How digital publishing is changing the category—and what stores can do

Fiction remains a strong category for Christian publishing, with new genres emerging while old favorites continue to perform well. But the category is facing changes, especially in the light of the growth of e-book sales.·We discussed some of the issues with representatives of leading Christian fiction publishers. Taking part in our conversation were:

1·Allen Arnold, senior vice president and publisher, fiction, Thomas Nelson

2·Mary Burns, vice president of publishing, Barbour Publishing

3·Don Gates, vice president of marketing, trade books, Zondervan

4·Nathan Henrion, national sales manager, ABA and digital, Baker Publishing Group

5·Karen Watson, associate publisher, Tyndale House Publishers

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CHRISTIAN RETAILING: Does fiction remain a hot category?

ALLEN ARNOLD: Yes, but also no. There was an immense amount of Christian fiction since The Shack hit big—everybody tried to dive into fiction, and everybody tried to do a lot of fiction. I think what you’ve seen is over the last two years there’s been too much Christian fiction, so stores have started to become more selective by genre, but also by publishing house, and really by author. I think that it’s a good thing in that Christian fiction is still extremely popular, but it’s not a category now that anybody can jump in and do and expect to do well. It has to be done by somebody on a team that knows what they’re doing. To me, it’s a positive shift from a glut.

KAREN WATSON: It’s a very, very strong category for us. It has been for many years. We are seeing strong backlist performance for some of our well-known authors. We are being very selective in terms of new authors that we bring in.  

DON GATES: Zondervan fiction has over the last several years made up a third of our portfolio of trade books for adults. We continue to see slight growth in that, and expect it to continue to be strong.

NATHAN HENRION: We’ve seen a lot of influx into the market, especially the Amish fiction area. There seems to be a plethora of new authors coming out in that area. I think the big names are surviving pretty well. I think what’s happening, especially in this market in particular, in the reduction of a lot of stores and a lot of shelf space, is it’s your mid-list to new authors that are really having a hard time in traditional print, finding a new audience. The big names have established themselves over long periods of time and are trusted by the retailers. ... It’s harder now for new authors to kind of break into traditional print for fiction.

MARY BURNS: We haven’t seen any let-up in sales in the fiction area. We are continuing to go through our acquisitions process, but also being pretty selective at this point because so many publishers have started entering the marketplace because of the popularity of fiction.

CHRISTIAN RETAILING: Are you seeing any new subcategories emerging?

ARNOLD: We are more diverse than ever. Sometimes categories are minimized, and what we’re seeing is, no, really every category is viable as long as it’s a great story from an author who knows how to tell a story well. There’s always a fan base for that. We’re increasing our fiction probably 15%-20% as far as title output from a few years ago. We’re adding to our staff.

HENRION: In the past 18 months what we’ve found is in nontraditional markets, some of the other genres are really taking off. I think that’s been exploited more in the digital world than in print—sci-fi, mystery, suspense—areas that don’t fit into your historical Christian fiction.

WATSON: We do see some other genres that may be struggling at the Christian retail channel doing very well for us at the e-book market. Suspense is very strong for us in that channel, probably more so than romantic suspense. Historical romance does less well for us in the e-book channel.

GATES: We’re seeing a little bit of a blending of subgenres, if you will. We’ve got several books coming out this summer that really blend some. For instance, Day of War with a new author Cliff Graham has really combined biblical fiction—telling the story of David, but doing it like the movie Gladiator—so a blending of those two. Vannetta Chapman, who has been writing Amish, is adding mystery, so we’re seeing a mix of subgenres and hearing a good response from consumers on them.

CHRISTIAN RETAILING: What has been happening with fiction in e-books?

BURNS: We’ve had really great success with e-book sales, especially after Christmas with the popularity of the Kindle. Mostly what we have done in the e-book arena has been to convert almost all of our backlist fiction, and then every new title that is released is also released as an e-book at the same time. We’re really seeing that we’re capturing some different people by offering the e-book at the same time as the print edition, and I think that’s just going to keep growing as the popularity of readers and pricing of readers come down.

WATSON: We’re having very strong success and a lot of interest in e-books. All of our books are being converted—our backlist. Fiction is our strongest category across the board for Tyndale. In fact, Tyndale is doing some digital-first options. We’re probably the first Christian publisher to do this initiative, and I guess for us it is a way to garner interest and to give new writers an opportunity. Our hope is that we can identify a great new writer who can come into the print side and eliminate, I guess on some level, a bit of that risk for retailers in that we would bring out of this program an author that has been able to prove himself already in the marketplace. On some level it should be an advantage to traditional book retailers.

GATES: Much like the others, we’ve seen many people move to e-books, especially with the purchase of digital devices during the Christmas holidays. We’re running anywhere from 20% to 40% on the week launch of a book. I think it really is helping the fiction category long term when people can, in a matter of moments, select the book and do it for less than they would have taking a trip out to the store, quite frankly. Much as 400 years ago when the printing press happened, the industry was changed because of time and money. You could get resources much quicker and at a much more affordable cost. In the same way this digital revolution is doing the same thing: taking time out of the equation, taking money out of the equation. As consumers are able to buy quicker and for less money, we should see a continued growth in the whole category, so we’re excited about it.

HENRION: I think everybody’s kind of experimenting. That’s one thing that digital allows you to do. Everyone will kind of cook up an idea and maybe think it halfway through, execute it and see what happens. It gives us the freedom to do what you aren’t allowed in print to do, because of obvious costs.  Hopefully those experiences then can be translated into help on the retail level, because, obviously, print is still a huge, huge component of everything that we all do.

ARNOLD: The thing I’m most excited about is the ability to fine-tune promotions, experimenting with bundles, three-packs of e-books. We’ve got a promotion coming up really soon where we’re giving the first half of an e-book away from one of our major authors [for] 99 cents, before you can buy the book in physical or e-book form. 

E-book is a format that can do some really neat things, but in the end it’s the story. We would never just go e-book only because if we believe in the story enough, we want it to be in all formats immediately. It’s a little bit different philosophy, not that there’s a right or wrong. To me, it just makes sense if you believe in an author enough to pay them in advance, then let’s shout it out as loud as we can across all channels, across all formats. 

Over 20% of all of the units we sell are in e-book now, and that’s only going to grow. The interesting thing is at the same time, our physical books with many of our top-selling authors continue to grow. We’re not losing readers to a format change, we’re just, I think, overall expanding the pie, which is what we all want to do.

CHRISTIAN RETAILING: What about fears that e-books will cannibalize print sales?

WATSON: We’re finding an opportunity for authors to be introduced to a wider range. One of the great things about this is that there is a lot of energy around. I don’t think that’s bad news for bookstore owners. In terms of cannibalization, I think that there is a market-wide trend in the ABA, and just across the board, away from hardcover. If there’s any place that some of those sales are being converted, it may be away from hardcover, but for us I don’t really feel that the issue is cannibalization. I think for us it’s an opportunity for new readers.

ARNOLD: We’ve actually seen less mass-market sales. People who used to buy the $7.99, $9.99 mass market, are more easily the e-book-converting reader because they already wanted a cheap, less-expensive read. The people who buy hardcovers often want that for their bookshelf. So we’ve found hardcover stay pretty consistent because of the way people use a hardcover versus the disposability of a cheaper, mass-market book.

HENRION: So far, we haven’t seen anything to resemble cannibalization at all. I think it’s something that a lot of [us] are speculating [on], in a sense that it has to happen at some point. It just seems to be the natural evolution. We expect cannibalization to happen, we just haven’t seen it yet.

CHRISTIAN RETAILING: What have you learned about changing consumer habits?

GATES: The ability, as a consumer, to make a spontaneous purchase is much, much higher with the digital formats. Whether it’s from your laptop or your iPad, or whatever device that you have, you’re able to make that instant decision to purchase, and that’s a great thing for people making choices on buying books. People can purchase right away, so that should lead to more sales. Second, I’ve heard from folks that have purchased products and quite frankly, haven’t read them yet. At some point your coffee table or your nightstand gets full of books and you stop purchasing. The reality is in the digital space, nothing really gets full. You don’t feel the impact of books that you’ve purchased that you haven’t read, and so that leads to the mind-set of buying the next thing that you’re interested in versus realizing that you haven’t read what you’ve already purchased. Both of those factors bode well for consumers purchasing more products.

BURNS: One thing that I’ve been hearing a lot of, especially in some surveys that have been coming out, is that people are reading more books [because] of the e-book reader—it’s so convenient to take around. I’ve also heard from a lot of businesses that people who haven’t read for a while, just because they didn’t care to go to a bookstore and try to pick something out, have started to really get back into reading because it is so convenient. I think overall that’s a good sign for e-books, but it’s also a good sign for print because it’s going to get people more involved and wanting to go into the bookstore and see what’s there.

ARNOLD: For impulse purchase you can’t have a better opportunity than something you can order 24/7 on any device, anywhere. What we’re seeing though on the consumer challenge is, how do you stand out in a crowded digital world? Because when you walk into a brick-and-mortar store, there are displays and there are end-aisle, face-out books. People who aren’t even looking for your book, if you have the best jacket and if you have a great title and if you have great placement, you kind of intrude into their vision and have a chance to be noticed by impulse. Well, when you’re one of a million, 2 or 3 million digital books, consumers oftentimes are going right to what they want or what they’ve heard about. How do you make a book stand out in the digital world as they would in a physical world?  

WATSON: We’re seeing a lot of interest online and getting people talking about books. Some of that is the use of a corporate Facebook page. That sort of thing has been a strong way to drive discussion back online. I think it is an opportunity and a way for Christian stores to engage in that discussion. I would hope that they would not be afraid of that conversation about what books are doing well.

HENRION: Allen hit on an excellent point, which has always been the case: It’s all about discovery. How do you make that happen and how do you plan for discovery of a title or a group of titles? It’s even more difficult in the digital space. The store owner at least filtered out some discovery for the person coming in. I think what the digital world is teaching us is that people are willing to have somebody at least filter out for them. Right now there’s just been a Wild West mentality of millions of books being thrown out, and I think a lot of consumers are getting a little bit fatigued trying to sort through some of this stuff. Coming up, stores are going to have an opportunity to become places of discovery again.

GATES: Amazon and Barnesandnoble.com and CBD have done a nice job of allowing you to discover what other people have purchased: If you liked this book, you most likely will like this book as well. Obviously it’s done in a very dynamic way with algorithms that led to people buying purchase after purchase. That’s a great way of discovering. For instance, if you’re interested in certain topics or areas in nonfiction, or certain categories or genres in fiction, you’re easily able to see what other people are reading versus if you’re reading an author with an ‘S’ name, you’ve got to know what else is fitting with that, and the book most like it could be a ‘J’ name and they’re not going to be shelved next to each other.  It’s really putting the power into the hands of consumers.

ARNOLD: It used to [be that] a book jacket would start a conversation. Now the conversation is more, “Oh, what device do you have?” The ability for a book jacket on a physical book to sell the consumer can’t be overrated. That’s something we’ve lost a little bit of as we go more digital. I hate that we’ve lost so many face-out ads.

WATSON: The first book that I read on my Kindle was one that I absolutely loved, and when I finished it, I was sad because I wanted to hold that book and I wanted to have it on my shelf. The good news is I bought it in a hardcover because I wanted to walk by that book on my shelf and recall that reading experience. I think that that is just an interesting sort of emotional response to books for book lovers that just will not go away. 

GATES: A little of this conversation reminds me of the talk in the 15th century when folks were lamenting the fact that calligraphy writers were going away and the smell of the scroll would never happen anymore, and it just wasn’t the same. And indeed it wasn’t. Over the course of a generation or two, though, things went away, and the embrace of the printing press happened, and more people read like never before because it was much more available. Much the same way, I see this as a revolution that’s happening and will continue, and generations will go and new generations will come and be reading more than ever.

CHRISTIAN RETAILING: What is the place of Christian retail stores in all of this?

HENRION: The positive aspect you can take is that the market is big and is expanding, and that there are readers out there and new readers are being discovered by this channel—readers that are in the community of Christian retail that might not have been discovered before. ... Digital is proving that there are hundreds of thousands of readers available to us than we had before.

BURNS: I think smart retailers would be looking at their Web sites, looking at something like the Google bookstore, which actually offers to partner with retailers to sell e-books online. There are opportunities for retailers to really get involved in the e-book market. With e-books being out, their being discoverable, that does help the bookstores as well. Some people may discover things online, like the author, like the book. But not everything is available as an e-book right now, and may never be at this point. There’s definitely a place for stores to capture a lot of the backlist sales.

WATSON: One of the great things about e-books is that it does create buzz, it does create word-of-mouth. Only a small percentage of the reading public has a device. I think you can never underestimate the human element and the idea of hand-selling, and I think that’s the thing that retailers need to be energized by and know that they have that opportunity to be hand-selling these books, to be supporting authors in their area—regional authors.  

GATES: We are working with them to increase the ways in which they reach out using digital communications and selling e-books directly with them. Also for finding additive or add-on purchases that can happen with books as well. So many Christian booksellers have become lifestyle stores, not just bookstores, and have gone to many ancillary products for the Christian marketplace. So how can we at Zondervan help them sell more than just books?

ARNOLD: My encouragement to specialty retailers in Christian, especially fiction, is, make sure you’re in the game. If your loyal shoppers can’t easily buy an e-book from you, then you’re not only going to lose shoppers, but you’re going to lose a huge amount of relevancy in that category in the days ahead.