Publishing: How underdeveloped is the LDS Market?

In the discussion about last week's message on the need for a Mormon market, I pointed out that the Mormon market is 'undeveloped.' By that I mean that it lacks the infrastructure needed to effectively deliver products both to those that know they want them and to the rest of the potential audience for Mormon products.

I suppose the fact that no one disagreed with me might mean that this lack of development is obvious. Perhaps. But what may not be obvious is where the market for Mormon products is undeveloped. Today I'm making a list of at least some of the areas where the market needs development. Some of these areas are fairly simple to correct, IMO, and others are very difficult. Many of the changes simply occur because of the standard practices among the companies in the market -- something that could change almost overnight, if the companies would do it.

Please, if you have additional areas where the Mormon market needs development, let me know in a comment to this post.

[I should note that I came up with many of these simply by comparing what I've seen in the Mormon market with what exists in other book and media markets. Undoubtedly others have insight into the problem that I do not.]

1. The Mormon market lacks a wholesaler.
In the US national market, Ingram Book and Baker & Taylor are the most important wholesalers, carrying between them books from basically everyone. But most LDS bookstores don't seem to know the difference between a wholesaler (who sees its clients as bookstores and tries to make it easy for them to purchase books) and a distributor (who sees its clients as publishers, and tries to represent them to the market). In fact, the Mormon market has plenty of distributors, but no wholesalers. An LDS bookstore often has to purchase books from either the publisher or its exclusive distributor. The LDS bookstore only has one source for many books. [Although some LDS publishers do sell to Ingram and Baker & Taylor, but the fact that Deseret Book does not sell its LDS titles to wholesalers, and the relative ignorance of LDS bookstores about wholesalers, means LDS bookstores don't purchase from them.]

2. Missing genres
If you compare the Mormon market to the national market, you see many genres that simply don't exist or are under represented. Sometimes this means that the genre simply doesn't make much sense or is percieved to not make sense (think LDS erotica). Other times I wonder if it doesn't simply follow general taste in Utah versus other places. Science Fiction is quite weak in the Mormon market, but historical fiction and romance fiction are thriving. Serious fiction is holding its own, but Westerns and Mysteries are uncommon or non-existent. The worst is non-fiction, which has whole subject areas where Mormon-related titles make sense but don't exist. Current event non-fiction is a big hole (where's the book exploring the controversy over school prayer from a Mormon perspective?)

3. Lack of Publisher specialization and a permissions market
A striking feature of the national and international book fairs is the focus on rights and permissions. Publishers regularly sell the right to render their book in another language or format, or to create a derivative product. They do this because they don't have the ability to effectively do this themselves. For example, the US publisher of Harry Potter, Scholastic, purchased the right to publish the book in the US market, while other publishers purchased that same right in different countries and languages around the world. The UK publisher did this because it doesn't have the ability to effectively sell the book in the US. Scholastic, for its part, may sell the right to create an audio book of each title, as well as licenses to create back packs, notebooks, and a host of other US products based on the book.

Unfortunately, in the Mormon market no one seems to sell rights at all. Part of the reason is that many of the obvious rights that might be sold have no market (for example translations into other languages -- see #4 below). But part of the reason is that publishers think they should do everything themselves.

A good example of this is audio books. Covenant Communications innovated this product in the Mormon market, providing dozens of titles by the mid 1980s. As much as anyone, Covenant was the specialist in the Mormon market for audio books, just as many companies in the national market do the same. Instead of selling the rights to make their titles into audio books to Covenant, the other, larger, companies in the Mormon market (notably Deseret Book and Bookcraft, since purchased by Deseret Book) made their own audio products.

Now I don't know who made this decision. Did Deseret Book decide not to sell? Or did Covenant decide not to buy? Doesn't matter. The bottom line is that instead of publishers specializing in areas where they are or can become better than any other publisher, everyone is trying to do the same thing as everyone else. And its not just in audio books where this has happened. Other formats -- large print books, electronic products, and even hardcover vs. softcover books have the same problem.

4. Publishing in other languages
This will be the subject of a forthcoming post here. Bottom line is that the Mormon market (not including LDS Church Distribution) currently provides more than 5,000 products, and less than 100 of them are available in Spanish. Give me a few days and I'll cover this item further.

5. Lack of infrastructure publishers use
This could also be its own post -- and may if I can get to it later. The main resource publishers need is authors, but the Mormon market is weak in the places national publishers find authors. We do have a few journals and magazines that cover Mormon issues, but these are generally academic journals (Dialogue, Sunstone, Journal of Mormon History). We have only one literary magazine (Irreantum) and no genre-based magazines. On the non-fiction side we have nothing -- no magazines. No non-fiction magazines or newspapers (OK, we do have the Church News) means few, if any, journalists writing on Mormonism and mormon issues. In many non-fiction areas, no journalists means no authors.

Well, I'm certain there are other areas. I'll comment myself as they occur to me -- or I'll post further on this subject. Each one of the above may bear further discussion, to be honest, because so much needs to be covered.

And I look forward to the areas others bring up -- I'd love to explore them with you.