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Sports Book Publisher Scores with Rams Title
Jim Milliot -- 3/27/00

Following a record 1999 when sales rose approximately 50%, Sports Publishing Inc. has begun 2000 on a strong note, shipping 50,000 copies of Eleven Men Believed, the story of the Super Bowl champion St. Louis Rams that SPI published in conjunction with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. If the full run is sold, and SPI president Peter Bannon is expecting very few returns, it will be the best-selling book in the company's history. "Most of our titles sell in the 10,000 to 20,000 range," Bannon said.

The modest print runs are an important part of SPI's strategy; since the market for a typical sports book is largely regional, SPI "tries to be everyone's regional publisher," Bannon noted. "I'd rather sell 20,000 copies of the autobiography of Hayden Fry [the football coach at Iowa] in Iowa than try to figure out a way to sell 20,000 copies of some other title nationally. The economics are much better." SPI's unique sales approach is one reason the company d s its own distribution. With an 11-person marketing staff, SPI will saturate a particular city with sales and marketing calls when a book about a local team is released.

In addition, SPI has registered a large number of URLs that involve sports teams. For the Rams book, the company sold titles off the www.rams books. com site as well as through its own home page plus the Post-Dispatch's site.

Bannon estimated that SPI has sold about 2,000 copies through the various Internet sites. Other URLs owned by SPI include www.nyyankeesbooks.com and www.notredamebooks.com. "We want to grab as much Internet real estate as possible," Bannon explained.

SPI's president has planned a very ambitious publishing schedule for 2000, upping the number of new titles to 112 from the 62 it published last year. Bannon explained the dramatic increase by observing that "sports is a hot market right now." SPI is also planning to release a number of anniversary books that will celebrate the end of the century for a variety of teams. A couple of national-oriented books that Bannon thinks will do well this year include Crack of the Bat, the history of the Louisville slugger, and Going the Distance, the autobiography of boxer Ken Norton. One topic that SPI will avoid is the Olympics. "Except for a few exceptions, the majority of Olympic books turn out to be disasters," Bannon said.

SPI, which has 56 employees and is based in Champaign, Ill., began as a unit of Sagamore Publishers and became a separate company in May 1998. However, the two companies still share a number of back-office functions, including the use of the same warehouse. The publisher's Web site is located at www.sportspublishing inc.com.

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