Lausanne World Pulse – International Publishing – Beyond the Printed Book: Redefining Publishing in the Twenty-first Century

By Renato Fleischner
October / November 2011

Recently, we launched a new edition of The New Living Bible in Portuguese. In order to spread the new translation’s concept, every day a Bible verse is tweeted. The uniqueness of this new translation has been shared in an unprecedented way.

We are also on Facebook. There, we post copies of the messages we send via Twitter and insert links to our website updates.

The website is also a fundamental tool to our publishing strategy. Besides the company website, we have created sites for some of our new releases. A good example is a site designed for young girls. For this audience, we publish a devotional Bible, fiction, nonfiction, and devotionals.

Secular magazines for girls have given us several good reviews. There is no quality difference between our books and similar books published by Brazil’s largest general publishers.

These young readers’ responses and feedback have given us insights for future publications. Girls are sending us questions on faith issues, behavior, and health. They are listening to songs, reviewing our series, and more. Their desire to interact online has exceeded our dreams.

Mundo Cristão also publishes a magazine, Seu Mundo (Your World in English), that provides details of new book releases, author interviews, and articles. It’s free and can be read online.

Our website also offers free book chapters and allows reader to share their reviews.

Paper Is Not Dead
Despite predictions of the death of the printed book, we don’t believe it will happen any time soon. We have been distributing printed books as never before and believe that digital and paperback can live in harmony. For those who publish printed books, printing technologies for small quantity and larger print runs have opened new possibilities.

Despite the economic crisis facing many printing companies, some are still investing in new equipment. Advances in software such as InDesign and Adobe Acrobat and the spread of broadband networks reduce a book’s production time. In the early 1980s it took ten years to develop a Bible translation; now it takes five years.

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Renato Fleischner is editorial and production director at Mundo Cristão Publishers, Brazil’s largest independent Christian publishing house. He studied journalism and has an MBA in marketing. He has worked in the publishing industry for twenty-two years, nine of those at Mundo Cristão.