Mark Schoenwald: Discovering Publishing

When Mark Schoenwald came to Thomas Nelson in 2004 as v-p of sales, he was not, as we sometimes say in the industry, a “book person.” He had worked for 20 years managing companies for venture capitalists, including those that made gifts, gardening products, and home goods. And he quickly found that publishing is a very different kind of business.

Now president and CEO of HarperCollins Christian Publishing, Schoenwald says he discovered that “publishing is unique—it’s a mix of art and science. There’s a constant ebb and flow between the creative and business aspects.” Although every business is about relationships to some degree, that is even truer in publishing. The connections between authors, readers, publishers, retailers, and distributors are crucial, he says, and those relationships “must have longevity and not be just transitional” or based on a certain project.

“Publishing is an unpredictable business,” Schoenwald notes. “It’s very hit-driven, and you can’t just take a formulaic approach.” Working in a business in which all of the capital is invested up front, with no guarantee of success, was also new for Schoenwald. “With books, you lose the ability to predict, to anticipate what’s going to happen,” he says. “A publisher has to be future focused and brave, with the ability to lead and operate under a fairly high level of risk.”

Schoenwald enjoyed the new adventure, but he also discovered the negatives. He had to absorb a new language: “There were a whole bunch of new acronyms and terms to learn—OP, frontlist, backlist.” The downside of publishing as a business? “It’s not very efficient,” he notes. “Returns were a new concept to me.”

Coming into Nelson through sales was helpful, says Schoenwald. “In sales you have to take the customers’ point of view. I had to learn the industry fast, so I was lucky there are so many experienced folks here, people who have been with the company for a long time, and they were always willing to help.” One of the things he enjoys most is publishing’s collegiality, he says, not just within HCCP, but also among “strategic partners, authors, and retailers.”

One of Schoenwald’s distinctive strategies as a chief executive in Christian publishing has been championing women, who have traditionally been confined to editorial roles or relegated to lower-level managerial positions. A quarter of HCCP’s executive board is women, and Schoenwald has promoted several to v-p positions.

“Women understand our customers, since the majority of books are bought by women,” Schoenwald says. “They also tend to be relationship driven and very efficient, having had to balance work and family life.” Women can be “corporate pathfinders, coming up with different ways to get things done,” he says. “I am always looking to identify young female talent in the company and put them in informal mentoring situations.”

Born and raised in Grand Forks, N.D., Schoenwald worked in his father’s small catering company and found he liked business. The family moved to New Jersey when Schoenwald was a teenager, but he returned to his home state to earn a degree in business management from the University of North Dakota. Raised Catholic, Schoenwald married a Methodist and now attends a Methodist church in Brentwood, a suburb of Nashville.

Ticking off what be believes are some of the ideal qualities for a leader—be trustworthy, lead with integrity, work harder than anyone else, help others—Schoenwald adds, “This is a people business, so you must have empathy. Everyone, especially the author, is deeply emotionally invested in a book. You can’t just go by the numbers.” —Lynn Garrett

Mary-Kathryne Steele: Faith in Diversity

Mary-Kathryne Steele has compelling reasons for her mission to fill the void in the market for multicultural children’s religion books. Growing up in Southern California, she was surrounded by immigrants, including her father, a Polish Catholic who survived a Nazi concentration camp. Her childhood was peopled by Sikh neighbors, German friends, Korean grocers, and mariachis playing at Mass at the local Catholic Church. She was raised with “a lot of exposure to different cultures,” Steele says, and a mother who consciously taught her children about diversity.

Then, at age 17, Steele was accepted as an exchange student with the American Field Service, which sent her to a live with a host family in South Africa. It was 1980, “the height of apartheid,” she says. “It definitely made me more politically and culturally aware.”

Now president of World Wisdom, based in Bloomington, Ind.—along with its children’s and teen imprint, Wisdom Tales—Steele is putting her values into practice. The separate children’s line, which officially launched in 2012, strives to educate kids (and their parents) about world religions and important spiritual figures. One new title is Mahavira: The Hero of Nonviolence (Wisdom Tales, July), one of the few U.S. children’s books ever published on the Jain leader. Other Wisdom Tales books have looked at Native American traditions, Persian fairy tales, and the adventures of the Hindu god Krishna.

Producing and marketing beautiful, high-quality books about minority religions is not easy, Steele says. “It’s not just pop culture. We’re looking at a very different goal than some other companies. A lot of our books have something to do with nonfiction, so right away it’s a very niche market.”

Still, the response has been not only emotionally gratifying but also commercially successful enough to keep the imprint in business. This year, seven of World Wisdom’s 11 titles will be children’s books, the most the 34-year-old company has published in a single year. “We decided to concentrate on some of the children’s titles, which actually take up a lot more of our time and resources than the adult titles,” Steele says.

It’s an investment that is paying off. The Wisdom Tales brand is becoming increasingly known and respected. At this year’s BookExpo America, two Wisdom Tales books won Ben Franklin awards, which led to an opportunity for the company to run book trailers at the Children’s Book and Author Breakfast.

“I think we’ve been very blessed as a company,” says Steele. “The outpouring of support we’ve felt from teachers, parents, and librarians has been amazing. People want tools to help them celebrate diversity—there’s more openness now.”—Jana Riess

Mark Kuyper: Urging Innovation

For the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association, 2014 is a year of note. The association is celebrating 40 years of service to the industry, and ECPA president and CEO Mark Kuyper is marking 10 years of leadership with the organization.

Kuyper’s experience in Christian publishing goes back nearly 30 years. He managed a Family Christian Stores outlet and spent more than 10 years at NavPress, first as a customer service supervisor and eventually as sales director. From 1996 to 2004, he was v-p of business development and marketing for the Christian Booksellers Association (CBA), now known as the Association of Christian Retail.

Christian publishing has changed radically since his days in retail, Kuyper says. “When I ran the store, publishing was about physical books that were discovered in a physical store. Christian publishing was about equipping Christians to understand God’s Word and apply it to their lives. I now see publishing as making a message publicly known whether it is 140 characters, a blog, an e-book, a traditional book, a website—anywhere content is found, in any format, on any device, and of any length.” Because of the proliferation of formats, authors’ messages can be spread faster and with more accuracy than ever before, Kuyper says.

The publishing industry’s pain points are the same for religion as for any other category: discovery, competition, and creating and cultivating relationships with readers. “When I worked at NavPress, the goal was to get shelf space. Along with print and radio ads, that’s how books were discovered,” he says. “With so many physical outlets closing over the last several years, the demise of many periodicals, and increasing media options [for readers], it’s difficult for consumers to learn about new content.” But, he adds, “I think the new [e-book] subscription services will aid in this process.”

Physical stores can still play an important role in discoverability, Kuyper says, and retailers should be determined to deliver what customers want. “There are great electronic recommendation tools, book clubs, portion samples, and other tools, but it will take a lot more to match the visibility and accessibility of a store.”

The competition facing books is more complex today, with the plethora of information and entertainment options vying for consumers’ attention. “The vast improvements in the ease and quality of self-publishing and digital-only publishing means the stockpile of content has increased exponentially,” Kuyper says.

With the popularity of blogs and social media, nurturing relationships between writers and readers has become more crucial—and more demanding—than ever. “Publishing today is like buying the perfect gift for a close friend or family member,” Kuyper says. “You need to know them thoroughly and anticipate their needs. You have to craft the content to their exact specifications and know how to deliver it at just the right time. Publishers never had to know the reader this well before, and it takes a whole new set of tools and skills in content development, marketing, and even direct sales to pull it off.”

As the head of ECPA, Kuyper has a wide-angle view of Christian publishing. “More than anything, I hope the industry can be inspired to innovate,” he says. “How do we move beyond turning print books into e-books and engage more people in more content? We have the capability to take any length of content, about any subject, and deliver it to nearly all people, virtually anywhere in the world. What will we do with it?”

Leaders in the industry must change with the times. “Publishing has traditionally been a slow, plodding process. Not anymore. Leaders need to be agile, move quickly, and make more on-the-spot decisions than ever before,” he says. “They need to be experts in organizational management, knowing when to develop capabilities in-house and when to outsource.”

But Christian publishers will also need to remain true to their original mission, Kuyper says. “They need the wisdom to create content that is true to the foundations of the faith, while conveying love, care, compassion, and respect to people everywhere.” —Kathleen Samuelson

Fred Appel: Building the List

Asked what he might be doing if he weren’t an editor at a university press, Fred Appel is a little stumped. Pushed, the 50-year-old supposes he would enjoy leading canoe trips in northern Ontario and Manitoba, his home province. Mostly, though, he wants to continue acquiring and developing scholarly books for Princeton University Press, where he is executive editor. He feels lucky to be doing what he loves and working with “really smart and delightful” colleagues and authors. “I want to just keep doing what I’m doing, and do it even better.”

Appel didn’t grow up wanting to be a book editor. He came to publishing late by industry standards, when he was 36. By then he’d gotten a Ph.D. in sociology at McGill University and started down the familiar academic track: teaching, completing a postdoc, and turning his dissertation into a book. But permanent academic jobs were scarce, so in the absence of a tenure-track position, he parlayed what he says was a “great experience” doing his own first book into a career in publishing.

He’s never looked back. “I have insatiable curiosity,” he explains, noting how important that quality is for an editor in a rapidly changing and competitive scholarly publishing environment. Although Appel’s main areas of acquisition—religion, politics, anthropology, and sociology—haven’t changed much as he’s risen through the Princeton University Press ranks since 1999, the industry as a whole has been through a number of seismic shifts.

E-books, once dismissed as a fad, now make up 11% of PUP’s sales. Amazon has become the press’s #1 customer, and the ready availability of used books means that academic publishers have to update and repackage content more often than ever before. “I’ve learned over the years to be as attentive as I can to the backlist, and to not take it for granted,” Appel says.

Appel’s acquisitions have included a number of award-winning stand-alone titles and several series, including the innovative Lives of Great Religious Books series, which explores how famous books and sacred texts of world religions have been received in different times and places in history. Volumes on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Book of Job, and others will soon be joined by installments on the Tao te Ching and Calvin’s Institutes—the latter just in time for the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation.

About the future of academic publishing, Appel says, “I’ve never been very good at crystal ball gazing. I focus on building and diversifying my list.” Appel’s goal is to “encourage scholarship that explores how faith communities interact with each other and influence each other culturally, politically, economically. I’m fascinated by these sorts of encounters through history.” —Jana Riess

Daisy Hutton: Playing to Strengths

In an interview that is supposed to be about her, Daisy Hutton opens by singing the praises of a colleague. Again and again she highlights the contributions of former mentors and current team members. The v-p and publisher of fiction for HarperCollins Christian Publishing says she values leadership that ensures “every single team member is doing work that plays to their strength.”

Hutton didn’t set out to be a publisher, though she was always keenly interested in books. She went to graduate school in comparative literature, but “realized that I would much rather be working with authors, and supporting them, than talking about them.” So after completing her master’s degree at Washington University, she found her way to New York, where she worked as an editorial assistant for the literary agent Georges Borchardt and his wife.

That agency in the late 1990s was a heady place to be. Hutton sold foreign rights and aided the U.S. publication of many French-language titles. Everyone working in the agency was trained in contracts, a proficiency that stood Hutton in good stead during her subsequent 12 years in rights jobs at Perseus Books Group, the Harvard Business School Press, and Thomas Nelson, where she led the rights department from 2008 to 2012, when the company CEO encouraged her to apply for the fiction position she now holds.

Hutton is passionate about stories—which is a good thing for someone who releases about 100–120 titles a year, approximately half of which are frontlist. Even though it’s unusual for a fiction editor to come up through a rights track, she says it’s a bonus. “From a content perspective, what selling rights teaches you is to be format agnostic, to imagine all the possibilities for your content.”

Some of the challenges of today’s publishing industry look like opportunities to Hutton, including industry consolidation. When Thomas Nelson was sold to HarperCollins in 2011, she was “thrilled” that the buyer was a publishing company that was “so incredibly committed to fiction.” Having the Harper imprimatur has helped to raise the profiles of both Nelson Books and Zondervan (both now under the HCCP umbrella) with the New York agents Hutton is pursuing.

Meanwhile, several publishers have gotten out of the inspirational fiction marketplace. “B&H stopped doing fiction; Guideposts shut down their fiction program; and then Cook and Moody recently announced that they’re scaling way back,” Hutton says. Those losses are sad, but also “a great opportunity for us,” she says.

Hutton is optimistic about the outlook for Christian fiction, and determined to care for the three constituencies that matter most to her: authors, readers, and employees. “We all have to be very flexible and open-minded about the decisions that are going to lead us into the future,” she says. “All bets are off. We can’t just be looking into the past for models.” —Jana Riess

Carlton Garborg: All in the Family

Publishing is in Carlton Garborg’s DNA. In the 1980s and ’90s, his father, Rolf, along with Rolf’s brothers and nephew, owned Garborg’s Heart ’n Home, a calendar and gift book publisher for the Christian market.

“I cut my teeth in the industry working with them for four years starting in the late ’90s,” says Garborg. “My dad was a colporteur as a 22-year-old missionary in Puerto Rico, selling Christian books door-to-door for over two years.” In the 1970s, Rolf and his brother, Kent, launched Successful Living, which distributed books to racks in drugstores and other retail outlets. “[My dad] also worked for Zondervan and for Word Publishing in the ’80s,” Garborg says.

While at Word—then based in Dallas and later acquired by Thomas Nelson—Rolf Garborg wrote The Family Blessing: Make a Profound Difference in the Lives of Your Children Through the Simple Daily Act of Blessing. Still in print 25 years later, the book has sold 350,000 units worldwide and been published in several editions, most recently by Group Publishing (Sept.).

“Being around my dad growing up—then again working for Garborg’s and later with Summerside Press [the family’s fiction imprint]—was really training by osmosis, like an old-school apprenticeship,” Garborg says. “They gave me my start, as well as a strong backbone and understanding of the market and what it takes to be unique in the marketplace. They also taught me that you don’t have to be big to be an innovator or leader in the industry.”

That strong foundation helped propel Garborg into publishing—first as president of Summerside Press and the Ellie Claire gift line (both were sold to Guideposts in 2010; Worthy acquired Ellie Claire in 2013 and Guideposts folded Summerside), and now as president and CEO of the newly formed BroadStreet Publishing Group, which will publish nonfiction, fiction, a new Bible translation, and a line of content-driven journals under its Belle City Gifts imprint. Garborg and his partners, Paul Bootes (Authentic Media) and Jerry Bloom (Publisher’s Factory Outlet), operate the business out of Bloom’s 200,000-sq.-ft. warehouse in Racine, Wis.

“Most of my focus is around product acquisition, development, and sales, which is really where my passion lies,” says Garborg. “Launching a new publishing company from your basement is no small task,” he adds. Garborg established BroadStreet Publishing in January and formed the partnership with Bootes and Bloom in July to broaden the company’s reach in packaging, sales, distribution, and retail.

“There are so many pieces to the puzzle that have to come together just to get it off the ground,” Garborg says. “I heard or read somewhere that you need a strong calling, gifting, and anointing before you start any business. The calling is what you do, the gifting is how you do it, and the anointing is God’s blessing on it. Without all three, you don’t stand much of a chance.”

In publishing, Garborg says, “the challenge is understanding the market enough to know how to be unique in a crowded space. You have to weather a humble beginning to allow yourself to grow large enough that customers are willing to give you a vendor number.”

Garborg hopes BroadStreet’s books will connect with readers, “to encourage, engage, inspire, and impact [their] lives with the message of Jesus, and that our books will resonate enough that [readers] want to tell their friends about them or give them as gifts.” He adds, “We view ourselves as a hub that extends the reach of [an author or organization] to touch as many lives as possible.” —Kathleen Samuelson