Let’s say you own a business. You have a specific clientele. However, there is unlimited potential for expanding your business even though it might offend some of your current clients. Your expansion plans need not affect those clients and would clearly benefit this untapped market if you could reach them with your product. The market surveys indicate this new market is anxious to enter into purchases if you could just open up your product to include more variety of similar though not identical offerings.
Overall you feel fairly secure within your chosen parameters. Although the economy has affected the quantity of product you produce, the clientele remains steady if not indulgent. Is now the time to take a chance and expand? Add on those who wait for your new and different version of product? Time to be visionary like a couple of your competitors? Of course those couple of competitors can afford to take losses more easily than you can, but, hey, how did they get to be bigger than you are anyway if not by expansion and product development?
Hmm. You don’t know. Maybe it’s better to reduce product for awhile, sit on what’s safe, and hold steady. Yeah. That’s what you’ll do. Maybe in the future you’ll address that untapped new market. But maybe by then your competitors will have that market secured in their pockets. And you’ll be stuck with the same old, same old . . . and they’ve sampled everything you’ve given them over and over again. And are starting to look elsewhere.
Such is the Christian book publishing industry. Or so it seems.
While there is nothing wrong with establishing a clientele and putting their desires at the top of the list, it is short-sighted and unimaginative to alienate a potential market by ignoring their desires to sample an expanded product. Imprints serve a purpose when a publisher wants to delve into an untapped (for them) genre or style to serve a different audience/market.
Don’t misunderstand me here. I’m all for any business choosing, refining, and specializing in whatever product they desire to produce. However, if you’re in the book business facing the joys or perils of the e-book craze, depending on how you perceive it to be or feel about it, publishers can potentially be affected by custom-publishers with POD and e-book adaptation technology. Authors who know how to use publicity can choose to use these technologies and promote their work for a possible greater gain. And those authors won’t be bound by archaic demands or to a restricted market.
What do you think?
Father, may we all follow you. You’ve ordained our steps, and it’s you who matters most. In the Name of Jesus, Amen.
Into the Fire 
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