A OWS group tried to protest in a nearby large city by blocking a bridge in a poor part of town – blocking the working poor from going home. The police chief said he wasn’t arresting anyone and all the police left. Furious, the protesters left within the hour. They are a bit of a self-serving bunch.

All books have to be written and layouts have to be done and covers have to be made. But e-books don’t have to worry about press runs or warehouse storage or returns on unsold books.

So maybe its time for Pagans to follow the trend and create a niche market ebook publisher – Pagan books: 101 and beyond

in reading the comments i particularly noted and agreed with the sentiments about genre books. they do narrow your target market….even though with “pagan” books the subject matter may be relevant for more than those people who self identify as pagan….the label could be thus damning.

As a bookseller, I can tell you that there is a market for more advanced works, but not as big as the market for intro level books, for a couple of reasons: First, a more detailed and in-depth book focuses on a specific topic and thus speaks to fewer people than a broad introduction. Second, some people never advance beyond 101. They jump ship or pick another path to study.

To help fill that need, small presses in the US are using Print On Demand (POD) to try to fill in the gap left by some major publishers. (Note that a major metaphysical/pagan publisher isn’t that big compared to the ones which put out New York Times Bestsellers). But frankly, often their covers are poorly designed (most people do judge a book by the cover) and small presses do have a problem getting both the word out and their books into stores. Barnes & Noble is just too big and their buyers probably wouldn’t give an independent press much notice.

There is no way to make a Pagan book a bestseller like there is in the mainstream. There is no media equivalent of the Oprah Book Club for Pagans. When I, as a bookseller, search for good titles to carry, I find dated recommended book lists where as many as half of the titles are out of print or only available overseas. Nor is there an equivalent of Christianity Today in print or online. The closest thing is the Patheos Pagan Portal, and that is a relatively new thing. How many pagans out there know of it? So even if a book is reviewed, how many people read that review?

Getting the books into specialty stores:

Independent stores like ours prefer to work with large book distributors or specialty distributors like AzureGreen, New Leaf, or lately, MagusBooks, because we only stock one or two of most titles. But lately the distributors are failing to keep small-press books in stock, they are “available to back-order” but it might take a month to get them in because they wait until there are enough to order. Many indie publishers have just gone with the Amazon/Createspace model so they can sell both e-Books and Print-On-Demand with the full marketing of Amazon, basically bypassing indies like us. For instance, when I just searched “Loneliness and Revelation” on Baker & Taylor, it’s available to back-order. So, if I want to get it in any sooner, I need to track it back in the supply chain to O Books then to NBN Distributors, then to a .pdf of a list of reps who I need to contact via e-mail. Then there are new minimums we need to meet, so we need to try to select even more titles from the publisher, with mostly just intuition/gut instinct, the title and the cover to tell us what we should carry.

The other place we’re finding interesting books is academic presses. But often these are not offered by distributors and we have to order direct. They are also often very low margin, AKA no profit, books, and they often require a large number of copies of a single title. So if they aren’t pre-sold, it’s pretty-much a no go for us. We found out about these books through a local academic who lead an “Egghead Pagans Book Club” at our store a couple of years back. With more than a dozen members, and a strong beginning, we worked hard to track down the books and get them from the publishers. But in the end, we got burned on many of the titles because only two or three would buy the book (they’d get it from the library) or they would buy it on Amazon to save two bucks. Also, it turns out one of the books was available as a free PDF online.

Large publishers know how to market intro books but are clueless as to how to market “smart” niche books. They think they don’t sell because they slap a semi-comic-book cover on it and a “catchy” title which misrepresents the book. This does get a certain segment to pick it up and page through a bit and find it too obtuse and put it down. But the people who would actually want the book, find it useful and challenging and all those good things won’t even pick it up because it looks like a 101 book. So we, as booksellers have to hand-sell them. “The cover is awful, and the title misleading, but but the book is wonderful, here . . . look inside.”

The other problem with some of the larger publishing houses is simply the expertise required to be able to judge a more advanced manuscript. How many times have you picked up a book which was supposed to be more advanced and found out it’s just 101 1/2, a different angle of rehash of the same topics as the basics beginners book?

So what do we do? How do we get the good works out there and into the hands (and heads) of the readers? I love the idea of a Book Club model, both online and off. I’d like there to be something which would include independent stores like ours, who could supply the books as well as meeting space, because I’d love to participate. But it should also be available in other areas without a local store or center to host, or for people just on the internet.

Heck, I’d even be happy with just an ongoing list of beyond 101 books worth pursuing and reading. I’d like a Pagan “Shelf Awareness”

As a side note, I would be delighted to join a Pagan book club, should anyone start one in the Toronto era.

Now, I do my bit to try to raise the bar. I had a wonderful time teaching the graduate-level course in ritual theory through Avalon College this year and look forward to offering some more serious academic work. I read and recommend serious pieces, including those books of yours I have (need to get the lonliness one soon). Clergy training at CWABC and CWAA has some intellectual rigour and we are bringing forward people with a taste for the depths.

And a last point – I generally don’t read “Pagan” books (with exceptions) but books dealing with topics that interest me, which often include ritual, mythology, philosophy etc. Genre writing is also problematic.

Blessings,

sam

I think the book club idea is a good one. There need to be more Pagan book clubs.