Week 4

This week we did the Bestbooks negotiation. I was the representative for Paige Turner negotiating against Luke. We started the negotiation talking about the contract signing bonus. I explained that Paige is an excellent author and signing bonuses are so common that we shouldn't even need to negotiate. He offered me $15,000 and I said that I would really like $20,000 and he accepted that. So the negotiation started off pretty well until he said that he thought a signing bonus and an advance were redundant and asked if there was any specific reason we would need both. I didn't know what to say because I didn't really know the difference between the two. Now I realize that I should have really thought about why each category was important in the deal and I should have played on the fact that Paige Turner was a best-selling author. Also, I didn't realize or take advantage of the fact that three of the categories were common interest categories. I just assumed that everything that would be beneficial to me would be disadvantageous to him. I think we ended up with less countries than we should have because he said that it would be time consuming and expensive to print the books in other languages and distribute in other countries. I think he suggested a low number so I thought that we could just meet halfway and he agreed to that. When we were done negotiating and 'signing the contract' I felt okay about the negotiation until I added all of my points and realized that I had almost 10,000 less than the points possible. All in all, for the next negotiation I will be doing a lot more planning and possibly researching information before class. Also, I will think more of interests instead of positions and realize that there might be some things in which we have a common interest.