Book clubs are the comfortable shoes of bookselling: dependable, unflashy, practical, appealing to a small group of confirmed readers. Even as direct-to-consumer marketing proliferates through a variety of channels—including clubs, catalogues and the Internet—major religion book clubs continue to report solid sales and level membership numbers. They perceive their challenges not as absolute growth of market share but as retention, renewal, replacement: keeping up with members' changing tastes and needs. More and more, these clubs are using the Internet to reach current and potential members.
Similarly, those using direct mail to sell books are keeping on, testing as they go, seeking new lists, products, readers. Mail still works, and catalogue mailers too are gaining a better understanding of the ways in which the Web can become a sales vehicle in tandem with mail.
Join the Club
The book club share of the retail book market grew 3.3% in 2001. In the religion category, clubs report steady going, working to keep members satisfied. The major clubs—Crossings, an evangelical Christian club with around a million members, and the body/mind/spirit-focused One Spirit, with 350,000 members—have operated on the same team since Bookspan, a book club marketing program, was formed in 2000 through the joint partnership of clubs owned by AOL Time Warner (including One Spirit) and Bertelsmann (including Crossings). Relatively new to the Bookspan team is Traditions, a year-old club for "cultural Jews" that adds fiction and eclectic picks to staple books about observances, holidays and other conventional Jewish religious topics. Editors at these clubs say some things change, some don't. While membership may not be growing, who's a member, what members read, and other materials members may buy can change, leaving the clubs the task of monitoring and responding to the shifts.
"We're having a good year," says Andrea Doering, senior editor at Crossings, who has been with the club eight of its 10 years. "We're seeing some good numbers and some nice surprises, and things we hoped were going to do well are doing well." Given the current hotness of Christian novels, fiction, not surprisingly, continues to grow, and Doering reports that Cape Light by popular painter Thomas Kinkade and Katherine Spencer (Berkley) is one success on the fiction list, though she wouldn't disclose a sales total. Also doing well, and representing a shift from previous sales of lighter inspirational fare, are more serious Christian living titles, including When Godly People Do Ungodly Things: Arming Yourself in the Age of Seduction by Beth Moore (Broadman & Holman) and His Word in My Heart: Memorizing Scripture for a Closer Walk with God by Janet Pope (Moody).
Doering notes that membership has held steady at around a million for the past five years after climbing to that height from Crossing's inception in 1992. But while the number is constant, the people who make up that number aren't. The average member stays two years, people may drop out and re-enroll, and only a tiny fraction—1,100 members—have stayed with the club since its beginning.
For that reason, "the challenge with the book club is to keep up with membership," says Doering. "You can't say something like 'children's books don't work.' Instead you continue to keep your mind and options open to try lots of different things." Some characteristics remain constant: 95% of Crossing members are women. But marital status is tilting toward including more singles, and the age of the typical reader is creeping upward slightly. "We are catering to and finding books for a Christian woman in her mid-40s," Doering says.
Like almost all clubs, Crossings has a Web presence. Members can use the site to make their selections and need not pay for the selection until it is received. Site features include articles, book excerpts and a place for prayer requests. "We might be the only book club in America that prays for its members," Doering says with a laugh.
Sibling club One Spirit, with 350,000 readers, is also working to keep up with membership even as it shifts its editorial selection. One Spirit has found it can't really grow the membership universe—"In the past, folks tried to expand to 500,000 and it was just too much," says editor-in-chief Patricia Gift—but it can alter to some extent what's offered, adding new categories. Cookbooks such as The Healthy Kitchen: Recipes for a Better Body, Life, and Spirit by Andrew Weil and Rosie Daley (Knopf) sell well, and One Spirit has found that certain science titles, for example, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Universe by physicist Brian Greene (Vintage) also appeal to a membership composed of "readers who happen to be seeking," Gift says. The range of titles in a recent catalogue includes the novel A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry (hardcover, Knopf; paper, Vintage) and a current affairs title, My Forbidden Face: Growing Up Under the Taliban: A Young Woman's Story by Latifa (Talk Miramax), as well as more customary selections on the afterlife, goddesses and feng shui.
Since Gift came to head the club in early 2001, she has expanded categories and shrunk the catalogue from oversize to slim to appeal to the environmental sensibilities of membership. And the club is more than merely books. One Spirit partnered with Colorado-based audio specialist Sounds True to offer an audio lesson series on insight meditation on an exclusive basis for six months. The club's desk calendar, One Spirit Book of Days, has been its bestselling selection.
Then there are the animal books. Pet communication books sell well, because they fit into a theme that characterizes this and other book clubs: book purchases are intended for the reader herself, for personal growth and expression. "I think readers are really interested in something for themselves," says Gift. "Pets are seen as an extension of oneself."
New Addition
Traditions, also under the Bookspan umbrella, is the new kid on the block, a club now being tested with readers and slated for full roll-out in late fall or winter. It was developed for "cultural Jews"—Jewish people who are not necessarily religiously observant. Arthur Goldwag, an executive editor at Book of the Month Club and editorial director for Traditions, describes the mix as "Judaica you didn't know was Judaica": novels with Jewish characters, political books, books about spirituality, in addition to more traditional choices about culture and observance. He cites such books as Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, a memoir by Jewish essayist-neurologist Oliver Sacks (Knopf) and Funnymen by Ted Heller (Scribner), a novel based on the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis comedy team that is steeped in borscht-belt culture.
"What I was expecting was to find lots of Red Tents," says Goldwag, referring to the bestselling 1997 novel by Anita Diamant (hardcover, St. Martin's; paper, Picador), an imaginative telling of the biblical story of Joseph and his brothers from the point of view of their sister Dinah, who is mentioned only once in the original biblical tale. But that's not what happened. "The strongest interest seems to be in books about Jewish culture, observance, religious books—the more obviously Jewish books," Goldwag reports. Members' appetite for such books is something of a surprise. "This pool of members we're testing is buying books at a greater rate than I've ever seen in my career in book clubs. They are starving for the books."
The potential universe is small—six million Jews live in the U.S.—"but extremely motivated," Goldwag says. "The area we are most bullish on is the Internet." Yet at the same time the print catalogue has gotten sales results. "The catalogue really adds something," Goldwag concludes. "We're talking to readers." Anticipating the full launch, Goldwag says a major mailing will go out in early 2003, and the Web site will be expanded later this year.
Even as clubs adjust to the growth of competing sales outlets, other economic pressures loom. Bookspan clubs operate against a backdrop of recent corporate change: Bertelsmann has a half-interest in Bookspan, and the recent departures of Thomas Middelhoff as CEO of corporate parent Bertelsmann and Klaus Eierhoff as head of the DirectGroup have put direct-to-consumer operations under the microscope of Bertelsmann management.
It's in the Mail
An example of mail-Web synergy is provided by the 1,900-member Catholic Book Club. An arm of America Press, it is connected to the Jesuit order and their respected America magazine. The club got a substantial boost this year by adding 900 customers interested in an online club newsletter and online ordering. The larger umbrella of the club, begun in 1928, keeps it going, says director Patricia Kossmann, who is also literary editor at the magazine. "It's a tough climate, surely, for selling to active members, let alone recruiting new ones, especially when you're working on a limited budget as we do," Kossmann tells PW. At Guideposts, inspiration still comes through the mail. The enterprise that started in 1945, based on Norman Vincent Peale's "positive thinking" philosophy, today has magazines at its core—flagship Guideposts among them—with a combined circulation of 4.5 million. The company also sells 3 million books a year, a total that includes its signature annual Daily Guideposts, a daily devotional. Guideposts also operates a family of Web sites.
"More and more of our subscribers use the Internet, and they do find out about product through our Web site," says Marilyn Moore, editor-in-chief of Guideposts Books and Inspirational Media. Seventy percent of the customers are women, with a median age of 50, almost two-thirds with college degrees, married, with good incomes: town-based,-middle-class middle-America.
At Guideposts, direct mail is used to test lists and products that will match readers to Guideposts' style of inspirational storytelling. Half of what Moore's division sells is Guideposts' own exclusive product; other material is licensed from other publishers. Particularly successful have been continuities: book series such as the Church Choir Mysteries and Listening to the Animals, books of stories based on relationships with animals, echoing One Spirit's success with animal books.
Direct mail continues to be part of the sales strategy at Plough Publishing House, the publishing arm of the Bruderhof religious community. A combination magazine and catalogue, the Plough Reader comes out quarterly, offering articles, reader correspondence and titles from Plough and other publishers. The summer Reader features Palestine (Fantagraphics) a compilation of comics-style reportage by graphic artist Joe Sacco, The Lord of the Rings trilogy (Ballantine), now enjoying a film-induced revival, and an assortment of social justice titles. The Reader combines several formerly separate features: a quarterly magazine, the Plough Book Service for titles from other publishers, and Plough's own titles.
"I don't know of anything else out there quite like that," says Charles Moore, now an assistant editor but formerly in marketing for Plough. The house mails anywhere from 100,000 to 175,000 books, depending on the season and combination of rented mailing lists in addition to its own customer base. "Each year it's getting better," Moore says. "Our own list has built up." Like others, Moore says the mailing dovetails with Internet selling. "What you do through traditional mail encourages people to go to bookstores and the Net. We're of the opinion that you should try as many avenues as you can within your budget."
Many catalogues get into readers' mailboxes via direct mail specialist Christian Book Distributors. Fifteen niche catalogues with their own mailing frequencies add up to "millions of catalogues," says Stephen Hendrickson, company president and founder, who won't disclose the exact number. Specialty lines range from children's books to pastors' supplies to gifts to reference books. Since its founding in 1978, the Peabody, Mass.-based, privately held company has grown to 450 employees. It uses a "significant and robust Web site, and we have a very active catalogue marketing program," says Hendrickson.
Senior buyer Rick Brown says mail testing has given the company some surprising and precise information. What he characterizes as "rigorous" research through sales tracking has told CBD that mailing drives business to its Web site. "The catalogue has performed much better than we thought," he notes. Accordingly, the firm will actually be mailing more. "We're kicking that strategy in next week," he told PW in mid-August.
Meanwhile, e-commerce giant Amazon.com is noncommittal about details of sales volume and trends within its religion and spirituality category. (Amazon reported total sales of $443 million for the first quarter in its books/music/video group.) "We've seen strong religion sales this year, spiking post-September 11 and continuing to the present, with an emphasis on spirituality-related titles, as well as books about the present state of Catholicism," says Rob McDonald, interim religion editor.
In a multi-channel retail environment, the book industry tent is still big enough to provide a solid position for direct-mailers, clubs and Internet-only retailers, all working their niches and borrowing pages from each another's catalogues and Web sites. Hendrickson at CBD sees irony in some e-retailing marketing practices. "Some Internet retailers," he notes, "have actually produced print catalogues."
