To book publishers this Christmas: You better not pout, you better not cry.
That's easier said than done for an industry that has been battered by the meteoric rise of e-book readers and tablet computers. According to a Pew Research Center study conducted in January 2012, the number of devices nearly doubled after last Christmas, pushing traditional book publishers like Covenant Communications of American Fork to take stock of their strategies to survive.
"E-books are a huge sea of change, a huge challenge," said Robby Nichols, vice president for marketing at Covenant Communications. "It's phenomenal. It's mind-boggling."
The 23-employee publishing company headquartered here sells nearly 1 million books a year. But it faces fresh challenges as it's attempting to adapt to the e-book's continued surge in popularity on one hand, and the growth of online retailers with razor-thin margins on the other.
According to an annual survey known as BookStats, which includes data from nearly 2,000 publishers of all sizes, e-books have surpassed hardcover books and paperbacks to become the dominant format for adult fiction.
But in a twist, the consumer move to e-books has forced bookstores to dedicate more space to non-book items like DVDs, clothes and even home decoration in an attempt to recover the loss in sales revenue from physical books, or p-books as it is known in the industry.
"The number one selling product at Seagull Book is not a book; it's a DVD," said Mr. Nichols, referring to the movie adaptation of Christmas Oranges, which Covenant helped create and distribute, the latest example of a publishing company finding innovative ways to generate money outside of the turbulent print business.
Once a publisher of the Book of Mormon in the LP format, Covenant Communications now sells CDs, DVDs and about 400 e-books available for download, all via its distribution channels, mainly LDS bookstores that dot the English-speaking world. But though the LDS church is growing, independent bookstores are a shrinking bunch, slowly choking Covenants' channels.
The fact that new revenues from e-books fails to make up for the drop in book sales is now forcing the American Fork company to look elsewhere to survive, acquiring new skill sets in the movie business, home decoration and a line of modest clothing.
The clothes line, which launched this summer at Seagull Book, is proving to be the right move for a publisher looking to diversify. A few months after the launch, the LDS church changed the age requirement for missionaries, prompting a surge in enrollment and a potential demand for modest clothing.
"We have a committee that meets every week," Mr. Nichols said. "We have to generate new ideas for products every week. We read three to four manuscripts, but we also brainstorm new ideas -- that's part of it."
As the centuries-old trade of book publishing is reaching new, deepened complexities, a team from Covenant Communications travels every year to New York and learns about the latest trends. So far, the hard work seems to be paying off.
"Our sales this year are up compared to last year. That's a positive," Mr. Nichols finally said. "There aren't a lot of book publishers that have positive years."
Danny Crivello can be reached at crivello@citizen.af, via text at 801-477-6397 or on Twitter.
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