Interview:
Luke Lewis

What role did Langham play in Christian publishing before you started working with Ingram?

Before 2012, we had been working in partnership with several major publishers as a library distributor for academic texts in theology and biblical studies for several decades. Our focus was on supplying Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Eastern Europe, areas outside of the traditional Western Christian trade, I.e., North America, Western Europe, and Australia.

What motivated you to start publishing books yourselves, and what challenges did you face?

We really wanted to serve a need for scholars from Africa and Asia who didn’t necessarily come with significant name recognition internationally and therefore weren’t getting many opportunities to publish. These authors were unlikely to be immediate best sellers, so we needed to think very carefully about how we could take on the costs of becoming a publisher in a way that wouldn’t sink the wider Langham ship. We really wanted to limit our risk while serving as many authors as we could. So, in 2012 we started looking for a service provider that could help us do that.

Why did you choose Ingram?

We had first-hand experience of the quality of your Lightning Source print-on-demand operation through our library supply, but what set Ingram apart was the strength of your connection to the global wholesale market. Being able to print in the UK, the US, and Australia with a short lead time and avoiding the costs of importing books into those markets is also a major benefit.

Langham also uses Ingram for eBook distribution. Could you describe your experience with that?

We wouldn’t have been able to get involved in eBook distribution in the way that we have without Ingram’s CoreSource service. After experiencing difficulties with another provider, we signed up for CoreSource Plus, which allows us to manage all our digital assets, such as PDFs and e-pubs. It has helped us simplify our digital distribution process, pushing our eBooks out to the market and receiving an income for them, much as Lightning Source has done for our printed books. CoreSource makes our books available on a vast number of platforms. We're grateful for that because as a small team that now publishes about 50 books a year, we just don't have the capacity to deal with contracts for every single different digital supplier that's out there. eBooks now account for about 15% of our gross sales. We are also starting to use CoreSource for our audiobooks as well.

Are there any other ways working with Ingram has benefited Langham?

Ingram’s Lightning Source print-on-demand service has enabled us to avoid having significant capital tied up in stock, which allows us to be more flexible. It means that we can invest that money into new books, into marketing, and into various other projects, rather than it just being in books that sit in our warehouse and that are eventually written off year on year. We now have just under 400 titles published, but when we compare how much stock we’re holding versus how much we had back in 2012, it’s a lot, lot less.

This year we also opted into an additional tiered discount programme that applies when we order 250 copies or more from the UK. We found that as things started to pick up after lockdown, and our authors and their networks were doing a lot more in-person events, we were suddenly needing 100 or 150 copies of a selection of titles several times over the course of 12 months. Having much faster print turnaround times while still getting a significant discount has allowed us to be extremely responsive, so that is a huge benefit.

What advice would you give to publishers considering working with Ingram?

I think you need to look at the long term and what's sustainable. We never know what's around the corner. We've seen with the pandemic that things can change quite quickly, and nothing is necessarily the norm. If you’re a publisher, what you do well is identifying content and putting it into print and nowadays into digital too. You want to make sure that you partner with a service provider that complements your strengths as a publisher and that can help you with the areas that you find the most challenging.

Luke Lewis was interviewed by Alistair Pitts, Marketing Specialist and Laura Dolan, Key Account Sales Manager at Ingram Content Group.

This interview was originally published in the November-December 2022 edition of Together Magazine.