It is now conventional wisdom that New Age—like virtually all categories of spirituality—has been among the publishing world's hottest tickets in recent years. The scenario seemed almost, well, magical and mystical: Publish anything New Age, stock the bookstore shelves and watch those titles fly into consumers' hands virtually as fast as they can be published. But publishing, distributing and selling New Age titles is not without its challenges. While no one is disputing the success of the category—and no one, certainly, is complaining about it—sudden growth and even the most immense success bring problems and question marks that must be dealt with to ensure the continued vitality of the category. That publishers, distributors and retailers have succeeded in facing and overcoming those challenges is most evident in the fact that moving New Age titles seems, to consumers and other observers of the industry, to happen almost without effort; yet those involved in getting New Age books into consumers' hands are constantly dousing fires large and small that may stand in their way.
For many, the difficulties in selling New Age are no different from those in selling any product, anywhere, these days. As Charles Nurnberg, executive v-p of Sterling Publishing puts it, "In the simplest of equations, you need to find the right author, the right topic, and be able to package it in the right format, at the right price point and at the right moment in time." That's a tall order—and a lot of variables to get right—under the best of circumstances. But lately, it's been even more of a problem than at other times. "It's not the content or substance or even the industry [that is the problem]. It is the general economy," says Phil Thompson, co-owner of the Bodhi Tree bookstore in West Hollywood, Calif. "If people are buying, there's no lack of people interested in the subject. It just keeps getting bigger and bigger." The problem is, Thompson says, that with the economy going south, sales have trailed off.
On the Front Lines
New Age booksellers face many of the same challenges as any independent or specialty bookstore—but writ large for this particular category. Garrett Stanley, manager of the East-West Bookstore in Sacramento, Calif., quickly ticks off the three biggest obstacles he faces in selling New Age titles: "Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Borders." As the category has exploded onto the market and been adopted by large chains as mainstream fare, niche sellers like East-West, which have long dominated the market, have been forced to fight back—quickly. In Stanley's words, "The biggest resource they have is seemingly unlimited capital. How can you compete with someone who can lose over a billion bucks?"
Smaller bookstores also face more ground-level challenges from New Age's spread to mainstream stores and large chains. Once, people needed to come to independent sellers to find New Age books. With New Age found in every mall or mega-store nowadays, even many consumers who consider themselves committed to the success of independent stores find themselves going elsewhere, Thompson reports. Coming to downtown stores like his is an inconvenience to many people, when they can find the same books—along with a readily available parking space—at the mall.
The solution for independents is to emphasize what makes them unique, despite the similarity of the products on their shelves and on the shelves of the local chain store. "We know our product well, we provide great service and we can provide quick answers to customers' questions," Stanley says. Thompson says that people continue to come to his store, despite the inadequate parking, because they "like the experience" he and his staff provide, and the environment and culture they have created. Terry Jones, director of marketing and sales at New Leaf distributors in Lithia Springs, Ga., concurs that independent booksellers' expertise sets them apart: "By and large, our [bookseller] customers are knowledgeable, much more so than you'd find in a chain store. They're much more involved with their customers."
Jason Smith, book buyer at Transitions in Chicago, tells PW that in response to the challenges of New Age's mainstreaming, his store, like many New Age retailers, relies more heavily on non-book items—incense, candles, videos, etc.—while at the same time emphasizing that it still carries more New Age titles than even a large chain store. "They may carry 20,000 of 30,000 available titles. But those other 10,000 are very important, and we carry them," he says. He adds that Transitions tries not to get carried away with non-book items; it is tempting, Smith says, to emphasize the gift items whose price markup is very high compared to books', but Transitions wants to ensure that it is still seen primarily as a bookstore.
But not all New Age stores necessarily have the same goal of maintaining their primary identity, and that can be a frustration for the distributors who keep those stores' shelves stocked. "The challenges there are in keeping up with the newest trends [in gift items]," says New Leaf's Jones. Judy Wheeler, sales manager at Oakland, Calif.—based distributor Book People, goes further in her complaint: "Books are a sideline for many of the outlets for New Age books. Store owners may not be familiar with the nuances of the book industry." This plays out in many different ways, which distributors need to deal with and overcome. "The channels of distribution are sometimes confusing to explain. Returns are considered differently in this market, and retailers often prefer nonreturnable terms. Also, [retailers'] exposure to traditional book trade journals and associations also varies widely. All of these things present a challenge in keeping buyers aware of what is new and selling well," Wheeler says. For publishers, of course, the large chains' welcoming of New Age provides huge new opportunities to sell their titles, so there are obviously few complaints among publishers about Barnes & Noble's large New Age section.
More Publishers in the Game
Still, as with any change, the category's broader appeal brings difficulties even to those who benefit most from it. As the market has grown exponentially, large publishing houses have taken note and have begun publishing their own New Age titles, which once were relegated to smaller, niche houses—just as retail sales, once the almost-exclusive territory of independent stores, have been adopted by large chains. "It makes it harder for us to stand out," says Karen Narita, marketing director at Santa Cruz, Calif.—based Crossing Press. Crossing, like other niche publishing houses, must work hard to get its titles into the large chains, competing for space with an ever-growing number of titles from an ever-growing number of houses large and small. At the same time, Narita says, it is vital for Crossing to maintain its long-standing ties to the smaller, independent stores with which it was doing business long before Borders-type outlets became interested in the category. "We want to maintain our personal connection to the smaller independents," Narita says. To do so, Crossing has increased the size of its sales department, allowing salespeople to reach out to new venues while retaining strong ties to older ones. The house also has beefed up its publicity department.
Publishers must stand out not only to retailers but to the New Age consumer as well. With New Age readership so large and diverse, it's difficult for many publishers to keep a finger on the pulse of what New Age aficionados—as well as more casual readers—are seeking. "Our greatest challenge is finding enough contact with the metaphysical community. What we're trying to do is publish material the community is interested in," says Laurie Kelly, special sales representative at New Page Books, a division of Career Press in Franklin Lakes, N.J.
Asking readers directly what they're looking for rarely seems to yield helpful answers, Kelly says, so publishers need to get creative. New Page has had great success in talking to the proprietors of the bookstores it services and from trolling New Age—oriented Web sites, such as Witchvox.com. Based on sources like these, the house decided to put an emphasis on issues such as pagan parenting and how people first became involved in New Age, Kelly says, citing A Witch Like Me: The Spirit Journeys of Today's Pagan Practitioners (Oct. 2001), by Sirona Knight, as an example of a book that came out of this line of inquiry.
Karen Kreiger, marketing director at Thorsons Publishing in Lanham, Md., concurs with Kelly, saying the sheer volume of New Age material available makes it more difficult to gauge what readers want and what the next hot thing will be. "The New Age reader is so sophisticated now," she notes. With New Age content everywhere, in books, magazines and other media, "It is hard to figure out what to use and how to package it," Kreiger adds. In response, New Age offerings have become increasingly specialized, with books on, for instance, Chinese astrology, Vedic astrology and any number of other astrology-related subcategories. Publishers must do all they can to "stay on the ball in terms of where the market is going and realizing what's hot," Kreiger remarks.
Increased Size=Increased Challenges
The vastness of the category makes for several other major difficulties as well. With 600 product categories to distribute, New Leaf finds it challenging to recruit and train employees who can deal knowledgeably with the inventory, Jones says. And Jim Ramsour, buyer for religion and metaphysics at one of the Tattered Cover bookstores in Denver, tells PW that his biggest challenge is stocking the New Age titles in their appropriate categories. With New Age sections becoming increasingly specialized, one particular title can potentially fit into the store's Wicca, Western Esoterica or Shamanism categories. "The issue is to get the book the best presentation," Ramsour says. "It's more of a challenge [in New Age than elsewhere] because it is so subjective. We have to do it based on what we know our customers want." Occasionally, it becomes apparent that a book's original categorization was a mistake, and it sells better when it is moved to a new category, but the store's job is to prevent such mistakes in the first place.
The public's thirst for all things New Age has left many publishers with a conundrum: How to please everyone from the most knowledgeable New Age devotee to the mildly curious novice. At Viking Penguin Compass, Janet Goldstein comments, "We are, on the one hand, wanting to mainstream New Age—or Mind, Body and Spirit—titles and make them accessible for our marketing and sales people to go out and sell them. On the other hand, if all the books become so general, do we then risk losing those niche books? We try to get titles that are exciting, accessible and marketable. We look for authors who can explain their books in a mainstream way—we try to find a happy medium."
Doing so, Goldstein adds, often entails selling a book using language familiar to booksellers and consumers, even if that language would not be used for that particular title by New Age experts. For instance, when publishing a book on the now-popular topic of labyrinths, the house used the phrase "walking meditation"; even though labyrinths are not Buddhist, the company had a history of Buddhist-oriented publishing, and its employees were comfortable talking about Buddhist books. "The idea is not to just do New Age 'lite' or spiritual 'lite,' but to bring something new into familiar language and packaging," Goldstein explains. Part of the problem, she says, is getting the publishing house's staff to be conversant and knowledgeable about New Age. "We try to have in-house education so that we feel a familiarity with these markets, so they don't feel so alternative."
The Name's the Game
With so many newcomers to the New Age publishing world, some who were producing in this category long before it was the stuff of large publishing houses and national chain stores find themselves feeling uncomfortable with the boom. "There is a lot of New Age fluff. The New Age is more than feel-good material and so on," says Carl Weschcke, president of Minneapolis-based Llewellyn. And to publishers like Weschcke, the New Age is also about more than moving books and the subsequent bottom line. "It's really the same challenge for the 41 years I have been in the publishing business—combining business with my belief that we're living in a New Age," he says. "I actively believe there is such a thing as a New Age." He complains that many publishers and booksellers water down the topic by calling it by other names. "It's all for the one purpose of giving us a higher perspective, so we can save ourselves and save the planet. The New Age, in my concept, is far more than ancient wisdom in new dress," Weschcke says. It is not a lesson most people in the publishing world are very conscious of. Transitions' Smith says of people's attitudes toward New Age, "There is an odd change going on right now. The words 'New Age' are stigmatized by society, but what New Age stands for is embraced by the mainstream more every day." As a result, more and more stores are increasing the size and scope of their New Age sections, but more and more are, as Weschcke points out, calling it by different names.
Weschcke's fear of New Age "fluff" is shared by many publishers. For those that do not publish New Age exclusively, fitting a company's New Age offerings into the general tenor of the company's titles can be tough. "My main challenge is to find titles by highly credentialed professionals, as opposed to books that could be perceived to be ungrounded, or by authors with weak or nonexistent credentials, or low-price-point merchandise," says Tom Miller, executive editor of general interest books at John Wiley & Sons. "Professors, researchers and clinicians—as well as highly gifted writerly writers—thrive on our list, but I'm not able to publish other kinds of New Age books by authors who do not have these credentials. We do very well with mind-body, meditation, inspirational narrative and general spirituality New Age books but would probably not be able to publish in some traditional New Age areas, like astrology, unless the book were by someone who has conducted substantial original research in the area."
Even when all these factors come together, publishers still need to ensure that their product stands out in this crowded field. "There are a lot of good authors and basic subjects," says Nurnberg at Sterling, "but it is the few that strike a chord that usually set the tone for a whole list." To accomplish that, the company relies on interesting, original packaging of popular subjects. One example, according to Nurnberg, is yoga. "Our challenge, as a publisher with many serious yoga books, was to find one that could break out of the traditional selling patterns—and in this case we were right." The success story he's referring to is Yoga for Wimps: Poses for the Flexibly Impaired (Oct. 1999), which, Nurnberg reports, "took a more irreverent tone, with just the right touch of humor and entertainment, combined with a superb teaching text." The results were gratifying. "It has captured the public's imagination to such an extent that we have trademarked the Wimps series name and will have a number of others coming out, the next two being Meditation for Wimps and Tai Chi for Wimps." A similar approach to this challenge, he says, is to "stop them dead in their tracks with the title and concept" of a new book, one that will catch the eye of jaded expert and curious newcomer alike. Such is the hope for the company's lead fall title in the Body, Mind, Spirit category. What to Do When You Are Dead: Living Better in the Afterlife (Sept.) offers "a serious approach to preparing for the afterlife, but the title is catchy, unique, and the packaging really effective. This one has a great likelihood of breaking out for all the same reasons as Yoga for Wimps, with the added shock value of the title."
The challenges in publishing, distributing and selling New Age books are various, and the industry is responding in many various ways. But even as they describe and illustrate these challenges, there are not too many true complaints being heard from New Age publishers, distributors and booksellers. The books that move so quickly off the shelves and into consumers' hands may not be moving quite as effortlessly as it may seem to the casual observer, but it is hard to argue with the success and popularity of New Age. Those involved in the industry may offer different explanations for why the category is so popular—Crossing's Narita, for instance, believes that "the baby boomer generation is a generation of people seeking answers"—but the fact that it is popular is not in doubt.
Those benefiting from the boom relish the challenges and use them as incentive to work harder and grow faster. "Our challenge is to keep educating ourselves, keep being creative and keep growing. We should probably be doing that even if they [large chains] weren't around," says East-West's Stanley.
Llewellyn's Weschcke puts the situation is perspective by recalling his early days in the New Age publishing business. He recalls how he'd travel around the country talking to dealers and bookstore proprietors, only to be told there was no market for these types of books. In addition, he says, "One of the obstacles for us way out here in Minnesota is that people thought we weren't serious." Today, of course, categories like Wicca and astrology, which people scoffed at originally, are standard fare for stores large and small, specialized and general, while the Twin Cities area is one of the country's larger publishing centers. And with growth like that, there is no real downside. "There's no sense publishing books, there's no sense selling books, if you can't reach people," Weschcke says. He adds that once upon a time people interested in topics like these needed to travel to India or find a guru; today, they can find what they're seeking in books. And that's good news for everyone, despite any problems that might present themselves.
