talked to Monique Lallier and Don Etherington. After their conversation, they decided to do a 30% off sale on some of the bindings that Monique and Don have done. I thought that this was a really unique experience considering I had just done all this research about Monique. This really tied everything together and made me feel like I chose the right book to research! Overall this project and internship as a whole has taught me many things that I know will help me in my future endeavors after I graduate from the University of Delaware.