Michael McKinley Meredith/Better Homes and Gardens Living the Categories
"We're in a growth mode," says Michael McKinley, clearly satisfied with his company's present, albeit undisclosed, sales pace. The Meredith executive editor, who oversees the Better Homes and Gardens, Ortho and Scotts imprints, offers reasons why: "We're unique in that we conduct so much research. We live our subject categories. Here, we're horticulturalists and landscape architects." Among the other elements that McKinley credits for the business's position are the facts that "we're in Des Moines, which is a key to our connection to the country's heartland," and that "we provide service to people. Pretty pictures are nice, but our focus has always been on information."
He continues: "Our research indicates that people are staying home and gardening more. Since 9/11, people in general are traveling less, and they're putting their energies instead into the home. Landscaping and gardening relate to the places readers live, where they can find peace and tranquility with a closeness to nature."
When asked about gardening trends, McKinley replies, "Gardening is not a trendy subject. Gardening is long-term. Perennials and water gardening continue to be hot in the way that some topics transcend trends and become movements. Flowers in general are very, very big. Perennials, water gardening and roses are powerful subjects that arouse a degree of passion in people. There in fact may be fewer people interested in a subject like water gardening, but they buy every book out there."
Pointing to one area of specialization, McKinley says, "In several of our brands we're exploring natural landscaping. [A January release from Ortho is All About Creating Natural Landscapes: Understanding and Creating a Beautiful Landscape for Your Region.] But that's nothing really new. We've just published Better Homes and Gardens Garden Rooms: Imagine, Plan, Build, Decorate, and there's nothing new about that either." He relates an anecdote about recently coming across a book on garden rooms that was originally published in 1901.
The public response that Meredith enjoys is, of course, built in part on the reputation of its brand names. These same brand names, says McKinley, "force us to make sure that what we provide people with is accessible. Most books on water gardening, for example, don't help the reader with maintenance. Ours do. Our January Ortho book even helps the reader convert a swimming pool into a water garden. [The Water Gardening Book: Building, Growing, How-to, Projects] is a large book, as is The Perennials Book: Planning, Using, Growing, How-to, Garden Designs, and that's a new comprehensive format for Ortho, although we will continue to focus on niche subjects. We have what we call our cornerstones, like the Better Homes and Gardens Complete Guide to Landscaping, and we also have our narrower subjects."
"The marketplace is glutted," McKinley observes. "The shelves are full and highly competitive. Our last list was probably our lightest with eight titles, but in the upcoming year, we'll create a larger presence. It becomes a question of doing what you did before, only doing it better and providing added value."
Laura Wood B&N.com Kudos for Timber Press
Drawing both beginners and advanced gardeners, B&N.com reports muscular sales. "It's a good category for us," says gardening buyer Laura Wood, noting that while lead titles sell in sizable numbers, "we also sell tons of books in smaller individual quantities. Backlist sales are huge." These are not only books about plants. "Many people ask about design aspects of the garden," she says, "but there is a lot of interest, too, in perennials and native plants. These provide more permanent design elements that take less time than annuals do."
As evidence of the natural garden's enticement, she mentions a title B&N.com promoted successfully last fall: The American Woodland Garden: Capturing the Spirit of the Deciduous Forest by Rick Darke (Timber Press). Wood anticipates as well a popular reception for Timber's just-published The Well-Designed Mixed Garden by Tracy DiSabato-Aust, a look at site evaluation, color theory and maintenance planning, complete with actual design plans. "When I interviewed Tracy," notes Wood, "she said that mixed gardens have been around from previous centuries, and that these things go into and out of fashion. People are rediscovering the joy of mixed gardens because when you put annuals in with perennials, you change the mood of your garden."
She expects similarly positive results with P. Allen Smith's Garden Home by P. Allen Smith (Clarkson Potter). This first entry in a new series by the TV personality explains 12 principles of garden design as well as step-by-step projects to extend personal home style into the garden. Another new title that Wood thinks will fill the needs of ambitious planters and builders is Architecture in the Garden by James van Sweden and Thomas Christopher (Random House), which follows yet another path to connect a home's essentials to a garden with walls, decks, fences and more.
"People are experimenting a lot," says Wood. "It's a good business for plant-specific books, especially those on roses or lavender. The books that do best are the ones like that, or great encyclopedic books like The American Horticultural Society A—Z Encyclopedia of Garden Plants, a backlist title from DK." Publishers should focus on the first type of approach or the other, she suggests. "There's always a danger of a book falling into an amorphous middle somewhere in between."
The Flower Gardener's Bible by Lewis and Nancy Hill and 20 Plans for Colorful Shady Retreats by Barbara W. Ellis, both spring books from Storey, are two more to watch for, says Wood, as are a pair of April releases from Lyons Press: From the Garden to the Table: Growing, Cooking and Eating Your Own Food by Monty and Sarah Don and The Secrets of Wildflowers by Jack Sanders. "There's a blurring of the line between domestic and wild plants," continues Wood, although she adds that while ground covers may have found a growing number of fans, lawns remain the norm. For grassy questions, she points out, Hyperion releases in April The Lawn Bible by David R. Mellor.
Lionel Koffler Firefly Books Measure Twice, Cut Once
"I'm the kind of gardener we publish for," says Lionel Koffler, president and publisher of 26-year-old Firefly Books Ltd., which publishes and distributes nonfiction and children's books in North America. "I want to keep my company afloat, but I want to do books I'm interested in, which is why we do a lot of titles on birds, plants, flowers and conservation."
When Koffler lived near the office in downtown Toronto, where yards were small, he took out his front lawn and replaced the grass with dwarf conifers. This spring, Firefly is publishing a book on how other conservation-minded gardeners can do likewise—Front Yard Gardens: Growing More Than Grass. "It's for gardeners who've done everything in their backyard and who want to do something in their front yard," says Koffler. "Looking at climate change, lawns use a tremendous amount of water and gardens use less." A few years ago, Koffler moved to a farm, where he has space to plant on a much larger scale. And again, he's acquired a book to help him fill his own needs, The Best Trees for Your Garden by Allen Peterson, which is being copublished in the U.K. "Because I'm a gardener, I'll make sure that our North American team makes this book suitable. We'll rewrite, find new pictures and update zone maps."
From the start, Firefly has published gardening books, which typically make up 20% of its adult list each spring. Since the company began in 1977, the biggest shift in the category that Koffler has observed is an increased sophistication among gardeners. "Gardening books have a lot in common with craft books," says Koffler. "They both began to be widely published in the 1980s. A lot of new nurseries and garden centers grew. Then as people got to know much more, their tastes improved. Booksellers thought the category had shrunk, but the public has become more sophisticated. What we've done is try to follow the public's interest in specialty areas—like dry gardens or low-maintenance gardens—because people don't have time to do a lot of gardening or they're in parts of America where you can't water." Aging boomers, too, adds Koffler, are playing a large role in today's gardening market. "They have money and they want to grow trees with distinctive foliage or plants that make a statement as people drive by."
Koffler estimates that the sophisticated gardener, while still a minority, is closing the gap with novice gardeners and now account for as much as 30%—40% of the gardening market. Says the publisher: "For the serious gardener, it's an economy to buy a book. It's the equivalent of 'measure twice and cut once' in carpentry. One of our top-selling books last year was Landscape Planning by Judith Adam, all about thinking and planning. You see the same change in the gardening magazines: Fine Gardening and Garden Design. Instead of spending $5,000 on plants, people will spend $3,000 and buy a $50 book. These are people who want the information badly. It's like adventure travel and eco-touring. Because the group that's interested knows it's satisfying, they'll buy."
Frances Tenenbaum Houghton Mifflin Taylor-Made Sales
Editor of the Taylor gardening guides at Houghton Mifflin for better than a dozen years, not to mention recipient of a gold medal from the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, Frances Tenenbaum has the companionable voice of experience that leads to a realist's perspective. "Gardening books have not been faring very well in recent years," she reflects pragmatically. "In fact, we've pretty much stopped publishing gardening books—except for the Taylor Guides. My theory is: there are just too many gardening books published. Back in the 1980s, gardening was the hot new thing, and everybody started doing them. If you go into a gardening section now, who knows what book's good and what's not?"
The Taylor franchise was born back in the 1930s and, despite the market's ups and downs, the line has maintained its strong foothold ever since. Three years ago, HM thought it time to spruce up the entries with such revised and freshly designed titles that now include Taylor's Guide to Perennials, ...Roses and ...Trees. "We've redone seven titles," says Tenenbaum, "and they've done well, but even some we haven't repackaged—Taylor's Guide to Orchids, ...Shade Gardening and ...Herbs— continue to sell nicely." Tennebaum also cites Taylor's Master Guide to Gardening by Rita Buchanan and Roger Holmes and ...to Landscaping by Buchanan as "cornerstones of the Taylor guides. We do well with the big reference books. In some cases, I just don't find that smaller niche books are as successful. There are limits to books on subjects like building stone walls because you can find that information in a magazine. And even smaller books are still expensive to produce if they're full of color, and color is what you need in gardening books."
HM's next major reference work will be Taylor's Encyclopedia of Plants (Oct.), which carries Tenenbaum's byline as editor and which draws from those seven refurbished Taylor titles. "This is different from other encyclopedias because it's all about North American plants only," she says, "and it doesn't just give descriptions. It tells you how and when to grow them—as well as what won't grow for you." The book is organized alphabetically by genus, but the index includes common names as well, so gardeners who can't be bothered with Latin can still find the facts they seek. A special effort will launch a 50,000 first printing of the Encyclopedia of Plants, which will benefit from an ad/promo campaign and, in an unusual move, Tenenbaum will be doing publicity.
Asked how HM keeps the Taylor Guides in the foreground amid all the gardening books clamoring for attention, Tenenbaum replies, "They have a distinguished heritage. They also have good pictures and good information." At present, the plant encyclopedia is the only new Taylor Guide scheduled, as Tenenbaum awaits future signals from the market before making further commitments to the series. "It's hard to see what's missing in a book that a lot of people would want to buy," she remarks, "but there are still some other books we're planning, including one on orchids by William Cullina, who wrote The New England Wild Flower Society Guide to Growing and Propagating Wildflowers and Native Trees, Shrubs and Vines."
Mary Gay Shipley That Bookstore in Blytheville Easier Than Redecorating
Mary Gay Shipley, owner of That Bookstore in Blytheville (Ark.), divides the gardening titles in her store into two categories: "There are books for people who really want to dig in the garden, and there are the others for people who want to look and think, one day I'll have a garden and it will look like this."
An example of the latter type of book is Seeing Gardens by Sam Abell (National Geographic, 2000). "It's about how to find a garden wherever you are," explains Shipley, "for those of us who want to sit on the sofa and garden." For those who do want to get their hands dirty, Shipley frequently recommends books by Jerry Baker. "His books sell all the time, especially when he does things on NPR or PBS," she says. "I'm glad to see those back in an easy-to-get format." (Baker publishes his own books under the name American Master Products.)
Gardening titles make up 5%—10% of the titles at That Bookstore in Blytheville, and Shipley believes the current economic climate has, if anything, benefited their sales. "You can make your garden more beautiful for not a whole lot of money," she says. "It's easier than redecorating your house." However, small books geared to impulse buys are no longer selling at the store. "Those things were fun if you had an extra $20," says Shipley, "but we're kind of down to the basics here with unemployment the way it is. They're not so fun anymore."
Likewise, she says, heavily illustrated gardening books are not as popular with the store's customers as they once were because they bear a hefty price. "There was a trend toward more and more color photography, but the economy has kept that at bay. The books just can't be any more expensive," says Shipley. "Instead of having 500 color photographs, they may have 100." She estimates that the average gardening book in her stores sells for $25 to $40. "You can't sell books for $75 or $100," she adds.
Also shelved in Shipley's gardening section are flower-arranging books such as Flowers, White House Style: More Than 125 Arrangements by the Former White House Chief Floral Decorator (S&S, 2002) by Dottie Temple and Stan Finegold. "It's about beautiful flowers and what you have to know about flowers to entertain, because so many customs are all tied up in flowers," explains Shipley.
This store owner keeps in close contact with the members of local gardening clubs and tries to meet their specific needs. "To place a large order, I have to have somebody in mind. The best thing to do is to find somebody who's influential in the club who might present programs out of the book."
Shipley also supports books by locally grown authors with healthy orders. P. Allen Smith's Garden Home: Creating a Garden for Everyday Living (Clarkson Potter, Feb.), whose author, a Little Rock native, makes regular appearances on The Early Show on CBS, has been a solid seller. "People recognize his name because he's local, in addition to the fact that he's on TV," says Shipley.
Lauren Shakely Clarkson Potter Addressing Stagnant Sales
Over the last seven years, Clarkson Potter has adjusted its publication plans to what's working in the marketplace. "Cookbooks had been about 20% of the list, now they are 50%," says publisher Lauren Shakely. "Gardening, home, gift, humor and health fits into second half. We're trying to change the balance so when the world has enough cookbooks, we're not caught off guard. Sadly, there's no turnaround in the garden market.." Sales of gardening books were stagnant even before the economy took a downturn, says Shakely, who describes herself as "cautiously optimistic" about the category. "Like the stock market, if things are sluggish you always have room to grow," she jokes, making the inevitable pun. "I'm excited about individual books, which is possible when you keep your list to the right number."
This year, Potter has plans for four gardening titles, including Ken Druse: The Passion for Gardening by the well-established author and photographer; Andrew Wilson's Influential Gardeners, a high-end reference work; David Stark and Avi Adler's Wild Flowers and the just-released P. Allen Smith's Garden Home by P. Allen Smith, a first-time author with multiple nonbook platforms such as the Weather Channel, PBS and a Web site. Potter's goal is to develop a brand name in the gardening arena, a recognizable face—"a category buster," says Shakely. "Our hope is it will be Allen Smith, someone exciting enough to get people to spend time in that section of the bookstore. We're hoping for an ongoing program of about a book a year, because he's got a big platform. His position is that gardening is not about science, it's about lifestyle. Don't think first about plants, think about how you'll use space. He's unintimidating and refreshing."
Although gardening itself is a multibillion-dollar business, it doesn't attract readers of higher-end books, Shakely says. "Magazines and how-to books at nurseries get more attention." Nevertheless, Potter has found that a pricey gardening book can be more successful than a generic, less expensive one. "We can sell beautiful books, such as Gardens by the Sea ($60), targeted to particular readers. We don't plan on a first printing of 30,000 or 40,000 copies, but on finding the right audience, which we make every effort to do. Publishing has become high/low, as in fashion," Shakely says. "In the middle, things are less clear, whether it's a handbag or a book."
From her vantage point, most people seem to perceive gardening as a major investment, like interior decorating, Shakely says. "We are trying to convince them you don't have to focus on everything at once. You can save money. That's another opportunity. My instinct is there's lots of opportunity in this category. We just have to get the right books from the right authors."
In the end, aging baby boomers may be the salvation of the field. Ken Druse's new book, The Passion for Gardening, views garden activity as a lifetime occupation. "The book gives aging boomers a chance to look ahead," says Shakely. "After all, you may have to give up skiing but you never have to give up gardening."
Benjamin Reese Amazon.com Bananas, Bugs and More
"There's always an active interest in gardening books," says Amazon.com home and gardening editor Benjamin Reese, "particularly as spring gets nearer." Not everyone, however, is able to gambol into the backyard to cultivate an expansive flowerbed. "What we've seen is a big interest in gardens for small spaces, such as patios," he notes, mentioning two popular backlist books from Rodale: Lasagna Gardening: A New Layering System for Bountiful Gardens: No Digging, No Tilling, No Weeding, No Kidding! by Patricia Lanza and Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew, which Amazon.com's readers and reviewers have awarded a five-star rating.
Another popular topic, says Reese, is garden design. "Every year we see new inspirational books showing large gardens designed by famous gardeners." A title Reese cites for 2003 is Clarkson Potter's Influential Gardens: The Designers Who Shaped 20th-Century Garden Style by Andrew Wilson, which illustrates the creative work executed by 56 men and women with both archival and contemporary photos.
"Not everything is about flowers, though," says Reese. "Scotts has books for lawns; Hyperion has The Lawn Bible; and Rockport is publishing a kind of anti-lawn book, Beyond the Lawn: Unique Outdoor Spaces for Modern Living. " Reese suggests that beauty of another sort is promoted by the new Better Homes and Gardens Bird Gardens: A Year-Round Guide to Creating an Alluring Haven for Birds.
It's an accepted fact that what Americans want they want right now, and Reese even describes a new gardening book answering this urgent need. It's Fast Plants: Choosing and Growing Plants for Gardeners in a Hurry by Sue Fisher (Fireside). "It's for people who don't have their landscaping in yet, who want something to look good quickly," he explains. Fisher suggests 100 different species of shrubs, conifers, climbers and perennials that produce results without trying one's patience unduly.
"Both niche and general gardening books have their places," says Reese. "There are good vegetable books, good plant-specific books, and there are good books for adventurous gardeners who want a very special kind of garden." Speaking of special—for the brave soul who yearns to grow bananas in, say, Michigan, Reese offers Palms Won't Grow Here and Other Myths: Warm-Climate Plants for Cooler Areas by David A. Francko (Timber Press). Another Timber Press title that Reese mentions addresses a potential threat to the handiwork of even the best gardeners—the just-published A Color Atlas of Pests of Ornamental Trees, Shrubs and Flowers by David V. Alford is "a real rogue's gallery of plant pests, with a description of life cycles and hints on how to control them. If you're interested in bugs, you'll find them all there."
Roger Waynick Cool Springs Press Counting on Backlist
On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of Cool Springs Press, the gardening publisher he founded that became a Nelson imprint two years ago, Roger Waynick sees the big picture. "Our challenge when we first started was to prove to retailers that regional gardening books would sell," he says. "The challenge today is to continue to come up with new series and new titles."
Waynick isn't, however, waxing nostalgic about earlier economic times. With an 80% increase in sales last year, Cool Springs is upping its annual number of titles from 17 in 2002 to 31 in 2003. "People are not traveling as much because of the economy, and when we're not traveling we're at home and trying to create our own little Eden there," says Waynick. "I'm just happy that 10 years ago I didn't start publishing travel books." Instead, the press's first title was the Tennessee Gardener's Guide. "It had no color and no index and it sold out in a week and a half," recalls Waynick, "and I thought, 'this may be a pretty good idea.' "
Cool Springs books approach gardening region-by-region, rather than attempting to cover the entire gamut of seasonal situations found in North America. For example, the house's bestselling titles are the Gardener's Guide series, a primarily state-by-state line that totals 28 titles. "National books don't answer the questions that gardeners have," explains Waynick. It's not just the balmy parts of the country that are covered by Cool Springs books, either. "We've done books on Minnesota and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and Illinois. Gardeners there are so excited about seeing the sun in spring," he notes.
Today Cool Springs sells books through five different sales channels: discount mass merchandisers, home improvement stores, chain bookstores, independent bookstores, and lawn and garden centers. "We've seen sales increase at all five, and sales are pretty evenly split," observes Waynick. Return rates for Cool Springs books remain low, ranging from less than 5% to a high of 14%.
Improvements in technology have increased profitability as well. "Ten years ago it was prohibitive to produce 8,000 or 10,000 full-color books," recalls Waynick. "That has changed substantially. Now technology allows us to reprint in quantities of 5,000, 7,000 or 8,000."
And Cool Springs has several new series in the works as well. One debuts this spring with Tough Plants for Southern Gardens and is expected to grow to encompass five or six regions. Cool Springs is also developing a series on drought-tolerant gardening for these ecologically challenged times. "That series grew out of relationships with lawn and garden centers, who told us that it's something their customers deal with every August," says Waynick. Cool Springs seeks such feedback aggressively: marketing staff and authors conduct 300 to 400 events across the country each year.
Despite the ongoing creation of new series, Cool Springs counts heavily on backlist sales, with half of all revenues deriving from previously published books. Waynick hopes to increase that share of revenues to 75 or 80% in coming years. "To me, strong backlist sales mean our books have lasting importance to the consumer."
Denise McGann Country Homes & Gardens Book Club A Hands-on Membership
"We used to be all about beautiful. Now the emphasis is on practical," says Denise McGann, editor-in-chief of the Country Homes and Gardens Book Club. "We are repositioning ourselves." Since coming under the umbrella of Bookspan in 1996, the book club has doubled its numbers, to more than 200,000. But growth has come to a standstill in the last year and a half, says McGann, and the club is struggling to find new members. "It's a function of the economy—people are cutting back on entertainment-type expenses." McGann estimates that 60% of the club's selections are decorating books, with the number of gardening titles steadily increasing.
Most popular with club members are the proliferation of titles that treat the garden as if it were another space to live in (The Outdoor Living Room, The Comfortable Garden, At Home in the Garden). "People want to decorate it, if you will," says McGann. "They want to make it look pretty. More and more books deal with garden decorating and 'hardscaping' with fences, gates and walkways. These books work for my audience, who like curb-appeal aesthetics. If you want interiors to look nice, you want exteriors to look nice. We love these books."
Because gardening comes to a halt for long periods in most parts of the country, the club doesn't offer gardening books year-round. "We begin in December and go through July, as the publishers do," says McGann. "Each cycle we usually offer three to five gardening books, which will stay in the catalogue as backlist." The publishers with titles most interesting to the club, McGann says, are Clarkson Potter (P. Allen Smith's Garden Home is a main selection); Meredith (for its Better Homes and Gardens imprint); Sterling ("especially now that they've acquired Hearst"); and the Vermont-based, Workman-owned Storey Books ("their books are looking great"). "We always like higher-priced books, because we discount," McGann says. "Garden Home is $30, a good price for us. We can do a nice discount of 20% and offer a good deal for our members." McGann estimates that as many as 40% of the garden titles published are offered by the club.
"We're trying to position our choices as enabling you to do it yourself and save money," McGann says. We did phenomenally well with Sherri Warner Hunter's Creating with Concrete, a Lark Books title that was $24.95. We were surprised; our members are really hands-on. We thought they gave the books to their decorators, but they're doing the projects themselves. We've always done well with idiosyncratic titles like David R. Stiles's Sheds: The Do-It-Yourself Guide for Backyard Builders (Firefly Books). That's done well for five years."
What doesn't work for the club? Ultra-serious or highly detailed horticultural books such as those published by Timber Press. (Bookspan spun off the Garden and Landscape Design Club for the serious gardener and landscape architects.) High-end books don't sell either, McGann reports, nor do titles on vegetable gardening. "Men are the vegetable gardeners, and they are not our club members. Books on trees, lawns—men's domains—we can't sell them. Our club is women." (The typical club profile, she notes, is a "well-heeled woman over 45.")
Margot Schupf Rodale Lasagna in the Garden
The soft economy hasn't hurt sales of gardening books, or at least not the kind of gardening books published by Rodale, according to Margot Schupf, executive editor for lifestyle books. "Everybody is so price-point sensitive these days that if you're publishing highly illustrated gardening books it's a tough job," says Schupf. "But we don't typically publish a lot of highly illustrated gardening books."
What Rodale does publish are gardening books targeted to a broad market that include organic techniques. In fact, incorporating organic principles is the hallmark of Rodale books on the subject. "Our founder, J.I. Rodale, coined the phrase 'organic gardening,' " says Schupf. "The first Rodale publication was Organic Gardening magazine, and we just celebrated its 60th anniversary."
Rodale has a long history in not just traditional publishing, but one-shot books sold through direct mail and other offers—which in addition to boosting book sales has resulted in a database of 50 million active names. Often titles are published more or less simultaneously as both trade paperbacks for a bookstore audience and hardcovers to be sold through direct mail. "In an ideal world, for Rodale, all books would be both trade and direct," says Schupf. The Gardener's Weather Bible is one example of a book offered in both formats. The $21.95 trade paperback recently reached stores, while a $29.95 direct-mail hardcover edition will roll out in May.
One of Rodale's strengths lies in its expansion of gardening techniques series over the long-term. The Lasagna Gardening series, for example, involves layering various seeds and soils so that the reader doesn't need to dig. "Lasagna Gardening for Small Spaces came out last year and did really well in bookstores and through direct mail, and next year we'll have Lasagna Gardening for Herbs," says Schupf.
Perennials are a long-time workhorse in the gardening category, for Rodale as well as for other publishers. "Excuse the pun, but perennials are a perennial topic," says Schupf. Rodale's Illustrated Encyclopedia of Perennials has sold more than 125,000 copies in paperback and hardcover; a revised edition is due in fall 2004.
In addition to plants, birds are addressed by Rodale gardening titles such as The Backyard Bird Feeder's Bible. Birds of a different feather populate the pages of Chickens in Your Backyard, a book Rodale originally published in 1976 that has sold approximately 63,000 copies to date. "It's a small trade paperback and it regularly pops up on our weekly sales tracking report," says Schupf. "It may be the Martha Stewart influence."
When asked what upcoming trends she sees—deriving from Martha Stewart or elsewhere—Schupf says, "Frankly, there isn't a lot of white space in the gardening market. We have a really extensive backlist, and sometimes we come up against competing with ourselves." Since the field is so, well, picked over, Rodale is looking to expand its gardening program by moving into lifestyle books with a gardening component. Schupf reports that the publisher has just signed a book on flower arranging with 1-800-FLOWERS. "They're such a strong company and there are a lot of synergistic opportunities."
Susan Crittenden Powell's Books for Cooks and Gardeners Of Roses and Puppets
Known as "The City of Roses," Portland, Ore., is home to thousands of passionate gardeners and a seemingly endless variety of garden clubs—the Hardy Plant Society of Oregon alone boasts some 2,300 members. "Despite what many people think, we don't just have English cottage gardens here," says Susan Crittenden, manager of Powell's Books for Cooks and Gardeners. "Portland has residents from around the world who have brought with them their gardening experiences and wisdom." The happy result, says Crittenden, is a city of gardeners who are "unrestrained buyers," and their enthusiasm gave the store its best Christmas sales ever in 2002.
While Crittenden can't single out one category as the store's sales leader, she does cite books specific to gardening in the Pacific Northwest as consistent sellers. Books on tropicals, such as Dennis Schrader and Susan Roth's Hot Plants for Cool Climates (Houghton Mifflin) are also increasingly popular ("we can even grow bananas in the Willamette Valley"). The somewhat unlikely bestseller on the Powell's Web site is B.C. Mollison's Introduction to Permaculture (Tagari)—"we've probably sold 100 copies since December," reports Crittenden.
What's decidedly not high on Crittenden's list of favorites are books on annuals. "You can find all you need to know about them at your local garden center." Crittenden also finds most coffee-table titles "utterly useless. I hate to see publishers doing more of them when they could be doing more monographs." She also notes a need for additional titles on hillside gardening and gardening in difficult places—"gardening in big muddy pits or in extreme weather or in soil too bad to amend. And," she adds, "there's a real dearth of good gardening writers."
While Crittenden admits to having been "fairly negative" about the quality of last spring's titles, she's very optimistic about the 2003 crop of gardening books. "After 10 or 15 years of doing this, you get a bit stale seeing the same thing over and over again, but this year, publishers are actually providing books that fill in gaps in the experienced gardener's library." And it's not difficult for Crittenden to name her favorite titles for the new season: Roger Phillips and Martyn Rix's The Botanical Garden: Trees and Shrubs and The Botanical Garden: Perennials and Annuals (Firefly)—"They're so beautiful it's like plant porn." On a more subdued note, Crittenden also has high praise for two monographs: Timber Press's Genus Epimedium by William Stearn ("something long awaited by the gardening community") and Guy Gusman's The Genus Arisaema from Koeltz Scientific.
According to Crittenden, the store employs a variety of techniques to entice customers out of their gardens, including "wonderful gardening remainders" and handselling by a staff that includes several seasoned gardeners. But the surprising promotional standouts of the last few months, she notes, are children's books: Annick's The Mole Sisters series by Roslyn Schwartz. "We ordered the books and the Mole Sisters finger puppets on a whim, and we're selling 30—40 books and a dozen puppets a month." The Sisters occupy a prominent display at the front of the store, which features tiny willow furniture purchased specially for the puppets' lounging comfort.
