I just saw LDSP’s new post and learned that there are more than just Granite in the little distributors game. Anyone know how they’ve succeeded in growing the market?

I do not think so.

Quite to the contrary. I think free is an important and underrated tactic — one that should be used more.

BUT, it isn’t always the right move. There are times when free doesn’t work.

It depends on your strategy and on the situation you face.

If you don’t have a strategy that takes advantage of giving away things for free to eventually get sales (or, as I was discussing above, to eventually build a market) or whatever your goal is, then free is a bad tactic.

Likewise, if the situation or environment won’t allow giving away products for free to help you to reach your goal, why do it?

As for the development of a “true future Mormon Culture,’ I don’t think we will ever have such a thing. Language, if nothing else, will prevent a common culture from existing.

We will have related subcultures within the various national and regional cultures where Mormons manage to get enough concentration to create a subculture.

When these things will develop is a good question. I don’t claim to know.

I just think that Church members around the world need something, and many are actually begging for cultural supplements to the Gospel.

I think that even Cumorah’s numbers are optimistic. A more realistic assessment, also from Cumorah, is here. Persistent high turnover in membership prevents the establishment of an identifiable “culture.” In any event, the ecclesiastical reality such a plan would face is underscored here.

Ultimately, I believe the true future of Mormon “culture” will come only as Mormon artists acquire legitimacy in non-Mormon markets, and then are reabsorbed by the Mormon subculture. Without the imprimatur of the church, the Mormon artist is largely without honor in his own country.

I don’t know if Mormon subcultures will develop — or perhaps they do but they may not develop as a viable cultural market. It’s quite possible, after all, to be a Mormon whose expression of LDS-ness is confined to products and events directly sponsored by the institutional church.

If it weren’t for my association with the AML and A Motley Vision, I would know a lot more Mormons that are gamers or sci-fi geeks or Jane Austen-philes than readers of Mormon fiction.

I’m not sure the pie can be made bigger … if the market has been defined by Deseret Book (and it pretty much has) then the only pie you are going to get is the narrow range of product categories (and the narrow range of allowable content within those categories) that DB offers.

This is a very interesting question. I’ve always assumed that with the growth of the Church, it is almost inevitable that the pie not only grow, but that the definitions shift because of the other cultures that are represented.

I tried to show in a previous post that I believe a Mormon culture is important and needed. And I suspect that in the long term, with enough growth, a Mormon subculture will exist in every country — uniquely Mormon in each case, but also reflecting the local culture as much or more than the Mormon culture we now see on the Wasatch Front. The commonality among these cultures will come from the beliefs and practices of the Church, and not necessarily from what we now know as Mormon culture.

So in the far future, I’m sure that the pie will be much larger and much more diverse than what we now know.

Of course, in my lifetime, its possible William will be right.

Unfortunately, I think this line of discussion grossly exaggerates the actual size of the market outside the “Mormon Corridor.” We’re also grossly exaggerating the size of the Mormon population outside the U.S. Activity rates have to be figured in, and they are not pretty.

Actually, I’ve made some estimates, mostly using the activity rates at Cumorah.com, which I believe are pretty good. I’ll have to write them up some time in a way that others can follow. The 14 largest languages (or countries, when the country speaks multiple languages) ranked by number of active Church members are:

English 2.5 million
Spanish 930,000
Portuguese 250,000
Philippines 135,000
Nigeria 32,500
Samoan 29,000
Japanese 25,000
Tongan 22,500
Korean 19,000
German 11,000
Ghana 10,500
Tahitian 10,000
French 9,500
Taiwanese 8,500

Please don’t treat these as gospel. I need to review them and redo them when the new Deseret News Church Almanac comes out. Also note that the Phillipines, Nigeria and Ghana represent multiple languages — I don’t have any way of dividing these numbers up.

In addition, in order to get a proper sense of each language, we need to factor in the ability and propensity of members to purchase books.

But even so, it seems clear that Spanish and Portuguese should have enough members to support a fledgling LDS market. When LDS books started being published in earnest in the 1880s, the Church had approximately 250,000 members total.

And, it should be noted, books were being published in a variety of languages: Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Welsh, French, German, Hawaiian, Samoan, Tahitian, Dutch and a little Spanish.

I guess my point is that while I don’t know what others are thinking, I believe I’m being realistic with the numbers.

It would be interesting (and incredibly expensive) to do a survey of American active LDS and find out what their media consumption habits are. And then choose, say, the top 5 genres/modes of entertainment and try to create an LDS-audience-oriented review site that mixes the Mormon with the gentile and reviews both to the same standards, that is for both “appropriateness” (or at least a range of appropriateness with content warnings) and production values/craftsmanship. Might be to diffuse to do much good. But I remain intrigued by certain non-Mormon cultural products that tend to have a lasting effect on American Mormon culture (Depeche Mode, the Princess Bride, the God’s Must Be Crazy, Newsies).

Paul Coelho pirates himself after pirated translations appear on the net

and

the ultimate antipiracy weapon.

I’d have to see some hard numbers that would justify the up-front capitalization.

Agreed.

The same thing with Harlequin creating the Steeple Hill imprint once the value of “Christian romance” had been demonstrated. They didn’t create the genre, but are more than happy to profit from it now that it has matured.

“Would that someone cared enough about our music to steal it!” An informal study was recently done tracking the piracy rate of Sundance films. The piracy rate was zero. Pirates don’t bother pirating Sundance films. It’s not worth the bother.

Studio Ghibli’s IP is worth about a billion dollars in Japan, which is why Disney bought the worldwide distribution rights. But it is unlikely Disney would have bothered releasing Ghibli films in the U.S. unless John Lasseter at Pixar took a personal interest.

The suits were pretty much right: despite high production standards, the Disney name, and an Academy award, Ghibli films have not made money in the U.S. market–or at least the kind of money that justifies the capital expenses involved.

In other words, anime importers don’t spend two million prepping a title for release, but more like $20,000. Ten years ago it was $2000. Twenty years ago it was $200 and pizza.

Unfortunately, I think this line of discussion grossly exaggerates the actual size of the market outside the “Mormon Corridor.” We’re also grossly exaggerating the size of the Mormon population outside the U.S. Activity rates have to be figured in, and they are not pretty.

I’d have to see some hard numbers that would justify the up-front capitalization. I don’t think they exist. Of course, there is an institution that has been creating brick & mortar infrastructure all along, but I think the phrase “when hell freezes over” then becomes germane.