Houses in the religion category run the gamut from corporate conglomerates like HarperCollins Christian Publishing to university presses like Georgetown and nonprofits like the Jewish Publication Society; from family-owned traditional publishers like Baker Publishing Group to recent startups like BroadStreet Publishing Group. Innovators in every company are hunting for new, expanded, more effective ways to do business.

Some strategies are more radical than others. The Jewish Publication Society recently handed over back office, production, and distribution to the University of Nebraska Press, which frees the editorial department to do what it does best, according to Carol Hupping, managing editor at JPS: “attracting first-class scholars and working with them to make their scholarship accessible to readers.”

PW spoke with religion publishers across the spectrum, asking how they navigate uncharted waters on the way to making books and finding readers.

Digital or Die

Any publishing model today includes a strong digital program—e-books, websites, software and apps, digital marketing and distribution, and digital product development.

HarperCollins Christian Publishing has a multifaceted digital model that includes product development, distribution, and marketing. President and CEO Mark Schoenwald says, “While e-books are the cornerstone of our digital publishing efforts, we are also heavily focused on delivering high-quality digital video, audio, and app experiences.”

Schoenwald notes that the company is developing new distribution options through relationships with Scribd and Oyster, Amazon Instant Video, YouTube, Vimeo, and others for video distribution. HCCP’s recent acquisition of Olive Tree has added mobile capabilities, and the house has developed a digital marketing infrastructure.

“Each month, we deliver millions of email, Web, social, and online advertising impressions directly to consumers to promote our books and drive discoverability and sales for our retail partners,” Schoenwald says. HCCP’s responsibility is “driving discoverability by leveraging our resources.”

According to president and CEO Carlton Garborg, BroadStreet Publishing, one of the newest houses in the category, is “developing a total digital strategy, including metadata and content distribution, that will represent a quality digital experience for BroadStreet e-books through all [our] key distribution partners worldwide.”

As BroadStreet enters the publishing arena, Garborg and staff are prepared to step into the digital mainstream. “Digital is a growing market with minimal overhead and production costs. Digital sales are plus revenue,” he says. “Innovations allow more readers to interact and respond to content, which can create more exposure to our print books, and help authors build their platforms or use their existing platforms to reach their fans with content in an immediate way.”

World Wisdom Inc. and its children’s and teen imprint, Wisdom Tales Press, have been in the e-book market for a decade as of 2014. “The introduction of digital editions is an extremely useful innovation,” says Stephen Williams, v-p of production. The 2012 launch of the children’s book imprint, Wisdom Tales, has especially benefited from digital technology as it publishes books to facilitate cross-cultural understanding and awareness. “As an independent publishing house, we are always looking for that competitive edge to attract the best authors and illustrators,” Williams says. “Early adoption of new and impressive technology is just one way we can achieve that.”

For its part, JPS is still looking for a way to put its most popular Bible, the JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh, into e-book form. “Vendors can’t seem to figure out how to have the two languages sit side-by-side across the screen,” Hupping says. “Hebrew, because it reads right to left, is the big challenge.”

The Digital Sales Outlook

Publishers generally agree that the past several years have seen steady growth in e-book sales, but that growth is leveling off. “We have settled into a consistent, monthly percentage over the past 12 months after three years of rapid growth,” says Schoenwald.

Dave Lewis, executive v-p of sales and marketing at Baker Publishing Group, says that the next few years look fairly stable, with “steady, modest growth in e-book revenue,” while Richard Brown, director of Georgetown University Press, predicts that e-books will continue to grow as a percentage of overall sales, though “we’ve already seen that this growth is slowing down.”

Fred Appel, executive editor at Princeton University Press, says e-books account for 13%–15% of annual revenue, and “we devote considerable resources to our e-book program.” Williams at Wisdom Tales adds, “Whilst e-book sales have become an increasingly important revenue stream, they have not supplanted the sales of print.” He calls Wisdom Tales’ digital editions “a very useful secondary source of revenue.”

Digital book sales have grown to more than 25% of total revenue for Baker, Lewis says, and include standard e-books, PDF-formatted books, and embedded e-books that are tabbed. “We are open to working in any other digital format that may gain a measurable share of the digital market,” Lewis says. “Our goal is to make our books available in formats the market chooses to read.”

Digital Experiments

Baker Publishing Group’s e-books remain the biggest portion of its digital investment. “We continue to explore and experiment with promotional pricing, promotional time frames, e-book-only publishing, e-book-first publishing, e-book-only prequels, and unique Web support of a specific book and author,” Lewis says. “We are hoping to see and think of other things to test as well. All of these ideas can work well, but they don’t always. We are trying to understand why.”

HCCP is making e-book inroads with digital-first or digital-only content in fiction, including serial novellas released first as digital and moving to print collections later, digital collections of multivolume print series, and interstitials (digital novellas releasing between books in a print series).

“These innovations are intended to get content to readers more quickly than is possible with traditional, print-only publishing,” Schoenwald says. “At the same time, we’re using these innovations to build content that will release as print editions.”

BroadStreet is considering a direct-to-digital platform for fiction. Georgetown is moving into a “born-digital model with print on demand,” and selling bundled print and e-books, Brown says. The house is also encouraging teachers and reviewers to use digital editions for exam and review, though it hasn’t seen much success.

Digital publishing offers yet another option that wasn’t feasible before. Princeton UP has mined its backlist and is “chunking”—breaking up book content into shorter pieces—with its Princeton Shorts digital-only line, inaugurated in 2012. GUP launched its own Georgetown Digital Shorts—works between 10,000 and 40,000 words—in 2013. The first title from the Georgetown line was Charles Curran’s Catholic Social Teaching and Pope Benedict XVI (Jan.).

Brown says, “We don’t believe that the traditional business model of simply selling long-form books, whether print or digital, to libraries, scholars, students, and the trade is sustainable for a scholarly press.” He adds, “In many ways the digital revolution has been a blessing because it has forced university presses to articulate their value proposition and justify why they should exist. That’s a healthy exercise, and it’s ongoing.”

Wisdom Publications also has stepped into the digital age and is exploring what it offers (it, too, is exploring chunking). Publisher and CEO Timothy McNeill says, “We are embracing the innovations as opportunities to connect our audience with Buddhist and mindfulness content on a variety of new platforms. For over two millennia, Buddhism has adapted to meet the changing conditions of the time and place. From woodblock prints to live streaming webcasts, Buddhism has thrived on innovation.”

Nurturing Reader Relationships

Every publisher today knows the importance of building relationships with readers, which also has been made easier than ever by the digital revolution. Wisdom is cultivating collaborative relationships with Buddhist communities, such as dharma centers, via social media and website links. “Our audience dwells on the Internet, and digital availability provides unparalleled access to our titles,” McNeill says. “Physical barriers to discoverability of niche titles have evaporated.”

For HCCP’s nonfiction titles, the company is using digital technology to give readers access to authors through online chats and with other marketing tools, as well as to align with an author’s existing platform as a partner on promotions.

When it comes to Bibles, HCCP is making progress, thanks to innovations via Olive Tree (see “Software Takes Center Stage in Multiplatform Plans,” in this issue), but “print still dominates this area of the business because of the emotional factor and the practical advantages that ink and paper still provide,” Schoenwald says. “It will take longer to transition consumers to digital in this area, even though it has the most potential for innovation.”

Another innovation on the horizon is subscription services. Garborg of BroadStreet says that although e-book sales continue to grow, especially in fiction and trade books, “it looks like much of the industry will move to a subscription model such as Scribd. We see a lot of parallels between the music industry and trade books in this regard. The growth of services like Spotify and Pandora seems to point to similar models for the book business.”

McNeill agrees, forecasting increased presentation of its content via databases and subscription services. He sees e-book sales continuing to grow, and “enhanced multimedia within the package will raise the experience and also the barrier to competitive entry.” Technology, he says, “is offering us opportunities for new revenue sources.”

Amazon—Friend or Foe?

Online book sales remain firmly entrenched in Amazon despite publishers forming relationships with Logos, Olive Tree, and retail partners such as Barnes & Noble and Walmart. Some publishers sell directly to consumers, but they admit numbers are small. “Why would someone buy from our website when they are used to buying from Amazon?” asks Brown of GUP. “That said, we think it’s important to have some control over online sales.”

Lewis at Baker calls Amazon “our biggest customer, and they sell a lot of books, both print and digital, and help us find new readers for our authors. There are more books available to purchase easily and quickly than ever before thanks to Amazon. As a reader and a publisher, we have to admire that.”

Wisdom Publications’ McNeill says, “We are not looking to compete with Amazon on price, but we do cultivate a direct relationship with our customers. At times we present special offers, but our primary objective is awareness of our offerings.”

Garborg adds, “Amazon is only one of many key partnerships in the industry, and our goal is to partner and develop unique relationships with them all.”

What’s a Website For?

While e-books have become revenue producers and marketing tools in every publisher’s arsenal, some are actively moving beyond simply releasing every book in print and digital. Websites are becoming places to view educational material, listen to portions of Scripture, meet authors and connect with fellow readers, and receive free content. Publishers are developing apps that offer depth and breadth to content, as well as launching new websites to support specific markets.

Wisdom Publications has hundreds of pages of free content on its website, “both to create a browsing experience similar to encountering a book in a store, but also as an end in itself to be recognized as an information resource,” McNeill says.

Wisdom is also looking at apps as a vehicle for translated content from works old and new. “The option to present two languages side by side and other features makes this an attractive way to present that material,” McNeill says.

JPS, whose mission is to enhance Jewish literacy, uses its website to offer downloadable study and discussion guides for several of its major reference titles, such as Outside the Bible: Ancient Jewish Writings Related to Scripture. The website also allows guests to listen to and read the weekly portion of the Torah, and offers complete videos of past JPS events cosponsored with the Skirball Center for Adult Jewish Learning at Temple Emanu-El in New York City.

“These videos are unique opportunities for learning with world-renowned scholars,” Hupping says. “We also have audio versions of our Torah, Tanakh, and the individual books of the Bible available from our website, iTunes, Audible, and soon from libraries via Findaway World.”

HCCP uses its website to lead readers to its other websites that provide unique content. FaithGateway.com offers Author Chat, connecting readers to “live chats” with authors, and virtual book clubs, in which authors and viewers study a book together for six weeks. “The informal, home-to-home live connection with readers is quite powerful,” Schoenwald says.

BibleGateway.com connects readers searching for a Bible passage in a particular translation, while ZondervanAcademic.com will launch soon to support professional and academic markets. The Textbook Plus site (textbookplus.zondervan.com) allows educators to test and sample content. “To meet consumers’ needs, we must create an efficient process to help them find exactly what they are searching for,” Schoenwald says.

Georgetown has long used IXL, an educational website developer, to create sites to accompany textbooks that include audio and video content, written exercises, and games (as have other scholarly publishers). However, although GUP sells digital books on its website, “it remains a marketing tool, first and foremost,” Brown says. “We’ll put more and more content there in the hopes of drawing teachers and readers, but that’s about marketing.” (To celebrate its 50th anniversary, GUP is offering books via its website at a 50% discount for the Georgetown community, something Brown calls merely “a tactic.”)

In fact, most publishers—even if they are selling direct to consumers— still see their websites as marketing tools instead of sales tools. Lewis at Baker says, “We have concentrated on creating a site that provides robust information about our books and our authors. We see it as a reference for any account, media, or reader who wants to find additional information about those titles or authors.”

BroadStreet doesn’t sell books to consumers, but instead directs them to key retail partners like Barnes & Noble, Walmart, Logos, and Olive Tree for Bible and reference books, as well as Amazon. “We are working to partner with all key markets and distributors equally,” Garborg says.

For HCCP, digital resources are used in connection with traditional channels as part of an overall approach, not a separate strategy, and several of its websites are e-commerce-enabled. While revenue is small, the sites allow the company to build a robust consumer platform, allowing real-time testing of marketing tactics to learn what produces results.

Far from stealing sales from stores, Schoenwald says, “we now have case studies that demonstrate how our digital marketing is creating a halo effect for our retail accounts and actually driving sales in their stores for specific authors and titles.”

To App or Not to App?

Some publishers are hip-deep in apps, while others are hesitant. BroadStreet is exploring the idea. “We’re still weighing up the costs of doing it ourselves versus joining already established platforms,” Garborg says. “BroadStreet isn’t looking to reinvent the wheel, but we are looking to maximize efficiencies in the digital, Web, and social space.”

Others have no immediate plans to develop apps. “We are watching and listening to what others are doing with apps,” Lewis says. “So far, we are happy to not have invested any significant time or money into apps.”

Steve Laube, who recently purchased Marcher Lord Press and rebranded it Enclave Publishing, has explored apps, but says, “An app devoted to one book or to a publishing company is an expensive pursuit of something few readers want. Unless there is a value-added component to the app, it competes with existing reader apps and software.”

University presses have unique responses to the app dilemma, in part because much of their audience looks for educational resources whether in religion or secular venues. Princeton UP recently released an app based on the renowned Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World. First published in an oversized cloth edition in 2000, both the atlas’s editor, ancient historian Richard Talbert, and PUP wanted to make it available digitally.

The advent of tablet computers made this possible. The app uses pinch-and-zoom technology, a searchable database of place names, and overlays of map keys, among other features. “The app, developed in conjunction with 100Robots, is a new and even fun way to engage with these exquisite maps,” says Appel of PUP. “Best of all, it makes the atlas available at a price [$19.95] that puts it within reach of students and amateur map and ancient world enthusiasts alike.”

HCCP’s Schoenwald says the company is using apps to stay relevant with readers beyond the pages of books or their e-readers, not to mention helping facilitate longevity for such brands as Jesus Calling, Bible Gateway, and Devotionals Daily. Outside distribution partnerships “help us discover new channels and methods to showcase our authors’ works and allow us to concentrate on content development,” he says. “Our focus with apps continues to be to provide added value to a core product.”

GUP is pushing hard to provide tools for teachers and students, including apps, along with enhanced e-books, websites to accompany textbooks, and platforms that encourage collaboration. “We’re heading toward more interactive and collaborative learning,” Brown says. “Publishers need to learn, right now, how to tap into that evolution. Teaching and learning are changing dramatically. Publishing must, too.”

The Consumer Cost of Enhancement

A few years ago, there was lots of buzz about enhanced e-books, though much of that excitement has died down because of production costs. Still, World Wisdom has begun releasing enhanced e-books with animation and audio elements—the children’s picture book Angels by Alexis York Lumbard was the first this year—allowing “our authors and illustrators that extra level of creativity to bring each project to life in a new and unusual way,” says production v-p Williams.

Advancing technology in the children’s book market is a key part of the discussion at Wisdom Tales. The publisher has introduced animated and audio elements into children’s picture e-books; Williams says such additions could be game changers. However, he adds, the high cost of hardware (i.e., tablets, laptops) may affect consumer demand.

“Providing a toddler with an expensive e-reader is not a step that most parents are willing to take. In addition, research about the long-term effects of digital reading and how children interact with digital mediums is still coming in,” Williams says. “What is clear is that children are becoming more comfortable with technology at an earlier age than ever before. As publishers, we have to be willing to adapt our processes to meet the expectations and demands of the marketplace.”

Evolving Business Strategies

Individual houses are adapting to the uncharted seas of publishing with approaches and solutions as unique as each house. For literary agent Steve Laube, that meant purchasing and renaming a company, though Enclave Publishing isn’t part of the Steve Laube Agency.

“I needed to rebrand the original company to reflect the new acquisitions, new initiatives, and new distribution effort,” Laube says. “Enclave just launched a new website and will have five new titles out in a couple of months.”

Other literary agencies have also launched in-house publishing arms, including MacGregor Literary and Alive Communications. MacGregor Literary monitors two websites—dustytrailbooks.com and forgetmenotromances.com—that offer authors a place to republish out-of-print books. Alive Communications launched Bondfire Books in 2012.

Acquisitions as a strategy, while certainly not new, may be gathering steam in religion. Several publishing houses recently have acquired companies that allow them to expand their content and reach. “HarperCollins is extremely supportive of our business and has encouraged us to continue to aggressively seek those acquisition opportunities that enhance our current model or allow for expansion,” Schoenwald says. “However, we will remain steadfast and focused on what we do best, which is publishing Christian content.”

Baker’s acquisition this year of Regal’s front and backlist titles, which will be absorbed into existing BPG divisions, means new books and new author relationships that lead, hopefully, to new readers. “To market and sell books well, you need to understand and serve many unique market segments,” Lewis says. “Regal titles will help us to learn a few more of these unique market segments. Publishing well is about understanding and serving niches.”

Princeton UP isn’t acquiring new houses, but is instead tapping into its vast out-of-print backlist. The Princeton Legacy Library debuted in July, making PUP’s backlist titles available digitally through Ingram Content Group in both POD editions and as e-books through library aggregators. The first batch featured over 1,200 titles, with PLL eventually including more than 3,000 titles by 2016.

“We felt we could fulfill our scholarly mission by making high-quality digital editions of these books available once again,” Appel says. “Over the past few years, we have seen a significant increase in demand for our out-of-print books.”

Produced using the latest POD technology, the paperback editions “preserve the original texts of these important books and present them in durable and affordable volumes for new generations of readers,” Appel says. All books will be available digitally for libraries and institutions by the 2016 conversion, but e-book versions won’t be available via retailers until demand warrants.

And Wisdom Tales has found a unique niche with “exceptional multicultural books that will spark the imagination, encourage development of good character, and help facilitate cross-cultural understanding,” Williams says. “As a company, we celebrate diversity and believe children can learn about tolerance and respect at a young age.”

Wisdom Tales offers wide variety, including a story of conflict resolution in medieval Spain, an American Indian coming-of-age story, and the tale of a central figure in the Jain religion who influenced Mahatma Gandhi. The books appeal to parents, teachers, and librarians, and “we spend a great deal of time and effort reaching out to those librarians who want to fill gaps in their collections” via the blogosphere, catalogues, email campaigns, and mailings, Williams says.

Same Destination, Different Routes

With all the convulsions and conundrums facing the industry, publishers continue to strive to get good content to the right readers in the most creative and desirable ways.

Since JPS shed distribution and production, the organization has been better able to focus on content and expand its publication list, though, Hupping says, “we focus on quality over quantity.” Several Bible commentaries are in development, along with an untitled 10-volume series on core Jewish topics.

For big houses such as HCCP, the responsibility to authors and retailers to be a leader and innovator to drive sales growth is clear, and the drive to find success quickly is a must. “The key is to be nimble and focus on execution,” Schoenwald says. “How we package content, how we market content and how we distribute content may change over time, but our mission never changes: we inspire the world by meeting the needs of people with content that promotes biblical principles and honors Jesus Christ.”

For smaller houses, innovations have made life a little easier. “The role of a publisher has always been to facilitate the exchange of materials and ideas from authors and illustrators to the public,” Williams says. “As technology continues to change to reduce the cost of producing and marketing projects, we think that niche publishing is going to become ever more viable as a business model.”

Adaptation is the name of the game, according to Laube. “A publisher has always been a business entity that pursues the publication and distribution of content that readers are willing to pay for. The distribution options are merely a result of publishers adapting to technological advances,” he says. “Fortunately, many publishers are learning to respond to new developments much faster than in years past.”

Traditional markets remain, but new ones emerge routinely. Baker’s Lewis says, “Even a casual student of history can name many industries that have gone through tremendous change in short periods of time: transportation, music, publishing, information, communication, and so on. Complaining about change and the agents of change has never stopped the change from progressing. We publishers still make books better than most writers can without us.”

Markets will be different in 20 years, and successful businesses today may not be successful tomorrow. “Adapting is key,” Lewis says. “While you keep serving the traditional market, explore and test how best to enter and succeed in the new one.”

“Publishers will continue to play a significant role as curators of quality content,” says McNeill of Wisdom Publications. “This role is all the more critical in nonfiction publishing. Ignorance is not bliss.” As Brown of GUP confirms, “The industry is in a state of perpetual transition, and we need to adapt or prepare to die.”

Ann Byle is a freelance writer based in Michigan who contributes frequently to PW.