Pregnant Moment for B&N Publishing

By Steven Zeitchik, PW NewsLine -- Publishers Weekly, 12/8/2004

Put Great Expectations into the bn.com search engine and the first book to pop up isn't the Dickens classic--it's the latest B&N publishing project of the same name, an "all-in-one resource for pregnancy and childbirth."

The book, a 700-page tome organized by week from Sandy and Marcie Jones (and probably the only book not recommended for sustained lifting by its intended audience) was announced last month and got a special marketing push today with a full-page ad in the NY Times. It's the latest instance of a reference-oriented niche dominated by one or two publishers (in this case, Workman's What to Expect When You're Expecting) that B&N is trying its hand at. The bet, as per usual: that the chain's reach and the book's low acquisition costs (and strong backlist potential) make it a no-brainer.

Previous forays of this sort are numerous. They include B&N Books' The Perfect Name (current market leaders: SMP's books by Linda Rosenkrantz and Meadowbrook's by Bruce Lansky), which released in October; The Baseball Encyclopedia (leaders: SMP's The Sports Encyclopedia and Sport Media Group's Total Baseball); Barnes & Noble Basics series (leaders: Wiley's Dummies and McGraw-Hill's Idiots); and Spark Notes (leader: Wiley's Cliffs Notes).

At press time, it appeared that What to Expect would still be carried by the chain. The book also came up, avec discount, on the bn.com site. And in several regards, Workman has an advantage--the company's book is actually slightly less expensive than the B&N paperback and, unlike Spark Notes' already strong position among students or the Workman title, Expectations doesn't come with the built-in seal-of-approval.

Perhaps recognizing this, the ad featured several testimonials, while a press release emphasized how this book is for "the 21st century," a seemingly direct response to its competitor, which first published twenty years ago (though the book remains a bestseller on any given week). Peter Workman, who founded Workman, declined to comment on whether his company was changing its distribution strategy, or when we might expect them to do so.