Dear Sir or Madame:

It gives me great pleasure to write this letter of recommendation for Angela Sanchirico. I was introduced to Angela in early 2000 after the company for which she worked, Book-of-the-Month Club, merged with my employer, Doubleday Direct. The resulting company was named Bookspan, later Direct Brands, and is the home of around 20 book clubs, including Doubleday Book Club, History Book Club, and Crossings.

As a club editor, and later Editorial Director, it was my job to know what books publishers had to offer. They submitted their manuscripts for club consideration, and their point of entry was Bookspan’s manuscript room. As Editorial Assistant of the manuscript room, Angela was responsible for helping track around 10,000 publisher manuscripts and other materials each year. This involved coordinating their review with the club editor, and logging into SAP several key pieces of information. Some editors assigned the material of interest to one of nearly 200 freelance readers, and Angela prepared them for delivery. Others relied on Angela to assign the material to readers directly, so she had to be familiar with the readers in order to assign each a work within their expertise, while keeping track of each reader’s workload. It was imperative this happen in a timely, consistent manner, and thanks to Angela, it did.

Once the readers completed their written review, Angela kept the systems flowing, as this triggered reader payment. Every day she compiled the reports from the readers and distributed them to the club editors. If she was going on vacation, Angela worked as far ahead as she could, knowing the importance of the timeliness of the information.

Angela has many strengths: she is organized, hard-working, detail-oriented, and has high standards. Angela has another great quality that can often be overlooked, even though it adds to her quality of work: she is inherently curious and thirsty for knowledge. Angela would spend her own money and time attending publishing industry events, simply because she wanted to learn more about a topic. And if she had a question of a moderator or a panel, she was not too shy to ask it.

As staff size decreased over the years, Angela’s curiosity spurred her to think of new ways to keep the manuscript room running smoothly. She contributed ideas on improving the flow of information, among them creating an electronic reader report database that would make it simpler for anyone in the company to find a report. This would have saved time for several departments and put more information at the fingertips of editors, copywriters, and copyeditors.

Angela has also exhibited great patience and caring when dealing with the dozens of readers. They would contact her with various issues, such as their unavailability for a certain length of time, problems with a payment, questions about tax forms, etc. The readers all thought very highly of Angela because she did her utmost to help them, and they knew she cared about them.

For all of these reasons, I believe any company would be lucky to have Angela as part of their team.

Sincerely,

Sharon FanteraFormer Editorial Director of Bookspan/Direct Brands