It's bad out there in religion publishing. Sales are dropping; jobs are evaporating. That's the downside of the story, and it's familiar. But what about the upside? What works in this category right now? How are religion publishers changing their sales and marketing strategies to adapt to the current economy and successfully get books out of the gate? Some are having success with new strategies.

Making Face Time in Nontraditional Marketplaces

At Jewish Lights, publisher Stuart Matlins says that the dwindling number of bookstores has led the Vermont-based company to seek new ways to get books some face time. “We are trying to overcome the absence of books on the shelf for people to see by getting out to more consumer and user events so they know the books exist and can go to bookstores to order them,” Matlins says. That took Jewish Lights and its interfaith imprint SkyLight Paths to a Florida conference for chaplains and, for the first time, to the Unitarian-Universalist convention in Salt Lake City last month. “We are reaching out more directly to the consumers to build awareness,” Matlins says. After the chaplaincy conference, SkyLight Paths saw an uptick in orders for Disaster Spiritual Careby Stephen B. Roberts and Willard W. C. Ashley (2008) and Care Sharing by Marty Richards (2008). The company is also looking for more nontraditional book outlets and new marketplaces for their books. For example, for the August release of Beading: The Creative Spirit by Wendy Ellsworth, sales reps made cold calls to bead stores; for The Art of War: Spirituality for Conflict by Sun Tzu and Thomas Huynh (2008), they got the book a slot in the History Channel's online store. And for Recovery: The Sacred Art by Rami Shapiro (Feb.) sales reps marketed directly to recovery centers.

Jewish Lights is also encouraging authors to take a more active role in marketing their own books. Every author is asked to establish a blog based on their book's subject, to create their own Facebook pages and to Twitter about the book. If they have a built-in audience or a network of readers or other consumers, they are asked to exploit that to the fullest. Matlins says The Modern Men's Torah Commentary (Mar.) is off to a strong start largely because its editor, Jeffrey Salkin, took the initiative in organizing his own speaking tour among synagogues and Jewish centers. “We are focusing more on training our authors to support their own work,” Matlins says. “Part of it is encouraging them to do the tried and true but unsexy stuff, like remember to include their new books in their bios or Web sites,” he says. “You can't buy something if you don't know it exists.”

Customizing Campaigns

At HarperOne, sales and marketing teams are keeping the best of traditional marketing while also using more nontraditional marketing. They assess each book and its author for what marketing recipe will best appeal to consumers. “You can't be cookie cutter in our business anymore,” says Claudia Boutote, v-p and associate publisher. “Every campaign has to be customized to who the audience is and how we are best going to reach them.” Two cases in point: Jesus Interrupted by Bart Ehrman (Mar.) and Unfinished Business by James Van Praagh (May).

For Ehrman, sales and marketing relied heavily on traditional marketing outlets, especially radio and television appearances. Boutote credits two particular appearances, one on National Public Radio's Fresh Air and another on Comedy Central's The Colbert Report, for paying high dividends. HarperOne also paid for NPR sponsorship in half a dozen markets and did an eight-city book tour. The result: seven weeks and counting on the bestseller list. “The traditional media campaign worked well for this book,” Boutote says. “So it can still work.” But that didn't preclude using nontraditional media as well. The publisher created a video of Ehrman discussing the book and posted it on a variety of Web sites, including YouTube and MySpace.

Traditional marketing worked well for Van Praagh, too, but here HarperOne added a larger dash of nontraditional marketing. Van Praagh, a psychic, has large followings on Facebook and Twitter. To take advantage of that as a resource, Van Praagh's Web site signed up people to receive 140-character psychic readings as tweets. The publisher and author also made good use of Van Praagh's network of friends and clients, including celebrities with Web sites and fan databases of their own. For example, Shirley MacLaine lent Van Praagh her sizable database for e-blasts about the book. The combination landed Van Praagh on the bestseller list. HarperOne will explore more Twitter marketing opportunities with Stephen Prothero's The Great Religions (2010), having him create 140-character “mini-course” segments on the world's major faith groups. “It's just been building,” Boutote says of Twitter. “It's one of the innovations authors and publishers are using to build social awareness about a book.”

Working the Core

At Abingdon Press, the publishing imprint of the United Methodist Church, marketing remains focused on its core audience of Protestant churches and church leaders while relying more heavily on author networking and creativity to sell books. One innovation at Abingdon is its Fast Track Publishing Team. This group taps the news, popular culture and other current events to identify consumer needs and then rapidly develops products to answer those needs. As the economy crumbled last fall, this team worked with Adam Hamilton, a United Methodist pastor, to develop Enough: Discovering Joy Through Simplicity and Generosity (Feb.), a book based on a sermon series he delivered last fall. To market it, Abingdon looked first to its UMC networks of churches and leaders as well as the author's own network and sent out promotional materials and e-mail blasts. What was supposed to be a six-month supply of the book was gone in four weeks. The same tactics are in play for Upside Living in a Downside Economy by Michael Slaughter (May), with each attendee at a UMC leadership conference in May presented with promotional materials. “When you bring something to market that fast, marketing it is challenging,” says v-p Tammy Gaines. “We marketed to where we know people who are interested in him will be.”

Another Abingdon success has been Five Practices of Fruitful Congregation by Robert Schnase. The book came out in 2007, but Gaines credits the online marketing of some church leadership materials based on the book as driving its continued high sales. “We worked through a series of six themed e-mails to book buyers, invited them to a Web site with new previews and excerpts each week,” Gaines says. “We shared the 'getting started' section free online and sent full sets of the new resources to each U.S. United Methodist bishop's office.” The result, Cultivating Fruitfulness (2008), one of the leadership materials, became a house bestseller. “It has sold in the tens of thousands,” Gaines says. “It surprised us.”

Another surprise came in the success of author-based marketing for the house's new Christian fiction line, which launches this summer. Thanks to author blog tours (guest appearances or scheduled features on other people's blogs); author-created videos, posted on the Abingdon Web site; and author participation on Facebook, Twitter and other new media, the house has sold more pre-pub copies than it expected to sell in the line's first year. “It is causing us to readjust our thinking as to what we have to spend on marketing these in the future,” Gaines says. “We hired an outside public relations firm to launch the initial list, and we realize we don't need that anymore. Through our own Web site and through the author's network, there is just a lot that you can do in-house.”

Building Relationships

At Baker Publishing Group, some very low-tech tools have led to some very high successes in the urban market, which at Baker means the African-American market. The Someday List by Stacy Hawkins Adams (Jan.) hit #5 on Essence magazine's paperback fiction bestsellers list for June, the first fiction title Baker has had on that list. And Unsigned Hype, a debut YA novel by Booker T. Mattison (July) has received favorable reviews from PW, Black Beat and African American Family magazines. In May, Baker received the Christian Book Publisher of the Year Award from the African-American Pavilion at BookExpo America.

Nathan Henrion, national accounts manager at Baker, says much of the success has to do with building relationships in the African-American bookselling and book-buying communities—and doing it the old-fashioned way. “This is a market that is really devoted to word of mouth, so we find what really works is getting the authors as much face time as possible,” he says. “It's getting the author out in front of people.” Baker has arranged for its authors to attend African-American book fairs and festivals in Harlem, in New York City; Atlanta; Baltimore; Philadelphia; and Washington, D.C. The emphasis on face time also means Baker arranges to send authors to African-American book club meetings of as few as 10 to 20 people. “Book clubs are much more of a social event in that community,” Henrion says. “And many of the book club members post their reviews online” at Amazon and on personal blogs.

Henrion says much of what Baker does in the urban market relies on relationship building with African-American bookstores as well. These stores are indies; many are small; and they often get overlooked as publishers chase the chain and big box accounts. But he credits the success of The Sunday List to years of talking to book buyers at African-American indies, listening to their needs and even getting their feedback on book covers. “They might only take two or four copies, but these are the people who begin the word of mouth on your book,” he says. Many of these stores are also the ones that report to African-American bestseller lists, like the one in Essence magazine, making the relationship with them even more important. “That's the boots-on-the-ground marketing strategy. You stay in contact with them, you let them invest in the process, so when the book comes out they feel like they have contributed.”

Henrion also credits Baker's success in this market to the dedication of its authors. Booker T. Mattison has taken to selling his books by hand on Saturdays in Harlem, Henrion says, and a friend of the author's has organized teams of kids to promote the book outside urban bookstores. “How do you put that into a marketing plan?” Henrion asks. “They are so invested in the books they have written, they are just out there pushing them because they really believe it is going to change their readers' lives. They don't want to rely on someone else to sell it for them. They are out there making their own market.” Working with authors who are that pumped about their books “makes you energized again.”

Acquiring, Publishing Across Platforms

Brand building and other basics are as important to a book's success in this economy as ever. So says Byron Williamson, former president of Word Publishing and now president and CEO of Worthy Media, a company that acquires Christian media and publishes across multiple platforms, something that Williamson sees as contributing to creating strong brand recognition and customer loyalty. “It builds the author as a brand and the brand as a single title,” he says. Currently in Worthy's works for August publication is a video curriculum based on Don Piper's bestselling 90 Minutes in Heaven (Revell, 2004), and Williamson is working on acquiring and developing another half dozen titles, he says. Worthy's curricula will be published digitally, in multiple formats, including MP3 and PDF downloads. That kind of digital formatting can contribute to a title's success as it reaches a tech-savvy market that may not be familiar with the traditional format of a title.

Leveraging Institutions

Ave Maria Press, a Catholic publisher, seldom holds bookstore events or sponsors traditional book tours. Rather, it targets its core audience—Catholic readers—through direct mail to the institutional church market. The house mails catalogues to 19,000 Catholic parishes in the U.S. and works with its distributors in Canada, the U.K., Australia and New Zealand to reach parishes there. It also works closely with authors to schedule speaking engagements at churches or church-sponsored events. “Very few of our promotional events take place in bookstores,” says Tom Grady, Ave Maria's publisher. “They're almost all in parishes, retreat centers and schools, and I don't expect that to change.” The strategy worked well for Joyce Rupp's Open the Door (2008). Rupp, a 20-year veteran with Ave Maria, conducts workshops and retreats in Catholic communities and has a large following. Ave Maria works with Rupp to sell her books at all of her scheduled events. “This is a book that came out during one of the bleakest publishing periods I can remember,” Grady says. “We've managed to sell 25,000 copies to date, and we've reprinted it three times.”

As for social media, Ave Maria finds Facebook a good resource, but prefers to use Web sites, blogs or other forms of new media the author has created and built. “We find it's more effective if the author him- or herself has actually created the community,” Grady says. In February 2010, Ave Maria will publish a book by Lisa Hendey, the creator of CatholicMom.com, a popular parenting blog, Web site and podcast that logged three million hits this past April. Ave Maria will work with Hendey to provide content from the book on her site, to spread promotional material and drive traffic to bookstores. “Lisa is an exceptionally savvy user of new media, and she has basically created an audience of people who are just waiting for her book to appear,” Grady says.

Going Viral

For The Noticer by Andy Andrews (Apr.), Thomas Nelson's marketing staff also relied on a mix of traditional and nontraditional schemes in orchestrating a multitiered Web-based campaign. First, through its Thomas Nelson Book Review Bloggers program, the house offered a free advance copy in exchange for a 300-word review to be posted by a blogger on his or her site and on a commercial site. They asked participants to hold their reviews until April 27, just before the book hit the stores. The result was a blitz of consumer-generated publicity. “It made a huge impression on the Web,” says Stephanie Newton, a senior Nelson publicist, who counted more than 450 individual reviews of the book. “A lot of people repost their friends' blogs, so the number was much larger.” Next, Nelson employed an outside firm to create www.thenoticerproject.com, a Web-based, interactive site where consumers can “notice” five important people in their lives. “It went viral,” Newton says. “There was a box people could check to let people know they had been listed, and then they would send it to other people. It was on Facebook and Andy talked about it in interviews and attracted more people to the project.” Nelson also relied on CEO Michael Hyatt to promote the book through tweets and blog entries, one of which offered to send each purchaser of the book a free digital and audio copy as well. “That was a strong component for us because many people saw this offer online and purchased the book,” Newton says.

The result of all this was a sustained presence on bestseller lists. Newton says more than 100,000 copies of the book have shipped. Newton described the return on Nelson's investment in this aspect of The Noticer's marketing as “tenfold. Unlike a magazine ad campaign, this is something that we are still feeding and is still ongoing and helping us in our campaign,” she says. Nelson plans to continue its use of Web-based social marketing. For The Hole in Our Gospel by Richard Stearns (Mar.), the company has crafted “e-blasts”—e-mail marketing that goes out all at once to selected Web sites and bloggers—and for 66 Love Letters by Larry Crabb (Mar. 2010), a Web-based Lenten campaign for 2010 is in the works. “In the future it is going to be imperative,” Newton says of Web-based marketing. “But it is also going to be important to always look to the next thing. And who knows what that is going to be, really? Isn't that the million-dollar question?”