Book Expo America TalkSales and Marketing for Spiritual and Mission Driven Publishers ©2005 Simon Warwick-Smith Warwick Associates (707) 939-9212 I'm Simon Warwick-Smith and I specialize in the intersection of spirituality, marketing and publishing. I have a consultant firm out of Sonoma in Northern California whereby we concentrate on building people's sales however that can be done ranging across from publicity to marketing, and also working with sales people directly. This is a very complicated business that we are in. . . I wanted to acknowledge a couple of people who contributed information to what I am talking about today: Rob Meadows who is the head of sales at Inner Tradition, Phyllis Tickle who is one of the religion editors at Publishers Weekly, Paul Cohen who is the head of sales and marketing at Anthroposophic Press. These people have a fund of knowledge about this business. I would like to touch in with who we have here today. Those who come from the religion camp 3-4, those from the "New Age" 10-12 out of about 60 people. I'm going to be speaking from the vantage point of how to publish successfully. It runs the gamut from choosing what you publish across to how to promote and how to sell, and how to be successful. So I wanted to define our terms. Spirituality and mission driven covers all of the religions from Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and so forth across to New Age and will include Psychology, Recovery, Self Help and so forth. And for you as a publisher I encourage you to keep your definition of spirituality as wide as you can to encompass these areas that are on the edge. My talk today is really a check list for you. To make sure that you are covering all of the bases and perhaps give you some insight. Let's go to the core of it. How do you hit the jackpot as a spiritual publisher? The principles are very clear and one keeps coming back to them again and again. Whenever you scratch your head wanting to do better, you go back to the principles. Which is, who are your customers, what do they want, and how do you meet their needs. Living in Sonoma there is a local cement company who have emblazoned on their trucks, "Find a need and fill it." It's a wonderful motto, they have their marketing down. That's also the basis of successful publishing. However, we have a paradox here--immediately, as soon as I have said those words, "Find a need and fill it." A mission driven publisher doesn't necessarily do that. You publish first, You feel strongly about your material, you want to get it out there, you feel it is timely, and so you publish it. And, you are hoping to create a response. So there is an element of putting it out there and hoping it will resonate. A good example of that is Eckankar who are a modern religion. Eckankar was around thousands of years ago and then sprung up again out of nowhere I think in the 60's. They have an Eck master, the leader of the church. They publish extensively and they have built a following now of thousands worldwide. They created it purely from starting to publish, starting to get the word out. That is really what the mission driven publisher does and that is the core of the challenge that we have in front of us. Interestingly, Publishers Weekly, has said that spiritual and mission driven publishing is the fastest growing genre in publishing. As everyone in this room would know consciousness is the only game in town, in the end, when all is said and done. For the first time we have the opportunity of making a living, even making a profit, in the realm of spirituality and consciousness. It really is a new era. We are in the middle of a spiritual explosion and it's not really apparent now because we are in the middle of it, but looking back years from now we will be able to see how fast we have moved.
HOW TO DEFINE YOUR MARKET AND REACH THEM I rode in today on the bus with Dan Poynter who some of you will know as a household name among small publishers. He asked what can you tell me about spiritual and mission driven publishing. I said, what has happened is that "main stream" has gone "New Age. And now, there has been a merging and it is no longer the niche that it was. It is becoming integrated in society. So let us take a brief look at the New Age market. I was told that this began on May 5 of this year which I find fascinating, bringing in the proverbial Age of Aquarius. I can't help making an aside, Christianity had the symbol of the fish, Pisces. What this means for Christianity in this new era who knows. But obviously a fish and water are quite compatible. The New Age market was defined beautifully by Paul Ray who wrote the "Integral Culture Survey" through Noetic Sciences. He identified a market of 50 million people and he called them the cultural creatives. Many of you know about this. He defined their income, tastes and so forth. The study is available from Noetic Sciences (415) 331-5650, $12.95. It really defines the market and for many of us who publish books for the "spiritual seekers", this is the study that helps us understand and know the qualities of this market. The other major source of information is New Editions International (800-777-4751) out of Sedona. They do an annual study of the New Age market and they will sell you lists of media. So you can reach all the media that specializes in this and bookstores that specialize as well. It wraps up this market. That gives you all the right contacts to build your sales.
PUBLISHING BASICS The reason we are here is that we publish to get the word out as opposed to identifying what a need is and then publishing to exactly meet that need. First things first--let's start with the basics. The sales of what you publish depend on the foundations of your publishing company. And that all starts with your purpose and your mission statement. Your goal is to get your mission statement stated in as few words as possible. Get it blown up on foam core and put it up on the wall in your office. Put it up on the wall in the warehouse, so everyone knows and can see what your goal and mission is. If you haven't done that, take a moment to reflect on why not. It may be a fruitful line of thought. You really want to have that goal in the forefront of every one's mind. So everyone eats, sleeps and breaths it. Also, so that all your decisions are measured against it. DECIDING WHAT TO PUBLISH Given that you have established your goal What do you publish? Because we are here talking about sales and marketing the truth is that sales and marketing starts at the level of product development, sitting around the acquisitions table making decisions. So, the core is your publishing plan. The purpose of your plan is to define your niche. As a small press the path to survival is to find your niche and dig in. I can't stress that enough. You find 15 different ways to deepen your niche and find people all of who which belong in that niche. Everything you publish wants to reinforce your niche, try not to spread away from that but be very specialized. You want to be in business 20 or 30 years from now and selling backlist and the key to that is publishing quality. What ever you do publish quality. Go for the best teachers, the best and the purest information. So I am going to digress for a moment on the topic of the publishing plan because I have found that many people don't have a clear concept of it. Map out your subjects across the years in terms of A, B and C titles, i.e. by rates. Allocate out how much you want to spend on marketing and the cost of running your operation and come up with a profit forecast. This is the big picture of your program. In the end while snazzy publicity and promotion is all very well it is this sheet (the publishing plan) that determines whether you succeed or fail at what you are doing. This is the top down approach and it is crucial to have this big picture. The other side is the bottom up perspective. Your plan is also built one title at a time. Sitting around the acquisitions table and asking yourself, "Do I or don't I publish this?" What have we got here. I urge you to write down for a particular book what it is going to cost. What is your pre pub, what is the printing cost, how much are you going to spend on publicity. Add up all your costs and estimate how many you going to sell for the year and the likely revenues. Work out from this your profit and loss. Are you going to make a buck on it for the year or for two years. Incidentally you are not going to know how it is going to do until it is out in the marketplace for a year. It takes that long and that is a very good rule of thumb. The best time to launch is at the BEA for the fall season. Because the fall is the biggest season. It is an excellent time to do a launch. So at that time sitting at the acquisition table that's the time to look at your positioning, your hook, your promotional plan, and making your decision if the book has meat in it. Whether it's going to set the world on fire. If it's not strong it's important not to publish marginal books. You only create problems for yourself. However, now as events are moving quickly, there are two new ways of publishing books on the edge which are low cost and get them out there. These are e-books which I will talk about later. There are some very exciting developments that I will tell you about. And, secondly print on demand which is a minimum of 25 books. It will cost you about 50% more to print a book that way. If you price by a multiple of 5 to 8 times your printing cost you are going to increase the cover price of that book by 50% or so. But, it is a way of making it available where otherwise it might not be available. So these are the decisions you make at the foundation level. Let's now look at the issue of profitability. You may be non-profit organization that operates by grants and other sources of funds. For them publishing is a loss-leader for the organization. The way they make their money is they get the word out about who they are and then they receive donations and legacies. So they make their money by going to the post office box and receiving a large number of donation checks. The publishing program feeds that cycle of keeping the checks coming in. They don't make their money from books sales per se. And it means that they have a bit of an unfair advantage in the marketplace because they are not concerned about profits. So they will spend extra money on marketing and promotion doing things that the for-profit publisher just can't afford to do. I will come back to how the for-profit publisher can handle that. So when you have to do your "C" titles, I urge you to be very tight about those: modest budget, focused marketing plans and small print run. For books that your organization mandates that they have to sell, if you are a small press either look at getting subsidies for them or don't publish them. The easiest money to raise is for publishing a specific book. It's often not too hard to find a patron out there who will write a check to underwrite the cost of getting it out there. Incidentally, 90% of all funds raised in the whole non-profit world come from individuals. Again around profitability, it is possible to do promotion minimally. I will give you an example. Pomegranate in California publishes among other things spiritual art and coffee table books that sell for $65 each. They do zero promotion: no review mailings, no author events. All they do is get the book in the store at $65 each. And that is a viable strategy for them and for that type of book. That way you can really keep your costs down. The idea in selecting what you publish is to have a fountain of opportunities so you can pick and choose. You are waiting for that opportunity to come along that gives you the edge in the marketplace. Now to create that fund of opportunities you need a flood of manuscripts coming through. The way you bring that about is to have a newsletter that describes what you are looking for and put it out there. You have a database of your authors and wannabe authors, friends of the press and anyone who is a possible candidate. Run an ad in the writer's magazines describing what you do and that you are looking for potential writers. When they get in touch add them to the database. The acquisition editor creates the newsletter, gets it out there and manages the relationships so you have that torrent of manuscripts coming in. When you are choosing what to publish you want to be aware of where your sales will happen. I am going to give you the profile of a typical medium size press. For them 30% of their sales go to in house groups, special sales, book clubs and so forth. 20% are direct mail to the in-house list. So a full half of their sales go to their established market that they just sell to fairly routinely. The other 50% go to the trade and of that only 8% is sold to independent bookstores. That is really a shockingly low figure because you want to be careful when you are looking at your numbers that you are not putting a disproportionate amount of dollars or effort in that direction if it is not being reflected in your revenues. I am sympathetic to bookstores, I used to own one. You need to be a realist when you are making your choices. Then of the balance half of what is left is sold to the chains and the other half goes to on-line bookstores predominately amazon.com. This is the other extraordinary thing that on-line stores, mainly amazon.com are matching all the sales of the national accounts Barnes and Noble, Borders and so forth. What is extraordinary about this too is that the rate at which on-line stores are growing you have to put your attention there. One of the things you can take away from here is that you really need to master the on-line promotion. I'll give you a simple example, when someone buys from amazon.com and they log on, they are prompted about a couple of books immediately. So you need to work it with amazon, that anyone who has bought a book of yours that when they log on again it is your books they are presented with. There are all sorts of intricacies in dealing with companies like amazon.com. It is an incredible bureaucracy. As a mission driven publisher editorial is the greatest challenge, setting the right framework. Your sales and marketing is driven by the content. I am saying the same thing sixteen different ways. Publish to deepen your niche, publish quality, go for content. What this means then as a small press your sales rep turns up to Barnes and Noble and the buyer says let's talk end caps, let's talk co-op. Your sales rep says, "no I am here to talk books. We don't have money to spend on that. We've got good books, we've got quality, we want you to stock our books." That's how you take your position in the market place is by having quality. Be aware of the number of books out there related to what you do. So in choosing how to get your edge in the marketplace the question is what's hot, how do you find out what's hot. You look at the bestseller lists, the trends, talk to your sales reps, ask them where they see opportunities in the marketplace. Talk to your buyers, pass the word to them, talk to bookstores staff. Also, when you are traveling look at magazine covers, they will tell you very clearly what the trends are. The Promise Keepers heralded a great surge in the Christian market. It was all over Newsweek. So be aware as a small press of your advantages in the marketplace. Incidentally the emphasis has shifted over the last few years. it used to be that seven out of ten of all books sold came out of New York houses. That is now completely reversed. It is down to about three out of ten. Small and medium size presses are getting a much larger share of the market than ever before. It is also related to the fact that there is a deluge of books. And the core problem in publishing is that there are too many books out there. The highest function for you editorially is for you to anticipate trends, create them, develop markets, publish what people haven't thought of yet. Be bold, thoughtful, turn people on to new ideas. That way the demand for books will always be there and the need for hand selling by independent stores will also be there because they understand how to do this the best. You have people hungry for this going into independent stores because that is where they have been nurtured and fed. The goal is original quality paperbacks in original quality stores. That is the way to the marketplace. Another way of saying this is, "Do what you love and the money will follow." So in going for quality: hone in and publish the essence of your message. Within all of this there is a trap. You build a devoted constituency of direct mail sales then they expect your product to be a certain way. However, you have been here today listened to me. Now you want to go back and make your list sexy for the trade, jazz things up a bit, reach new markets. The risk is that you will alienate your core people. How do you do cutting edge stuff without risking alienating your core readers or buyers. Paul Cohen at Anthroposophic Press held a series of revisioning meetings where they arrived at how Rudolph Steiner is the leading edge intellectual paradigm of today. That was the conclusion that they reached. And in that way they found that they could be focused and get in more deeply with Rudolph Steiner's ideas but also how they could be expansive and be on the fringe and reach these other markets waiting to be tapped. They got the buy in of the organization and the following about this reinventing of themselves. This is the solution of how to be at the edges. Reinvent yourself and do the soul searching of what you are about going deeper in and being able to spread out. The truth is that any teaching worth its salt can position itself as the intellectual paradigm. A good friend of mine Tim Campbell points out that in the pictures of the ancient Pharaoh's the pharaoh is followed by an ape. The ape would mimic and mock the pharaoh. This is where the phrase to ape comes from. Because the pharaoh had absolute power the ape would keep him humble by mimicking and mocking every step of the way. Similarly if you in pursuing your spiritual path and ramming it down people's throats whether they want to hear it or not you become a parody of yourself. So you need to be pure about what you are about and the key is to be intimate with everyone you do business with. The way you convey your teaching is through your beingness. So you are open and intimate with your reps, buyers and vendors. This is what we are about, what you see is what you get. And in a way it can be refreshing compared to the way some of the larger publishers do business and the whole corporate thing. This is an edge for you in the marketplace. You would be surprised at the impact you have on people you do business with by coming from a deep place within yourself. People recognize it immediately I want to touch on this quality aspect of marketing. How do you hone in on what you are about, how you describe yourself? The key in the marketing world is to go to your heavy hitters, i.e. go to the people who are the core followers, the strongest disciples, the strongest students and ask them what are the key concepts that do it for them. That is what you want to put in your promo material, your back cover, your introductions etc. That is what will trigger people. Another way is to use bounceback cards in your books to invite people to respond. Ask them anything you want. (As an aside I want to stress using author photos whenever you can. People lock into the picture of the person who wrote the book. One of the things that is underrated in selling books is the role of the author. You want to expand on that wherever you can. Get as personal as you can about the author as well as their credentials. It is a point of leverage.) See if you can offer a complete spiritual package. The British Buddhist publisher Tharpa offer a series of books from the beginning Buddhist practitioner through to enlightenment. You can buy something like eighteen books and put them on your book shelf and you have your work cut out for you right there. Interestingly of all those books that they publish, their bestselling title as is the case for many publishers is the title on meditation. So if you want a book that is going to have core book sales this is almost a sure bet. Try to go after your primary niche in non-traditional ways. Look at how they eat sleep and breath. What do they read, what do they think, where do they hang out, who do they talk to and try to reach them that way. You won't get a real good response from somewhere like Publishers Weekly because they are traditional and very New York house. Once you have got into the market that you have identified, when you have that down begin building one market at a time. Don't try tackling them all them at once. Now with the warehouses--we are talking Sam's, Target, Costco etc.--you can get a mock up to the buyer and say to them if you will take 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 I will go ahead and produce it. With that kind of guaranteed sale under your belt factor in an average of 50% returns and come up with your price. Once you have made that arrangement with the buyer you have 60 days to deliver. So as you are selecting what to publish think about end use. "End-use" is a key phrase. The teacher Gurdjieff used to say to his students "Don't ask me a question unless an answer is going to change how you live your life." I urge you to publish books in that vein. When looking at a book ask yourself how is this going to change the reader's life. Good publishing is governed by two maxims uttered by the Oracle of Delphi several thousand years ago. The oracle said "Know thy self" and "To thine own self be true". That is what we are about: Know your teaching and don't settle for any weak expression of it. Be true to that because you are the Holy Grail of your teaching. You are the cup for all the people who want to find out about it. DISTRIBUTION The master distributor is proactive and has a sales force. They do two things for you. They get you into the national accounts and they have sales reps who visit independent stores. We have touched on how independent bookstores are a smaller and smaller part of the pie. The truth of it is reps are a dying breed. So you are in a declining market there. It is a fairly sad thing. But that is what the master distributor does. They also demand to be exclusive. So, you cannot sell to any other retail or wholesale outlet. Everything goes through them including books to the wholesalers. There are about ten or twelve master distributors a couple of notable ones are Bookworld, Associated Publishers Group, LPG. The biggest is Publishers Group West, and National Book Network is very strong in this department, however they won't take publishers that sell less than $250,000 per year. National wholesalers are Ingram and Baker and Taylor. Regional ones are New Leaf, Bookpeople and then a bunch of others. That is your second path. If you don't go for a master distributor then you can look at going for wholesalers. The third path is hiring independent sales reps. If you are new to the business that can be daunting. You meet with them twice a year to get them excited about your line. They get a commission on the sales that you make 12-15%. The cost of that is that someone needs to manage them. You also have to be significant enough for them to want to carry your line. Those are the three options. There is a trade organization for sales reps - NAPIR. You can look up NAPIR.com. Also you can call the organization. They are listed in LMP. You can get them to send you a booklet of all the sales reps. In general they are sincere about what they do and are very good people. Bear in mind that the most important part of your sales will be the national accounts and on-line stores. One of the issues around sales, working with reps and in the mechanism of sales happening is timing. Many times publishers don't understand and mess up on the timing front. Barnes and Noble buyers operate on a budget. So for example, for a book with a pub date in May they have a budget to buy in December and January. The sales rep has to get the submission into the buyer a month before that. So we are talking five months before pub date. If you miss that the buyer has spent their money for that pub date. If the rep shows up and says, "Sorry, I'm late. Will you take a look at this?" The buyer says, "No, I can't look at that. I've got no money left." And so there is a time honored conflict. Now a days you can produce a book very quickly indeed. So, the publisher can be quick off the mark, but the sales cycle is much, much longer. So, you have a trade off and the price you want to pay. If you want to publish off of a quick turn-around looking at the consequences of missing the boat with many of the accounts. Selling to the chains is tricky. Chains are relatively unsympathetic to spirituality. How do you turn them around? One thing to do is to do surveys of your readers and come back to them with statistics and results and show that to the buyer. Secondly, your author is key. If you have a gung-ho author who is prepared to be out there, travel, do store events, radio, TV and so-forth, then it accounts for a tremendous amount. Point out to the buyer that the store needs to stock good books as well as popular books. The book store Gaia in Berkeley closed. Before they closed their doors, they did focus groups with their customers about what they needed to do in order to make it. The feedback that they got was that the customers wanted a "thicker soup". They wanted more substance in the books. They didn't want Gaia just to be stocking popular books that sold well. They were hungry for the real thing, and you want to present that to the buyer. The fourth point of leverage is that you want to use a well known writer because then you can leverage their history of sales. Also, buyers buy the publisher. Stay pure in what you publish because you will be known for that and future titles will be judged on how past titles did. Another way is to add a new message onto an old one. Take a book that has done well but the sales have faded. Put out a new edition and basically rework it as a new book. As far as the buyer is concerned they will look at the sales history of the old one as a guide to buying. When you are selling to the independent stores and especially the New Age stores you can sell on the basis of being touchy feely in contrast to the chains. Here is an example, we worked with Chris Prentiss and his book Little Book of Secrets. We did a sell sheet for him. It's a 8 1/2" x 11' glossy printed by Tuvets in LA. Image of the book, key points about it. What we did is get a terrific designer. It looked fantastic. Second we had great copy. For it we had the slogan the little book that sells big. Thirdly, it is a good book. It has information based on the I Ching so it has a solid philosophical foundation. The combination of those three things--the design, the copy, and the pull of the book itself--the buyer at Barnes and Noble said we'll take one for cash register placement for every store in California . We then got the author out on tour visiting Barnes and Noble stores promoting the book. When we put him out on tour we did posters which were put up to promote his events. We did buttons and also sent out free reading copies of the book to all the staff of Barnes and Noble stores in California . (I wouldn't recommend this for a small press. This sort of tactic is a loss leader in planning for large sales.) We also did stuffers, 1/2 sheet of yellow paper with information on the upcoming event to be put into every book that was bought in every Barnes and Noble store two weeks prior to the event. What really makes an event a success is an article in the local paper. Papers will oblige but you have got to have a great story. If you have that story then you are in, and when you get that article your event will be crowded out. If you don't get that article in the paper then you will only have a few people turning up and it will be your usual break-even event. Another way to build sales is to build friendships with the stores. Get to know people in the bigger stores, get their newsletter, get to know them personally. I will give you another path that we have done for John-Roger and Mandeville Press. We were involved in the launch of a book called Spiritual Warrior in Los Angeles . There was a launch event there. 600 people turned up. Admission to the event was that you had to have a copy of the book in your hand. The books were sold through the Bohdi Tree Bookstore who recorded those sales to the best seller list and it showed up on a few other lists. In a few weeks time it was on the L.A. Times Bestseller list. We attribute it to that launch event. Also you can do pre-publication sales at a premium if you want to raise money to publish the book. I've done this personally. Gather round your friends ask for a donation and offer to publish their names in the front of the book by way of thank you. You would be surprised at the number of people that would be generous in helping you out. Another area is special sales. I wanted to mention Byron Belitsos at Origin Press. He published Waking Up in Time by Peter Russell. He went to Noetic Sciences and sold them 40,000 copies and they sent out their annual mailing renewal to their membership and for everyone that renewed Noetics gave them a copy of the book. The key there is that Peter Russell is the darling of Noetic Sciences. You can turn around and look at organizations that are doing membership drives like that and find out what kind of a book would work and create that for them. One of the goals in marketing is to build membership of people interested in what you do. So that they read your book, call up for a catalog, you put them on your mailing list, you offer them membership, sell subscriptions, invite them to conferences and workshops and you get all this kind of information about them on your database. You create a growth path for people interested in what you do. One way to attract people is through permission marketing. You contact them and make an offer for free information about something they are interested in. Because they are interested they will accept, an e-mail letter is one way of doing this. So, you have their permission to be regularly in touch. One day you pitch them on something they want to pay for and then you have converted them to a paying customer. Looking at the internet and the advantage of website sales. You want to sell books from your website. Your transaction costs are lower, you are selling books at a lower unit cost, you have better customer relations, you can send them an e-mail confirming their order. Frequently you can sell more books per order. Amazon takes advantage of this because they put up what others who have bought this book are buying. And, also you can integrate more into your market. Time-Warner is a publisher but they are selling books on the internet and they are also coaching authors on how to write. so that they are using the internet to greatly expand how they are appearing in the marketplace. So having said all this you still have to compete with Amazon. When someone logs on to buy a book, you have to ask yourself, why do they go to you and not to amazon? In marketing jargon it is your long term competitive advantage. The key to this is going back to your niche, you've got to better at it than they are, people have got to feel when they log on to you it is home. They like it and are in an environment that speaks to them. The book on having websites that sell is by Ken Evoy entitled Making Sites Sell. you go to his website (sitesell.com) to buy it. He is a very interesting man. He has sold thousands upon thousands of copies of his book and, guess what, he has sold seven electronic copies for every one paper copy. There is a revolution coming around the corner very fast that I will tell you about. The key to his sales are affiliates, lots of people in the marketing business link their sites to his and their customers buy. So he has hundreds of affiliate sites. This is the electronic equivalent to traditional trade distribution. It takes time and money to set up but it can be dynamite. The best books to sell like this are books that offer solutions, how-to books. Pretty soon obviously we are heading down the path that e-books will be the way to go. A couple of weeks ago Microsoft announced that they cut a deal with Random House, Simon and Schuster and BarnesandNoble.com. For sixteen Star Trek books to be sold as e-books. Microsoft is promoting a software for pocket PC's and palmreaders. So you use the software you log onto Barnesandnoble.com and you down load your e-book. Microsoft is launching that this fall. Publishers Group West is throwing their weight firmly behind this. You are going to see a complete explosion of e-books in the next six months. You are going to find that everyone is carrying pocket readers. It is going to be THE gift for Christmas. You need to be thinking already about how you format your books. How are they going to look electronically? Writing for the electronic market is completely different style than for writing for a normal book. You are writing for people who want to see things in fewer words, more headlines, different illustrations and so on. This revolution is upon us right now. Time-Warner is launching ipublish.com and there are three areas: 1) iread which is selling electronic books 2) iwrite where they solicit manuscripts and 3) ilearn where authors and editors coach people on writing. So they are dramatically expanding their role in the marketplace. So you can see that this revolution of the internet is gathering speed. There is a survey coming out in Publishers Weekly that is somewhat startling and that is for the specialist new age stores only 15% of their stock is books. They have been forced to re configure themselves in order to survive. So they have more sidelines than ever and they operate more and more as a community center offering services and classes. So you need to be keenly aware of what is happening, the trend with the spiritually oriented store. On the Christian side they are only about 27% books, 15% bibles and that brings them up to 42% the remainder is what they refer to as "unholy hardware" and "junk for Jesus". By contrast Barnes and Noble has 80% books. You can see they are gaining the upper hand. But they need to be aware of e-books. It is very much a food chain where the larger fish are eating the smaller fish. Barnes and Noble are no longer the biggest fish in town, ebooks are coming. What is happening is that new age and Christian are kissing, pretty soon they are going to get married and have children. The Christian market is falling over themselves to get into the secular trade market and to some extent adapt their material so that it is acceptable there. The trade market is trying to get into the Christian market, but the Christian market is a very difficult market to get into. There is a merging going on. What happened was that the Christian market was operating fine in its own universe and then there was an explosion of interest in it. Some established publishers, DoubleDay and Tarcher (members of the Putnam Publishing Group), started publishing into the Christian market and they changed the way business is being done there. So they have driven a wedge into it and taken a chunk away from the traditional Christian publishers and they are forcing the Christian market to adapt and adopt to people from the trade and the trade interests that they are introducing. Originally the Christian market welcomed it but now they have mixed feelings about it and losing the business. Bill Anderson, the president of the CBA, feels that the newcomers are extending unfair discounts to the larger accounts and, low and behold, he is thinking about suing them just as the ABA did. With this explosion of interest there is a merging and this trend toward something for everyone. To wrap up, what you have is a trend toward applied spirituality. People want to make it work in their lives. To be successful in spiritual book publishing you need to take the steps that I've outlined here: Be discriminating about what you publish, be cost conscious, be pure about what you put out there and then commit to it boots and all.
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