| Making the most of the backlist |
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| Written by Production |
| Tuesday, 04 May 2010 04:21 PM America/New_York |
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Backlist titles remain an important focus for Christian publishers and retailers alike. Christian Retailing News Editor Eric Tiansay spoke with representatives of three leading suppliers about the challenges and opportunities:
David Horton Bethany House Publishers a division of Baker Publishing Group
John Johnson National Sales Director
Ken Petersen Vice President
Read excerpts of their conversation here, and listen in on the complete discussion atwww.christianretailing.com/index.php/features/retailers-roundtable.
Fresh faces for classics can reach a new audience
With brand-new titles being sold in diverse channels, including airport bookstores, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and digital downloads on Kindle and iPad, backlist has become a bigger focus for Christian retail.
Christian Retailing: How do you decide which backlist titles to revisit?
Johnson: They are obviously books that have stood the test of time, and in most cases what we have seen as we look at a backlist title that is still in the marketplace, generally the biggest opportunity is regaining distribution. We have lost distribution over time. It has fallen off for whatever reason, and generally repackaging from a sales perspective has given us another opportunity to reintroduce that product into the market, tied into an existing backlist or a frontlist release if that’s the case. But it gives it new life, not only from the standpoint of a new face on the shelf and new consumer appeal, but also it gives us a second opportunity to go back and regain distribution that may have declined over the years.
Horton: It is just about keeping things looking more current. A lot of times the content of a book is perfectly suitable for years and years, but occasionally books begin to look tired because tastes change and trends change, and people are interested in looking at new kinds of things.
Petersen: Also, quite frankly, it gives us a chance to fix our mistakes. Sometimes we come out with a cover, and after the fact we say, “Oh well, this didn’t quite get that right,” or we wish we had done this or we wish we had done that. So when we repackage something and reissue it as new backlist, it gives us a chance to re-address those things and re-strategize a particular book and a message for the marketplace.
Johnson: We took a series of Francine Rivers, a best-selling author—a series of novellas—and put them all together in one single book, and it have been a phenomenal success (last) fall. In another case, we took an older book that was a great missionary story, In the Presence of My Enemies, and there has been some new things happening in the past four or five years since the book first released. (The author) was able to go back and write another chapter that really updates the book.
Horton: It’s encouraging to authors to realize that the work, that all of the hours and days and weeks and sometimes years, they have put into writing a book is not exhausted after the initial sales. In some cases, you have books that sell pretty well coming out of the gate, but later on there are things that happen in the author’s ministry or the author’s promotion or the opportunities that the author has for speaking that weren’t in existence when the book was first published. So re-doing a book and refreshing it as new backlist offers an opportunity to pick up on later successes that an author might have (had).
Johnson: This is an area where getting retailers feedback can be very helpful to what’s working for them, what is not working for them, what are they hearing from their customers about how the book looks. Does the book look like what it is? We try to get retailers to give us feedback on things like covers or the format.
CR: What can retailers do to capitalize when publishers put new faces on old titles?
Horton: The first thing is, let’s get distribution back and optimally give it a face-out or a display … or if (there are) other author books around it, promote them on an endcap. A table placement is a great opportunity. The beauty of some of the key backlists—especially some of the older titles, the classics— is that there is a whole new generational opportunity when we revitalize these packages. Most of the backlist that we have repackaged over the last three or four years have actually, at the end of the year, been in our top third of book sales. So they are really encouraging, not just for the publisher, but I think it is a retailer opportunity.
Petersen: Sometimes, on the publisher side and on the retailer side, we become a little jaded because we assume that our consumers and book buyers are just like us—they are well aware of all of the authors and all of the books that the author published before. The fact is there are always new faces and new readers coming into the marketplace, especially in the Christian marketplace, as so many book buyers are really new church members, people coming into churches for the first time. They are discovering authors for the very first time, and so an author could be publishing out there for a decade or more and have a number of books on backlist that some readers—and maybe many readers—have never discovered before. So a freshened backlist title might, if properly displayed, really attract a new readership. Horton: This is at the core of what CBA is in the marketplace. If we have new readers coming into the marketplace, why not get them into a CBA store? What better way to do it than with some of these classic backlist titles?
Johnson: It is great to be able to show somebody a book that looks like it belongs in the current era, that it’s not just a tired old book. Of our best-selling books, some are classics that we have repackaged that had slipped off our best-seller list. Putting them together in a new package has given this book a new presence and really boosted the sales.
CR: What about pricing for backlist titles?
Petersen: As a rule of thumb, costs of publishing never really seem to go down, and so when we are redoing a backlist title, we are looking at increased costs across the board. The other challenge there is that although we are optimistic about what a backlist title will do, we’re not likely to be estimating the same initial sales that it would have gotten when it was first released, so we are looking at shorter print runs up front, and those shorter print runs end up costing us more per unit. So there are some significant issues that way, to some degree. We have to price things accordingly.
Johnson: We also need to look at the marketplace, what similar titles (there are). If this is part of an author’s backlist and there are similar titles that he/she has also written, we may choose to line-price to make sure there is a continuity in the price for promotion’s sake. Pricing is probably born out as much by the market as anything else.
Horton: John mentioned a series of books that were all collected into one volume, and you can do different things with pricing there, where people are being presented with a value package. … There, you may get some kind of consumer value that they wouldn’t get otherwise. You can see a real price advantage for the retailer. But very often, we are really talking about significantly increased costs. You invest a fair amount of money in a new cover and print costs are not going down. As Ken said, you typically print fewer of a backlist book than you do of a brand-new book.
Petersen: One thing we do a lot of at WaterBrook Multnomah falls under the category of added value. When we repackage a book, we are looking for other material that may have been produced separately from the main book since it was first published. It might be some online material, it might be a study guide. Hopefully what we land on is a package that gives added value at a reasonable price for the buyer.
CR: What current repackaging plans do you have?
Johnson: Our “Left Behind” series is a short-term repackaging. It’s not meant to be a permanent repackage. There are 12 books in the original series, and in January, March, June and September, we will have omnibus versions, hoping to have all four books out by Christmas. That is an opportunity to combine three books into a large volume and give a significant price point of $19.99 on a softcover version.
Petersen: With Bruce Wilkinson, we have a big new book, You Were Born for This, out in the marketplace right now, and we have repackaged a number of his backlist titles. Of course, the classic, The Prayer of Jabez, but also The Secrets of the Vine, A Life God Rewards and The Dream Giver. Those are just out and in stores now. We are constantly thinking of doing that on our top authors, and we will be looking at that in 2010 as well.
Horton: We try to be sensitive to the fact that retailers can only handle so much new stuff. It is possible to overdo the repackaging thing, and I know I have heard from retailers in the past who get concerned when people are just sort of willy-nilly slapping new covers on old products and bringing them out again. But there are some things that I think they really welcome being dressed up a bit. We are bringing out this year a classic series of Janet Oke, “Seasons of the Heart,” one of her all-time favorite series with really dressed-up covers, and I think those will be welcomed in the CBA market. |
Stores and suppliers say they are giving more marketing and promotional emphasis to their backlist titles, blogging about them, pairing an author’s new and older titles on displays, and watching news and cultural trends closely in order to promote books on popular topics.