Introduction and Episode Overview

Part 1 of 2 · Ep. 37

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Mormon Stories Podcast depends entirely upon the voluntary contributions of you its listeners to keep Mormon Stories alive. Please consider donating today@mormonstories.org to make a donation to Mormon Stories. Just click on the Make a Donation button at the top right of the MormonStories.org website. Thank you for listening.

John Dehlin [00:00:29] On December 28, 2006, Desrite Book, which is owned by the LDS Church, announced the acquisition of two of its top competitors, Seagull Book and Tape and its sister company, Covenant Communications. Based in American Fork, Utah, Covenant Communications is one of the largest publishers of LDS themed books and games. Seagull Book and Tape is an LDS oriented discount book chain with 26 stores throughout Utah, Idaho, Arizona and California.

John Dehlin [00:00:57] According to Sherry Dew, President and CEO of Deseret Book Company, after lengthy analysis and discussions spanning many months, we reached the conclusion that this acquisition could benefit both Siegel and Deseret Book customers as well as authors working with both Covenant Communications and Deseret Book Publishing. We feel that Deseret Book as a full service book retailer and Segal as a well established discount book retailer, not only both enjoy tremendous brand loyalty but but between them service the LDS market well. Our strategy is to continue to build both brands.

John Dehlin [00:01:31] Mr. Kofert, the founder and owner of both Segal and Covenant, adds, this is the perfect transition for Covenant and Segal. Deseret Book was an ideal choice to make this acquisition and I fully expect the companies to complement each other going forward.

John Dehlin [00:01:48] But many members of the broader LDS literary and publishing communities, as voiced on blogs such as motleyvision.org are concerned earned does this concentrate too much power in the hands of Deseret Book? Could this mean higher prices and less choice for consumers? How will this affect Mormon authors? Finally, how might this impact both the LDS Church and Mormon culture overall? On today's Mormon Stories podcast, we will learn a bit about the history of the Mormon publishing industry and will discuss this acquisition and how it might be good and bad for Mormons everywhere. Your story today on Mormon Stories Podcast.

Welcoming Kent Larsen to the Conversation

John Dehlin [00:02:39] As first in our series on the Deseret Book acquisition of Siegel Books and Tapes, we're pleased to have with us Kent Larsen. Kent, thanks for joining us.

Kent Larsen [00:02:48] Thank you, Ken.

John Dehlin [00:02:49] As I understand it, you're the president of a small company called Mormon Arts and Letters, is that right?

Kent Larsen [00:02:55] That's right. We're an LDS publisher based here in New York City. Something unusual by itself, and we're hoping to provide something new and a little bit different to the LDS market than what you traditionally find through companies like Desert Book and Covenant and Cedar Fort we're trying to promote the high end of LDS literature

John Dehlin [00:03:20] and almost as an act of love, even though it's a for profit company, as I understand it,

Kent Larsen [00:03:24] it is a for profit company. But, you know, there's in a lot of ways, not a lot of money to be gained if you're a very small company. You've got to somehow over years build up to be able to really make any kind of money in this industry, I think.

John Dehlin [00:03:38] Well, we'll get into that deeply. But just to start out with, go to MormonPavillion.com and you guys can check out Kent's company. Well, Kent, you have a lot of experience and knowledge about the LDS publishing industry. So I'd love to begin by having you just tell us a little bit about yourself. This is Mormon stories, so we love to hear stories. Tell us a bit about you, your background and what led you into this industry to start with.

Kent Larsen's Background and Early Life

Kent Larsen [00:04:04] Great. Well, I grew up in the Washington, D.C. area and kind of the 60s and 70s, and you know, we were very far from the center of Mormon culture. And I think that as a result, I was kind of a little bit out of it really in terms of the cultural aspects of Mormonism. We didn't really see anything in terms of Mormon culture. Where I was until the mid-70s when somebody put on a production of the Order Is Love there, you know, the Carolyn Pearson and Lexa Azevedo play musical. And then following that, there was a production of My Turn on Earth and probably Saturday's Warrior and those kind of things there.

Kent Larsen [00:04:45] But there wasn't a lot or very much access to Elias books and any idea of what was going on in Elias culture there except for what we came to see. At that time, there wasn't any prohibition in the church against having bookstores in the chapels. And so in the foyer of the chapel where I grew up, there was a kind of a cabinet full of LDS books.

Kent Larsen [00:05:16] Few and far between, really. Not a lot of stuff there, but there were some LDS books there. It was just hard to make that connection where we were into LDS culture. So instead I was kind of influenced by the social and cultural movements of the 1960s and 70s.

Kent Larsen [00:05:34] Watergate had a pretty big impact. I remember in sixth grade being in just after Watergate had happened and being in the playground of my elementary school and somebody being Mormon. And my family was fairly conservative and Republican and somebody brought up Watergate and I remember telling them clearly, watergate, schmodergate, it'll all blow over. Nothing.

Kent Larsen [00:06:03] But after that I kind of got involved with, well, not involved. I got interested in understanding a lot of that. I started reading Doonesbury, the comic strip, and that influenced me quite a bit. And I think the. Overall, the social movements did have quite a profound effect on my life and my thinking. I'm still somewhat suspicious of COVID ups of larger companies and organizations and government to a degree too. I just, I don't. Perhaps as much as I should.

John Dehlin [00:06:39] Right. So not necessarily a huge Bush fan.

Kent Larsen [00:06:43] Not at this point. I mean, I'm still a Republican, but, you know, I don't know. I think this guy makes Republicans look bad. I think we should have. We should have gotten rid of him. Not a good, not a good president.

John Dehlin [00:06:54] Okay.

Kent Larsen [00:06:55] Not in my opinion.

John Dehlin [00:06:56] So that's a nice cultural fermentation for what came later.

Kent Larsen [00:07:01] Yeah, I. I've always been a pretty big reader too. I remember being in elementary. Well, it was actually in junior high school. I found a little section in the school library of science fiction and there I went. I'd dive into a book and surface a day later or something like that once it was finished and my homework suffered and all that stuff.

John Dehlin [00:07:26] An avid reader.

Kent Larsen [00:07:28] I was definitely an avid reader. Summers were heaven because I could finish four or six or more novels in a week and it was great stuff. So by the time I got to high school, I think a lot of this influence really kind of started gelling in my life. I got involved with a little student alternative newspaper. Really kind of a mimeographed opinion sheet that we'd pass around to the other students on in the school at the lunch tables. I don't think we did more than about. We might have done 10 issues or something like that. A lot of fun, but not very responsible journalism, that's for sure. What's high school? What do you want?

John Dehlin [00:08:18] Sure. No, that's exciting though.

Kent Larsen [00:08:21] It was a lot of fun. I guess at that point. Really the bug of wanting to get into publishing, of getting the written word out and distributed to people, really bit me and everything. Since I've been extremely interested in that kind of thing, that kind of exploration of how to. How to tell people what's going on in the world.

John Dehlin [00:08:40] Sure. And wake them up a bit. Right.

Kent Larsen [00:08:43] Well, I think so too. Yes, people. I think we all do that. We kind of dive into our own little worlds and only things that are important are the things that actually affect us on a day to day basis. And there's more to life than that. By focusing so narrowly, we often miss not only fun and interesting things, but also things that eventually affect us yeah, sure.

John Dehlin [00:09:10] Being short sighted.

Kent Larsen [00:09:12] Exactly.

BYU Years and Early Publishing Experience

John Dehlin [00:09:12] So tell us about your BYU experience. I'm fascinated about that.

Kent Larsen [00:09:16] Well, I should mention I served a mission in Portugal and that had a fairly substantial impact on my life, perhaps more than most missionaries. But I only attended BYU following my mission. Graduated in 1988. And, you know, my mission language led me to get a degree not only in accounting, which I figured I could make money at, but in Portuguese, which is. That's a little unusual too, I think. While I was there I was quite active and got involved in a lot of different things. Involved in the student government at byu, the predecessor to the current BY USA thing that they've got now.

John Dehlin [00:10:02] And just to tell the. I mean, for me that's a huge thing. I was at BYU and the Student Review was still popular. It's an underground newspaper that allowed you to get an alternative to the Daily Universe. And here I am talking to one of the founders. What a delightful.

Kent Larsen [00:10:19] Well, yes, exactly. Friends and I, Some friends and I, we. A friend of mine one day started putting posters up around campus, totally without permission, of course, saying that we should meet at a certain time on a certain day. This is during spring term, I think it was. So it was outside of the normal semesters and suggesting that there needed to be alternatives to the universe. And I think we met with 10 or 15 people that day and everybody complained about the universe and everybody said it was a good idea. And at the end of the day, I think three or four of us really stayed around for more than five minutes after everything ended to talk about what we would do and how this would actually came to happen.

John Dehlin [00:11:05] Did you feel all sneaky and subversive or did you feel idealistically driven too much?

Kent Larsen [00:11:13] I think we felt mostly idealistically driven. We were interested in finding a publication that was pretty balanced and fair. Remember, I still, especially at that point in time, I was more conservative than I am now, certainly more involved, you know, more toe the line of Republican Party than I am now. And I looked at it and I, I thought it was a great idea. I thought this was an idea. If you had a balanced publication that you could actually talk about things and get people to think about their feelings about issues.

John Dehlin [00:11:53] But if you were ideologically aligned with the church and with even probably many of the substance of the Daily Universe, why did you feel a need for a more balanced approach?

Kent Larsen [00:12:04] Because the Daily Universe is and still is today much more a lab paper that is a paper that exists for students that are learning the details and the techniques of journalism than a Paper that is meant to serve the news and the needs of the students.

Kent Larsen [00:12:25] The Daily Universe. We see stories in there all the time about, you know, local issues to Springville and Heber and other cities around Provo that where there was no student population to speak of, it was just, you know, they suggested to the student who was the journalism major, oh, well, go and cover the, you know, the city meetings in Heber. And so they'd do that. And as students, we felt like it was completely unresponsive to what we needed and what we wanted to speak about. And at the time, in addition, there were issues that came up on campus that.

Kent Larsen [00:13:04] That bothered people. A good example is a minor example in a lot of ways, but a good example was an issue that had happened. I think it was a year or so before the Student Review was founded. A couple of students in the Cougar Eat had seen or discovered cockroaches as they were going about their cleaning and everything that they were supposed to do at their jobs in the Cougar Eat. And they reported it not just to their bosses, but also to. They wrote a letter to the editor or they reported to somebody off campus or I don't know exactly what it was, and they were fired. Okay.

John Dehlin [00:13:48] Right.

Kent Larsen [00:13:48] And the Daily Universe wasn't covering the issue. You know, should students be fired for reporting this stuff outside of their chain of command?

John Dehlin [00:13:56] Right.

Kent Larsen [00:13:58] Again, given my influences, my life, I, of course, thought that they should be. Be able to report this. You know, that whole whistleblowing function is kind of important. So we felt like the Daily Universe, as a result, was quite unresponsive to students. I don't think that the journalism people disagreed too much. You know, a lot of them looked at it and said, well, we're trying to train journalism students. We're not trying to address the needs of the community necessarily.

John Dehlin [00:14:26] Right. How aware were you guys of the 70s press, the predecessor to the Student Review?

Kent Larsen [00:14:32] Very aware.

John Dehlin [00:14:34] When did light go out on that?

Kent Larsen [00:14:37] My memory is. And I could have this wrong. My memory is about 1982.

John Dehlin [00:14:42] Okay.

Kent Larsen [00:14:42] We started up in 1986.

John Dehlin [00:14:44] And do we know why it went out of business?

Kent Larsen [00:14:47] It's my understanding, and I'm no expert on it, but it's my understanding that some of this articles printed in the 70s press basically annoyed the administration. They had articles that dealt with. There was an interview with Sterling McMurran, for example, where he admitted that he basically didn't believe the Book of Mormon to be a literal history, but rather an important book for, you know, as a mythology type thing. And there was other stories that they'd had in there. Something about a patriarch of the church who'd had some issue come up with his life that was not very flattering. Other things like that. I don't know all of the issues and all of the articles that they published, but there were plenty of articles that got people upset.

John Dehlin [00:15:43] So this is the last question I'll ask, but I want to do a whole show on the student review. But you must have known then that the Brethren might not be keen about a new alternative newspaper, but you went

Kent Larsen [00:15:56] ahead and do it anyway. What happened is we met with the administration all during that summer trying to work out the details of how we could found an alternative student newspaper and actually be on campus. And by the end of the summer, it came down to the first week of School that September, 1986, and we had a conversation with the.

Kent Larsen [00:16:18] I think it was the Dean of Students or it was a vice president for Academic for Student affairs or something like that. I'm not remembering off the top of my head the name. But, you know, we had all these meetings with him. And basically at the end of that time, he finally was honest and said, look, there's no chance that you'll get on campus. In fact, there never was from day one.

Kent Larsen [00:16:44] So that just got us angry, you know, and we decided, okay, we're off campus. We never distributed through the bookstore. We never distributed on campus. We went out and bought a bunch of stands and put the stands up at strategic places that were entrances to campus and let people, you know, grab them on their way as they were running into campus.

Kent Larsen [00:17:08] That was the main place of distribution. There were no copies in the bookstore. One of the things that killed the 7th East Press was exactly that. 7th East Press was dependent on distribution through the bookstore. And we never were right.

John Dehlin [00:17:23] And I'm sure that my listeners are understanding why I'm asking these questions, because these issues are not totally irrelevant to the. To the topic of the Deseret acquisition of Segal, So.

Kent Larsen [00:17:33] Absolutely. Distribution is still a huge issue in the LDS product industry and, you know, huge issue for. For. For LDS Church members, regardless.

John Dehlin [00:17:46] Right.

Kent Larsen [00:17:47] We'll go into that later, I'm sure.

Post-BYU Career in Commercial Publishing

John Dehlin [00:17:48] So tell us about Post byu.

Kent Larsen [00:17:51] Well, I. My wife did better than I did. She, I guess, was a little bit less distracted with so many things to do. And she got a graduate position here at Columbia University in New York City. And so we came here to New York City.

Kent Larsen [00:18:10] I figured with an accounting degree, I could find a job. And sure enough, I soon landed a position at Henry Holt and Company, now part of the company that owns St. Martin's Press. It's a large traditional book publisher here in the United States.

Kent Larsen [00:18:27] And I've been kind of working on and off in the book publishing industry almost ever since I worked at Bantam, A.A. dell. In addition to Holt, I worked at a small children's book publisher called North South Books, which really opened my eyes in a lot of ways to issues of international publishing and the importance and what can be achieved through international publishing and some of the challenges that are there.

Kent Larsen [00:18:54] And then about almost five years ago or five years ago at this point in time, I discovered a small company up for sale called Lusso Brazilian Books, which was and still is the premier importer of Portuguese language materials for the United States.

Kent Larsen [00:19:16] So I purchased the company and now import thousands of books a month from Brazil and Portugal and sell them to universities and colleges, including byu, of course.

John Dehlin [00:19:26] What types of books are these? Like novels like Gabriel Garcia Marquez?

Kent Larsen [00:19:29] It's the whole gamut. It's everything from materials for learning Portuguese to classics of Portuguese and Brazilian literature, to whatever the latest novel is, to even translations of US books into Portuguese. You know, I've still got a ton of copies of different Danielle Steele novels on the shelf.

John Dehlin [00:19:52] So no Spanish, all Portuguese.

Kent Larsen [00:19:54] All Portuguese. We purposely stay away from Spanish. There's tons of people that are doing Spanish and we're basically the only ones doing Portuguese. So we keep to our niche.

John Dehlin [00:20:04] So you have a tremendous amount of experience in New York style hardcore commercial publishing then?

Kent Larsen [00:20:11] I do. I don't pretend to know everything. I wouldn't put myself out as an expert, but I do have a lot of experience and I've been studying the industry ever since. While I was at Bantam, I got an MBA from New York University. And while I was there, I was definitely paying attention to how what I was learning coincided and worked with book publishing and what the differences were. And I think I found some holes in my education and my MBA as a result, because book publishing doesn't fit the traditional products style marketing that they teach in business schools. I've learned in other ways too. There are academic journals for publishing that I've followed over the years and professional books that I look at and read. And I still read Publishers Weekly. Wow.

John Dehlin [00:21:08] Well, that's excellent. It's an excellent background to maybe bring us up to date a bit on the history of the LDS book industry. So would you mind diving in a bit?

Kent Larsen [00:21:20] Sure.

John Dehlin [00:21:20] And bringing us up to speed on what led to this important moment last Week.

History of LDS Book Publishing

Kent Larsen [00:21:26] Okay. Well, LDS book publishing has got quite a long history, much longer than what, than what most people realize. I mean, for example, there was a Wikipedia article that I ran into a year or so ago, it was not a long time ago at all, just a year or so ago, about the LDS publishing industry. And they had it starting in the 1970s, like there was nothing going on before that.

Kent Larsen [00:21:55] It's just not right. Publishing started, of course, almost as early as the Church. The Book of Mormon is, of course, a publication, but by 1937, you had books like Polly P. Pratt's A Voice of Warning that were published as missionary tracts. And not long after that, you had even works of fiction and poetry coming out.

Kent Larsen [00:22:18] The missionaries that would go around, one of the tasks they would have, as we went around to different cities, would be, especially in the principal cities, to start a newspaper. Here in New York, they started a newspaper called the Prophet, which later became the New York Messenger, a weekly newspaper, all Mormon stuff. And there'd be poetry in it, there'd be even some short stories.

Kent Larsen [00:22:42] Polly P. Pratt wrote a little short story, for example, called A Dialogue of Joseph Smith and the Devil. And it was totally didactic, you know, totally a piece that was meant to try to persuade people to believe in Joseph Smith, but it was fiction.

Kent Larsen [00:23:03] That kind of style of publishing continued for many years up through the 1870s or 1880s. And independent actual publishing companies really started to exist by the 1880s, 1890s, at least with the company George Q. Cannon and Sons, that was, of course, a member of the First Presidency who owned this little book publishing outfit. And he would publish materials that were church related, most of them doctrinal, but there was some fiction going on. I believe he was the one that published the book Added Upon, a novel by a man named Nephi Anderson published in 1898, and that until it went out of print in, I think it was 2001 was the longest, other than the Book of Mormon, longest piece of fiction that had been in print in the LDS market.

Kent Larsen [00:23:59] It had been printed for literally more than 100 years. Wow. And if you read it, you kind of get the feeling, oh, Saturday's Warrior was based on this. There's a lot of similar things, themes and ideas in it.

John Dehlin [00:24:13] What's the title again?

Kent Larsen [00:24:15] Added Upon.

John Dehlin [00:24:16] Added upon, huh?

Kent Larsen [00:24:18] Yeah. I'm hoping to do a new critical edition of Added upon as part of the works that we'll do in the next year or two. It needs to be back in print. I think it's an important book, maybe not great written but it's certainly an important book.

John Dehlin [00:24:35] Right.

Kent Larsen [00:24:36] So by the time the early 20th century came along, you know, 1910, 1920, George Q. Cannon and Sons merged with a printing operation that the church had under what was called the Deseret Sunday School Union, the predecessor of the Sunday school organization in the church today. And they merged that together and it became Deseret Book. And Deseret Book really controlled the entire market, except for a little bit of private publishing up through roughly the 1950s. At that point in time, a company called Bookcraft was started. And Bookcraft, I think, was revolutionary for the market at the time simply because it published stuff that Deseret Book never imagined could be published. They also managed to get a lot of general authorities to write books for them who hadn't or hadn't been able to get contracts with Desert Book. So

Deseret Book and Bookcraft as Competing Publishers

John Dehlin [00:25:40] what were some of the hallmark publications of? I'm putting you on the spot here, but can you think of any of the banner, significant publications of Bookcraft that maybe some of our listeners might have heard of?

Kent Larsen [00:25:50] Probably the most, probably the most important was Mormon doctrine.

John Dehlin [00:25:55] The first edition.

Kent Larsen [00:25:56] The first edition of Mormon. Well, the second edition, too, but it didn't switch publishers. That alone is an interesting story because as I understand it, Mormon Doctrine was published without the knowledge of the First Presidency, even though Bruce Armaconkie was son

John Dehlin [00:26:17] in law of Joseph Fielding Smith.

Kent Larsen [00:26:18] Son in law of Joseph Fielding smith. David O. McKay was the prophet at the time. And when the book came out, the First Presidency became very concerned because they felt that there were problems with it and they were getting a lot of concerns and complaints that the book had a lot of errors, doctrinal errors in it.

John Dehlin [00:26:36] Right. We've actually covered that. We actually interviewed Greg Prince for his David O. McKay book and we talked about that.

Kent Larsen [00:26:44] Right.

John Dehlin [00:26:44] Yeah.

Kent Larsen [00:26:45] The story is that there's apparently a thousand errors that Marion G. Romney came up with in the first edition. And of course, it wasn't until Joseph Fielding Smith was more or less running the church that the second edition came out.

John Dehlin [00:27:01] And was Bookcraft selling a lot more books to the consumer public than Deseret Book was at the time in the 60s.

Kent Larsen [00:27:09] Then I don't know about more, but they certainly had their niche and were getting a lot of general authority books. That Deseret Book was not. That incident with Mormon Doctrine led the church to clamped down on the general authorities and basically told the general authorities, look, you know, you can't go and sign book publishing contracts and publish books without the permission of the First Presidency. You've got to go through this process because we don't want this kind of thing happening anymore. So ever since, in order for a general authority to publish a book, they have to get the permission of the Brethren to go ahead.

John Dehlin [00:27:47] The Bruce Armaconkie Rule.

Kent Larsen [00:27:50] It is. Yeah, it is.

John Dehlin [00:27:52] Okay.

Kent Larsen [00:27:53] I'm sure that. I mean, I know Bookcraft moved on to other things. They did fiction much more than Deseret Book did, and so on and so forth.

John Dehlin [00:28:01] It was pretty much a household name in the 70s and 80s, wasn't it?

Kent Larsen [00:28:05] I think it was. And it came along at the right place. I mean, they had a good 10, 15 years of being really the only alternative to Deseret book. As independent bookstores started to spring up here and there. You had, like, my own experience. You had a lot of wards and branches where they'd have their little bookstore in the closet there somewhere in the building, the church building now. Something the church tells you you can't do anymore. But that's definitely the way it was done in those days.

Kent Larsen [00:28:39] So you had networks like that. Then you had independent bookstores that began to spring out up, often near temples, at least outside of the Intermountain West. So when the Los Angeles temple was put in years later, of course, an independent LDS bookstore was put in there near the temple.

Kent Larsen [00:29:01] When the Washington D.C. temple was opened in 1974, I think I've got that right. It wasn't too many years later than somebody opened this Is the Place Bookstore, which was right near the temple and has been within a mile of the temple ever since.

John Dehlin [00:29:17] Still there.

Kent Larsen [00:29:20] The estimate that I heard is that they do over a million dollars a year in business. Wow. It was, you know, it was a pretty important business. Pretty important store, really.

John Dehlin [00:29:29] And there's no Deseret Book near the Washington, D.C. temple then?

Kent Larsen [00:29:32] No, there isn't. I think in a large way, they've kind of taken that space, you know, and they have the reputation everybody knows there. So that's where you go. In recent years, they've probably had a fall off in sales for a variety of reasons, principally because of the Internet.

John Dehlin [00:29:51] Right.

Kent Larsen [00:29:53] But as far as I know, it's still there, going strong.

John Dehlin [00:29:56] And that's probably a bookstore you frequented regularly in the 70s, huh?

Kent Larsen [00:30:01] Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:30:03] Do we know anything? Oh, go ahead.

Kent Larsen [00:30:05] The bookstore in Southern California near the Los Angeles temple, this is a recurring problem that actually has reflections in the current merger. The owners there eventually wanted to get it out, and so they ended up selling that store to Desert Book. And now it's a Desert bookstore. That has also happened quite a bit over the years. The owners of stores will get to the point where they want to retire, they want to get out. It's time for them to get out for whatever reason, and they have to look around and figure out who can buy it, who can buy these stores. And Deseret Book is, in a lot of ways, it's the main place you can sell them.

John Dehlin [00:30:47] Do we know anything about the relationship between the owners of Bookcraft and the church during that heyday? Was there any tension? Do we know? Do we know anything about that?

Kent Larsen [00:30:58] I don't. Not at this point. It is an area where I'm looking to research a little bit more, and I'd like to know more, but I don't really know.

John Dehlin [00:31:07] Okay.

Kent Larsen [00:31:09] I know that the people that were behind it most recently, including Corey Maxwell, who was, if I understand correctly, he's a son of Neal Maxwell. He's now a vice president of Deseret book, because in 1998, when Desert Book purchased Bookcraft, he stayed with the company, and he's been at Desert Book ever since. So in that sense, I guess he couldn't. They couldn't have been too radical.

John Dehlin [00:31:36] Right. Okay, that makes sense. So what happened next?

Kent Larsen [00:31:41] Also, the issue that you have in the LDS market of keeping things, for want of a better word, appropriate, keeping things doctrinally acceptable to the market. And I think that force is a big force in LDS book publishing and in LDS bookstores. Keeping things so that people feel comfortable with them tends to keep, especially the bookstores in line to where they're not likely to carry things that are too far out.

John Dehlin [00:32:18] Well, let's drill down that in a second. Let's finish up the history real quick, if that's okay. What happened to Bookcraft?

Kent Larsen [00:32:27] Well, I should mention first, before we go to that, that through the 1970s, it wasn't until the 1970s that a lot of alternative and other publishers started publishing started up. There was, for example, Trilogy Arts, which I think will be looked on in. In the future by people that look at this as an important development in LDS publishing. Trilogy Artists was started up to publish Carolyn Pearson's poetry books by your husband.

John Dehlin [00:32:59] Right, by Gerald, I believe her husband worked really hard to help sell her books.

Kent Larsen [00:33:07] It was kind of a grassroots, very revolutionary thing. And they. They put these wonderful drawings by Trevor Southey on the COVID They're just gorgeous stuff. And it was really an important early innovation in LDS publishing that you could have somebody that was publishing poetry, of all things. I don't think before that There had been too many poetry books published, not specifically for the LDS market.

Kent Larsen [00:33:36] So that kind of wave of things is very important. You also had the new wave of Mormon literature that started at that point where you had people like Douglas Thayer and Don Marshall who were publishing books. Orion Books was an early publisher that handled, I think, Doug Thayer's book Under the Cottonwoods.

Kent Larsen [00:34:00] Extremely important new literature that's. That was not being published before because instead of being apologetic, it was trying to look at Mormons themselves and where they were very different, really very modern literature. Very different from even the stuff that Desert Book publishes today.

John Dehlin [00:34:23] Sure. Okay.

Kent Larsen [00:34:26] So throughout the. The industry has developed over time. By the 1980s, there was an LDS Booksellers Association. They hold an annual convention which attracts more than 200 wholesalers, and until recently, 200 or so booksellers. The number of publishers has multiplied and continues to multiply substantially. Some of them have grown up pretty big. Siegel Book and Tape, for example, really started out as Covenant Communications, a book publisher. Well, before that, it was actually a tape publisher. They published audio tapes. That was their niche. And they went from that. And then Desert Books started doing audio tapes as a result. And Siegel Covenant went into book publishing and then started their own chain of stores. And so you had Siegel Books and Tapes that started to grow up over the years and discount LDS books and become really the only real competition to Deseret Book.

John Dehlin [00:35:38] Do you know who the book publisher was or the publisher was for Paul H. Dunn's books and tapes?

Kent Larsen [00:35:42] Do you have any idea for which one?

John Dehlin [00:35:44] For Paul H. Dunn's books and tapes. Did he use Bookcraft?

Kent Larsen [00:35:48] Did he use books? My memory is correct, and I admit I could be wrong on this, but my memory is that it, that it was in fact Covenant Book and Tape, because initially they were the only ones that were doing books on tape market.

John Dehlin [00:36:01] I remember there used to be an entire wall at Deseret Book of Paul H. Dunn tapes and books and stuff.

Kent Larsen [00:36:06] Yeah, yeah. Desert Book, you know, public had to buy a lot of this stuff and carry it.

John Dehlin [00:36:13] Okay.

Kent Larsen [00:36:15] Now, Bookcraft, of course, as I mentioned earlier, was 1998, was purchased by Deseret Book. And that was kind of the beginning of a small series of acquisitions that Deseret Book has made, because after purchasing Bookcraft and integrating that, they then purchased Excel Entertainment, which was a music producer mainly, but also was the first distributor

John Dehlin [00:36:49] of

Kent Larsen [00:36:51] LDS films, and caught. Right on. Caught the whole Richard Dutcher movement of God's army and this whole movement of LDS film that we've seen in the last Five years. And then after taking in Excel, they started up their own wholesale operation where they're now distributing the works of smaller LDs publishers in addition to their own, which was something new for Deseret Book. And finally, now we've got this new merger, this new acquisition of Siegel Book and Tape and Covenant Communications, the sister companies.

John Dehlin [00:37:33] So

Kent Larsen [00:37:36] it's kind of different. You know, you wonder if there's any place for Deseret Book to go to acquire anybody else. I mean, it seems like they've taken the last five to seven or so years, and they've tried to grow by acquisitions instead of by opening new stores themselves. And I think they've done so much of it, I don't know how much farther they could go with that.

John Dehlin [00:38:00] So they have a lot of their own authors. They publish, they're doing distribution, wholesale distribution, and they're now, you know, acquiring lots of retail outlets. You know, I used to work for my. I used to work for Microsoft. So, you know, there's a. There's a tone or a sense. Is there a concern about Monopoly? Is there too much power? Is it too concentrated?

Kent Larsen [00:38:23] And there should be. I. Let me contrast this a little bit. This is something I tried to do a lot because of my own experience. I try to contrast what's going on in the LDS market with what's going on in the national market or what has gone on in the national market. Now, it used to be years and years and years ago that national publishers in the United States did own their own chains of bookstores. Doubleday owned their Doubleday Book shops. Okay? It was quite a famous little chain of bookstores.

Distribution, Market Dominance, and Monopoly Concerns

Kent Larsen [00:38:55] And that made some sense because, you know, you needed the distribution. You needed to be able to be able to get your product out there to where customers could see it and buy it. But by the 1970s, that whole movement of publishers owning bookstores went away for a lot of reasons.

Kent Larsen [00:39:16] Not the least of them is that it was seen as vertical integration, which is something that's protected and discouraged under the antitrust laws in the United States.

John Dehlin [00:39:31] Kind of like film. Film studios owning the. The movie theaters.

Kent Larsen [00:39:35] Exactly right. You can't. The idea is it's not good for a company to own everything from the beginning of the production process all the way to the sales, to the consumer, that there ought to be more than one company along the. Along the lines, because it decreases that company's monopoly power. Okay? Nobody that way can say, oh, well, you can only get our books through Desert Book. Okay?

John Dehlin [00:40:06] Right.

Kent Larsen [00:40:08] Desert Book today, I think, has got the reach that they could just simply say, okay, there will be no independents, independent books, LDS bookstores, nobody else will sell our books. We, you have to buy them through Desert Book. They could then charge whatever they want and, you know, we wouldn't have any choice.

John Dehlin [00:40:26] Right. So lots of power concentrated tends to not be a good thing.

Kent Larsen [00:40:31] Right.

John Dehlin [00:40:31] But would the would the LDS market ever be of such a size that the Federal Trade Commission would ever even see it as significant enough to make some type of ruling or curtailment of that?

Kent Larsen [00:40:42] That's a good question. I was reading on, on, you know, I blog on the blog motleyvision.org and I've, of course, blogged on this issue to a degree already. And another of the publishers, a man I respect fairly, fairly well, his take on the whole thing is Desert Book is an antitrust lawsuit waiting to happen.

John Dehlin [00:41:04] Right.

Kent Larsen [00:41:04] I'm not willing to go that far. I don't know antitrust law. I don't think he's an antitrust law lawyer either. I think I could be wrong. He may know what he's talking about. I know I don't, other than I've had a few business law classes and we cover antitrust. It does seem to me, though, that it's such a large concentration that, gee, if it were the entire US Market, there's no way that the Trade Commission would let it go. Okay. Because it'd be too much of a concentration. The thing that makes it, in my opinion, unlikely is there are alternatives for LDS publishers. Maybe not great alternatives, but there are alternatives. You can go and sell your books to Amazon.com and it's then available to the same market, essentially because Amazon.com sells everywhere the Desert Book sells. Okay.

John Dehlin [00:42:06] Right.

Kent Larsen [00:42:08] How much of an alternative is that? Well, do LDS Church members know that they can get a lot of lds books through Amazon.com or if not a lot, most really books through Amazon.com I don't know. I don't know how well people know that.

John Dehlin [00:42:25] Sure.

Kent Larsen [00:42:27] Let's maybe it's not a monopoly in that sense.

John Dehlin [00:42:31] Right.

Kent Larsen [00:42:31] But as I, you know, on the other hand, from a publisher standpoint, and I think from a lot of the other bookstores nail this market standpoint, if it's not legally a monopoly, it sure feels like one.

John Dehlin [00:42:43] Sure. So let's we're going to come back to sort of an analysis of where we are today and why it might be good or bad. You've done some a little bit of history or some thinking or an outline on the conflict between Deseret Book and Siegel leading up to this acquisition. So let's talk quickly, if you don't mind about that, and then we'll talk about implications more broadly.

Kent Larsen [00:43:05] You know, I can't imagine that they would have gone the 15 or 20 years since Seagull was founded and not had a certain amount of conflict. Okay. They have to have disagreed over things. One of the things you have to remember about the two of them is they are completely different models of how to sell books.

Kent Larsen [00:43:32] Segal Books is a discounter. And generally what that means is they're knocking something off of the price of every book akin to what Amazon.com does. And there are other companies, retail organizations in the national market, that do the same kind of thing. When I was growing up in the Washington, D.C. area, there was a company called Crown Books, and a guy that owned that company used to put out advertisements. And he'd say, at Crown Books, I think books cost too much and every book is discounted. So they were all discounted. Every book. Something off of what the publisher charged, usually based on what kind of discount they could get out of the publisher.

Kent Larsen [00:44:15] In that model, a retailer has to cut costs. They do it by several different ways. Number one is they crowd things. The aisles between the shelves aren't as wide. The shelves go higher. Maybe there isn't carpeting on the floor. Maybe they just have tiling or something like that.

Kent Larsen [00:44:38] There's not as many employees who are around restocking the shelves. And so they tend to get a bit more disorganized. A lot of people don't like that. They feel like it's worth those extra few dollars to go and shop at a more full service bookstore where they don't have to go through that.

Kent Larsen [00:44:58] I should say another classic sign of a discounter is the employees there often are paid minimum wage and they don't know one book from another. The classic story on discounters in bookstores is you go in and ask the employee, where can I find a copy of Moby Dick? And the employee has no idea what Moby Dick is, let alone where it would be found in his store.

Kent Larsen [00:45:33] Whether that's true or had it ever happened or not, I have no idea. But that's the idea behind a discounter. You figure the customers are going to find what they need. Don't worry. Just get it out there where they can get it.

John Dehlin [00:45:45] And that's kind of how siege is.

Kent Larsen [00:45:47] The Deseret book model is a full service model. You know, you can go to the employee, they know what you're talking about.

John Dehlin [00:45:52] Right? Is that true? Is that the Deseret book experience? I've never really talked to employees at a Deseret book.

Kent Larsen [00:45:58] Well, I don't know how well that's true. True anymore. This goes back to perceptions about the industry more than anything. These things are built on perceptions. If you go into a seagull book and tape, compared to a desert book, it will feel more crowded. Okay. Whether the employees themselves actually know more or not, I don't know.

John Dehlin [00:46:23] Okay. But it feels like you got. Feels like you have more support there,

Kent Larsen [00:46:27] you know, it does feel that way. And traditionally, full service bookstores have trained their employees and they tend to hire people that are more literate. But more and more so today in mainstream bookstores. The Barnes and Nobles. To be honest, my experience in Barnes and Noble around the country is that the stores around the country, outside of here in New York, the employees don't really know any more than a discounter's employees would know. But if you go into the employees here in the book, Barnes and Nobles here in New York, they tend to know what they're talking about, mainly because of the size of the audience they're drawing from. They know they can't get away from it. And New York is a pretty heavy book reading population.

Contrasting Deseret Book and Seagull Book Cultures

John Dehlin [00:47:16] And I don't know if we should talk about this, and I don't know if you should talk about this now or later, but I would love to hear you contrast those two experiences from going into a Benchmark Books or a

Kent Larsen [00:47:26] privately owned bookstore, Benchmark Books and a few other book dealers, I don't think you should even really call them bookstores so much as book dealers. It's a completely different experience because they're dealing with a different kind of clientele and a different kind of book they're looking specifically for. For people that are highly interested in specific content. And as a result, they carry used stuff and they carry rare stuff. This is more why they're dealers, because they need to know outside of what the publisher tells them, what something is worth. Benchmark knows. If you go into benchmark with a nineteen 2013 Book of Mormon or Doctrine Covenants, Benchmark knows what it's worth. And they will tell you, I will pay you X amount dollars for it. Okay. You know, if you go into Desert Book, I'm pretty sure this is the case. They don't even deal with used and rare books.

John Dehlin [00:48:31] Right.

Kent Larsen [00:48:31] And so they're not interested in even knowing what it's worth. Okay.

John Dehlin [00:48:35] Okay.

Kent Larsen [00:48:37] Again, it's a different model of selling books.

John Dehlin [00:48:41] And those are maybe the Three main models in the LDS market, is that right?

Kent Larsen [00:48:44] I think those are the three main models overall. There are others. There's door to door sales, There's Internet sales is kind of a different model. And that may be splintering into different kinds of, or may have splintered already into different kinds of stores. There's, you know, there's everything from kind of the book party type idea, kind of the equivalent of the Avon party, you know, Tupperware. That kind of stuff goes on. There's school book fairs and it goes on. There's Legion ways of selling books.

John Dehlin [00:49:18] Okay, so.

Kent Larsen [00:49:21] But in terms of stories, those are the main ones. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:49:23] So Siegel ran into a bit of trouble or ill will with Deseret Book by undercutting them price wise, maybe a little bit too much. Is that kind of how the story went?

Kent Larsen [00:49:32] Well, that's a little simplistic and probably not quite the right thing. Publishers, as you might imagine, always care about how their books are displayed and merchandised and sold. And at least according to Deseret Book, the issue that they ran into this is just more than six months ago when the issue first arose, at least in the public, Desert Book was complaining that Siegel Book wasn't displaying their books. Well, they, you know, and to be honest, the thing that flabbergasted me about the whole thing is my attitude was, well, they're a discounter, they don't display anything.

John Dehlin [00:50:18] Well, right.

Kent Larsen [00:50:19] But you know, a Desert book apparently was not happy with how it was going. You know, it's a matter of sometimes position where the books are put on the shelves, who gets end caps, who gets prominent position, what books are advertised.

Kent Larsen [00:50:38] Going back to what I was saying about publishers owning chains of bookstores, the problem with a publisher owning a chain of bookstore is the bookstore gets put in this conflicting position. Do we promote our sister publishers books or do we promote the books of everyone else? If the bookstore was independent, they'd choose according to what they thought best. But when the bookstore is owned by a publisher, they have this potential of this conflict of interest. Really, I should be pushing the books of the publisher that I work with. So it's widely thought and widely believed among publishers and even booksellers in the LDS market that when it came time for the big sales pushes at Christmas time, for example, you know, Deseret Brook was putting giving all their books Desert Book titles, prominent positions in their stores.

Kent Larsen [00:51:33] And sure enough, Seagull was doing the same thing. They'd give prominent position to Covenant Communications titles instead of Desert Book or anybody else. So you know, it's kind of unfair in a sense, to somebody that doesn't have a line of bookstores because you don't have a place where you can push your books.

John Dehlin [00:51:53] Well, it sounds a little odd for Deseret Book to say, you're not selling enough of my books the way that I want you to. You're not pushing my books the way that I would want you to.

Kent Larsen [00:52:07] That's when it came down to it and the issue hit the public. That's the line that Deseret Book was claiming. You're not doing a good job of merchandising our books. I'm sure part of it was Deseret Book was comparing the sales that they saw through Segal stores compared to the sales that they saw through their own stores, factoring in some of the differences between the stores and saying, what's going on? Our sales are so much lower in Siegel's stores than they are in desert bookstores. Why we should be selling better than this.

John Dehlin [00:52:39] It seems like Segal should be able to decide how they want to. I mean, they're the ones who have made the risks and the investments. They should be able to decide what they want to sell and how.

Kent Larsen [00:52:47] Absolutely. And what happened last summer was Deseret Books said, well, fine, yeah, you can decide how you want to merchandise things. We can also decide whether or not we'll sell you our books at all. And they gave Seagull a month or so and said, at the end of this month, we're pulling all of our books and we're not going to ship any new books to you.

John Dehlin [00:53:10] And I remember the outrage on the blogger nackle and the Internet about that. Did they end up following through on that, or did that get pulled?

Kent Larsen [00:53:19] Well, what happened was Covenant claimed that they had been caught off guard about the whole thing and didn't even know there was that much of an issue. I'm sure they'd received communications over the time from Deseret Books saying, I don't like this. Blah, blah, blah, blah, why don't you do this? And, you know, again, part of it is the difference in the model between the two stores. Seagull Books sells discounted. They don't want to put time and effort into doing all this merchandising. So they don't want to spend time fulfilling exactly what Desert Book wanted.

John Dehlin [00:53:54] Okay, sure.

Kent Larsen [00:53:54] That's cost them extra money, which decreases their profits and their ability to stay in business. So, you know, it's a different model. That's undoubtedly part of the problem that they Ran into anyway, Covenant came back to them, said, hey, let's talk about it. Let's sit down and negotiate. So they sat down, negotiated the deadline, was put off for a month, and the item, the issue disappeared from the news for, you know, until last week.

John Dehlin [00:54:26] And that's when we learned about the acquisition.

Kent Larsen [00:54:29] Yes. Now apparently, apparently these talks, this negotiation over what to do was what led to the acquisition to begin with. Lew Coford, the guy that owned Siegel and, and Covenant until last week, apparently went into those meetings and according to the statements that both he and Deseret Book made to the press, they had a warm and fuzzy time. They both got to the point where they respected each other's other's positions and liked what the other person was doing and understood. And Lou says, Lou Coford says that he has for the past few years been looking for a way because he's an older gentleman at this point, in his 60s.

John Dehlin [00:55:19] Grandfather. He's a grandfather.

Kent Larsen [00:55:21] Yeah, he's a grandfather. He says he said that in the press reports. He's a grandfather. He was looking for a way to get out. Well, we've heard this before. You know, that's the. One of the problems in the LDS book industry is you build this business. What's your exit strategy? How do you get out? Okay, and. I'm sure that this is part of the reason behind Bookcraft being sold to Desert Book. You know, where do you sell? Is there somebody else that's got the financial resources to take on the acquisition of a Bookcraft or a Seagull Book and Tape and Covenant, Fairly large companies.

John Dehlin [00:56:01] Right.

Kent Larsen [00:56:02] So, you know, in a lot of ways, Deseret Book is the only place in town where you can sell it.

John Dehlin [00:56:08] So, you know, the question of motive is an interesting one. Let's just start there, if you don't mind. You know, I imagine that the president of Deseret Book. Remind me of her name.

Kent Larsen [00:56:21] Sherry Dew.

John Dehlin [00:56:22] Sherry Dew. I imagine she's under tremendous pressure to make Deseret Book as profitable or at least as self sustaining as possible.

Kent Larsen [00:56:29] So.

John Dehlin [00:56:29] So I think it would be for

Kent Larsen [00:56:31] the conspiratorial, I always say profitable. It's not just self sustaining, it's profitable.

John Dehlin [00:56:36] And I'm sure there's conspiratorial minded people out there who are thinking that this is all about censorship, about a desire to control the message and to make sure that everything's correlated. But I would say it would be a mistake to underestimate the profit motive going on here. Is that right or what do you think? What's your opinion?

Kent Larsen [00:56:54] I think you are right. It is. It is unwise to think of it as not about profit. It is to a good extent about profit. Sherry Dew is expected to turn a profit. All of the businesses that are owned by Desert Management. Desert Management is of course the holding company that holds all of the for profit operations of the church, including KSL Radio and tv, the Desert News and you could go on and on. Tons and tons of real estate holdings. You can go on and on and on. There's a ton of stuff that the church owns this way. And yes, those businesses are expected to turn a profit.

Kent Larsen [00:57:36] They're expected to, you know, turn money back into the church that the church then can use for funding its nonprofit operations. You know, they help pay for temples, they help pay for. They help pay for the salaries of people that help clean the meeting houses. You know, that is the people that do the deep cleaning after all the members have gone around and done their weekly cleaning.

John Dehlin [00:57:59] Right, right, right. So. So from a member's perspective, from a faithful member's perspective, then why shouldn't we say, well, this is good. If this makes Deseret Book more profitable, it's going to mean cleaner chapels and more temples and more missionary work and more, more byu. So what's. I guess that's a way of transitioning into the question of why is this good or bad. What are the benefits and costs to this as a people and as a church?

Kent Larsen [00:58:25] Well, again, it comes back a sense to an idea of whether you think it should be about money or not. If money is the only issue here, then it does tend to make sense. If money's not the only issue, then there's certainly other things that should enter into this.

Kent Larsen [00:58:47] There's an ethical dimension in a sense. If this has in fact created a monopoly, regardless of whether it's a legal monopoly or just one that acts and talks and does everything that a monopoly does. If this is a monopoly, then there's an ethical dimension to this, isn't there? The church shouldn't be owning a monopoly. And you know, monopolies, we've pretty much decided in the Western world the monopolies are an unethical and bad thing. So therefore it shouldn't happen regardless of the money involved.

Kent Larsen [00:59:22] Drill down monopolies, earn money, monopolies. The reason the monopolies, when they exist, work is because they earn more money than they would separate. Okay, Right. So.

John Dehlin [00:59:32] But from an average member of the church, I think that people trust the church. I think the church is in many ways obviously trustworthy. And they'd say, hey, I don't care if the Mormon Church or the LDS Church has a monopoly on the Mormon book publishing industry. They should, and that's a good thing. Why would anyone think otherwise?

Broader Effects of the Acquisition on LDS Culture

Kent Larsen [00:59:53] What are the other effects of a monopoly beyond and the other effects of this acquisition beyond just the monopoly aspects? Okay. I mean, obviously, monopolies do have things that hurt individual members in monopoly. The prices tend to go up. So individual members tend to pay more for their books and tapes and other products. Okay? That's what happens in a monopoly.

John Dehlin [01:00:18] Higher prices.

Kent Larsen [01:00:20] Right. Higher prices in this case because authors are involved. It's been said before by many people. Likely outcome here is that there will be, over time, not initially, but over time, a reduction in the number of titles and the number of authors that Deseret Book and Covenant together are publishing. And it's possible because they're such a huge portion of the market and have all the marketing power that not only will authors there be fewer authors, but the ones that are there could end up getting their royalty rates cut, for example. They'd earn less money.

John Dehlin [01:01:02] Okay? So fewer authors and less money per author.

Kent Larsen [01:01:07] Fewer authors, less money per author, higher prices for consumers. All these things raise the bottom line for Deseret Book and therefore for the church. But it's coming at our expense.

John Dehlin [01:01:21] So let me ask you a broader question then. I know the church would love every member to spend 30 minutes to an hour reading the scriptures every day, right? And I'm sure most members maybe are falling short of that goal. And I'm sure that if members weren't reading scriptures, the church's next preference would be for them to be reading books written by general authorities, talking about the scriptures or about, you know, life experiences. So why is that bad? What if this leads to fewer books? But the books that are available, or general authority books or the scriptures, you know, why is there a need for something more than that within Mormonism? Don't. You know, I don't mean to be glib, but, you know, there's someone that could argue the brethren's books along with the scriptures are pretty much all we should be worrying about.

Kent Larsen [01:02:13] I don't think you're being glib at all. I think this is actually an important question and one that has to be decided. I would love the church to decide differently than it has, because the church's position has often been, you know, you don't need all this other stuff. It's superfluous. But yet, on the other hand, they go and they sponsor plays and they sponsor musical events, and they pay for the salaries of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and the salaries of researchers in the history department who write books. And the reason they do this is because all of these things are important. Culture does make a difference.

Kent Larsen [01:02:53] It helps people become stronger and better members of the church. I can't tell you the number of people. Well, let me give you an example, pretty concrete example. One of the arrangements I have here in New York is to distribute the publications of a small artist group here in New York called the Mormon Artists Group. And the Mormon Artist Group asked Richard Bushman, in the wake of his book Rough Stone Rolling, to keep a diary of his.

Kent Larsen [01:03:29] His travels and his efforts promoting Rough Stone Rolling. Well, this has been put together. They published it as a limited edition volume, limited to 100 copies. Those copies are, of course, all sold out. They're all gone. But in the wake of going through that and distributing those books, I got responses from people. You know, I heard people's reactions, not just to this book, but to Rough Stone Rolling and the number of people that have said to me, I'm not even the person behind the book, but have said to me, richard Bushman's book Rough Stone Rolling is wonderful.

Kent Larsen [01:04:10] I finally feel like I understand what was going on. I feel like a part of the church. It's brought me back to the church because nobody had addressed issues like Joseph Smith's polygamy, issues like Joseph Smith's gold digging and so on and so forth. Rough Stone Rolling, according to the responses I'm getting, has brought some inactive members back to the church because they finally feel like somebody's standing up and telling everything.

Kent Larsen [01:04:39] And in a sense, it's an issue of what voices you can hear. Before Rough Stone Rolling, there weren't church books that addressed some of the issues that were going on. Nobody was saying, well, this was this, and this was this, and making a plausible case for Joseph still being a prophet. And instead, the only books you could find were the ones that said, oh, because of this and this and this of polygamy and because of grave digging, I'm not grave digging, treasure digging and all those kind of things. Joseph Smith isn't a prophet.

Kent Larsen [01:05:16] You see what I'm saying? Nobody's out making the case. So having these cultural things going on, books, having films, having plays that we can go to, having LDS music that we can listen to, it gives us an alternative that's purely Mormon, that will help build our testimonies and help us become better members of the church.

Kent Larsen [01:05:41] And if you lose the culture Then people will get swamped by the broader cultures around them, and they'll lose their faith as a result.

John Dehlin [01:05:51] And you don't think that the church can monolithically create a culture that's satisfying.

Kent Larsen [01:05:56] To that end, it's chosen not to. Regardless whether it can or not, it has chosen not to. Back in the 70s, this is something I left out of the LDS publishing history that we talked about earlier. Back in the 70s, the church reorganized in a big way. This is when President Kimball became the prophet.

Kent Larsen [01:06:16] And in fact, there's kind of a funny little story I heard along these lines that when he became prophet, he brought in some management consultants to look at how the church was run as an organization. And they all sat down at the table, and the management consultants said to President Kimball, tell us how many. We've got this information. We need to be able to do our job. Tell us, how many buildings does the church own?

Kent Larsen [01:06:42] President Kimball turned to the appropriate people at the table and said, give them the number. And they said, we don't know. And they went and asked another question. How many employees does the church have? And President Kimball turned to the appropriate person at the table. We don't know.

Kent Larsen [01:07:02] And apparently it went down the line almost every question. We'll have to get back to you with this information. These are basic questions you need to know in running an organization. And they didn't know. Look, the church was a lot smaller. Now, I'm not going to.

Kent Larsen [01:07:19] I'm not saying this to say that anybody was at fault or anything like that. The point is that at that point in time, they had to figure out really, what should the church be doing and what shouldn't be doing. As a result of those discussions, a lot of changes were made at that point in time. They changed the names of all the wards and stakes.

Kent Larsen [01:07:48] So whereas before you had here out in Washington, D.C. it was the Washington, D.C. steak and the Chesapeake Stake. They had a formalized system for naming, and what was the Chesapeake stake became the Silver Spring, Maryland stake. And you had to have both the name of a city or location and the state in the name of the stake, or else it wasn't a valid name.

Kent Larsen [01:08:16] That's still true today. They reorganized the church magazines. So instead of the Improvement Era and the Children's Friend that they had beforehand, they consolidated everything to just those three magazines that we're so familiar with today. The ihc, the hospitals that were owned by the church were spun off into their own thing because the Church decided, this isn't part of our mission. This isn't what we're supposed to be doing.

Kent Larsen [01:08:46] And at that point in time, I believe in a large way, the church decided what we are supposed to be about doing. And they looked at a lot of the cultural stuff and said most of this stuff isn't part of the core mission of the church. It isn't what we're supposed to be doing.

Kent Larsen [01:09:04] I'm not going to argue that they were wrong. I'm not saying that they're wrong. But I am saying that because culture is needed, it means that members of the church should go ahead and produce their own. And that's what we've done over the past 30 plus years. Since then, if anything, we need to do more.

John Dehlin [01:09:24] One caveat I'd maybe make to that is I've been watching, I love music and the spoken word and it's really been ramped up. I mean, they have full orchestras now and they have guest performers come in. And with the creation of that conference center, there has been a lot of even creative works done, plays or musicals that were church sponsored. Wouldn't you agree with that?

Kent Larsen [01:09:47] That's right. There's only a few that are done and they're very oriented towards Salt Lake. You know that there are a number of, I don't know, people generally don't know this, but there are Mormon choirs in other places around the United States and those choirs are often run by donations and by people themselves instead of being run by the church. So even though there's a demand and a need for regional choirs to do the same role that the Mormon Tabernacle Choir does, the church doesn't fund it.

Kent Larsen [01:10:23] And you know, should they. I'm not saying that they should. I am saying that those choirs need to exist and there's a role for them to play. And they exist in Southern California and in Arizona and in Washington D.C. and there's one I heard about in Richmond, Virginia and one in Colorado. They exist because the members feel like they need to exist and they're willing to put the effort into doing it.

John Dehlin [01:10:48] So what is. Do you think that, I mean, do you think the church is discouraging that culture from developing then or what do you think the.

Kent Larsen [01:10:55] No, it's not quite.

John Dehlin [01:10:57] What should the church's role be in encouraging books?

Kent Larsen [01:11:01] Quite to the contrary. The Southern California Mormon Choir gets used at church functions. They invite them to come and sing. Okay. Same thing with the Washington D.C. mormon choir and these other choirs they do get. I've heard the Arizona Mormon Choir sing at the Mesa Temple. Okay. You know, the church isn't saying they shouldn't exist. They're fairly neutral on the question, maybe even supportive in terms of the support that local leaders give to these organizations. But they don't fund it. Not to any significant extent, and certainly not from Salt Lake. There's sometimes, I would imagine, that some stakes find it in their budget to throw a few dollars to some of these organizations. But it's not salaries. Not that the Mormon Chabber Choir makes salaries, but it's not a full line of equipment and support that other organizations might expect.

John Dehlin [01:12:03] So your concern is bottom line is

Kent Larsen [01:12:05] culture is important and the church has chosen. They're not going to be the supportive organization.

John Dehlin [01:12:13] This program has been a production of Mormon Stories Podcast. To comment on this episode or to peruse the archive of past episodes, please visit us online@mormonstories.org. also, please consider supporting Mormon Stories Podcast by making a contribution today.

Part Two: Activity Rates and Cultural Roots of Mormonism

Part 2 of 2 · Ep. 38

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Mormon Stories podcast depends entirely upon the voluntary contributions of you, its listeners to keep Mormon Stories alive. Please consider donating today@mormonstories.org to make a donation to Mormon Stories. Just click on the Make a Donation button at the top right of the MormonStories.org website. Thank you for listening. You are listening to part two of a conversation with Kent Larsen about the recent acquisition of of Siegel Book and tapes by Deseret Book. So your concern is, bottom line is

Kent Larsen [00:00:34] culture is important and the Church has chosen. They're not going to be the supportive organization. In a lot of ways, I think that's a good thing because if the Church was the one doing all the supporting, then I think there would be an inherent feeling or need that they should try to control all this cultural outpouring, and there'd be, as a result, less diversity and controversy about things that shouldn't be controversial. You know, whether or not you can sing modern music as a Mormon choir or not might be an issue where it isn't now, right?

John Dehlin [00:01:17] So this reminds me of history repeating itself a tiny bit as I read the book Adventures of a Church Historian by Leonard Arrington. Some apostles in the late 1960s and early 70s, especially as a result of Fawn Brodie's book, no Man Knows My History, recognized that we were getting our lunch eaten by secular historians that were not painting Mormonism in a favorable light. So they asked Leonard Arrington to come and head up a church history headquarters where he then, by the church's support, starts commissioning new literature, history, to try and deal with the history in a credible way, but also in a way that doesn't destroy faith.

John Dehlin [00:02:00] And most people who have, you know, Leonard Arrington, as he accounts the story and those who have sort of analyzed it, acknowledge that at some point the brethren were observing the results of the history that was being created, the books that were being published, the articles that were being published. They decided that it was causing people to doubt and question their faith and their commitment to the church. And so by early 1982, you have the department being dismantled, the access to the church archives being restricted to these historians, and eventually these guys all being sent to byu. And some could argue, look, yeah, when it comes to music, okay, the church can support music because you're singing hymns mostly, and it's kind of innocuous, but once you start getting into film and literature, you're dealing with stuff that could really jeopardize faith and challenge people's testimonies, make them aware of things they otherwise wouldn't have been exposed to and cause them to come to church less, pay less tithing, be less committed to their families, whatever that from the church's perspective, maybe it requires a monopoly so that they can make sure that these sensitive, fragile, vulnerable testimonies can be protected.

John Dehlin [00:03:16] So what if. What if a culture is good for the members from a humanities perspective, but bad for the members or the church overall from a faith commitment, devotion, perspective?

Kent Larsen [00:03:30] I don't know. I tend to think not. Let me go back to this and maybe this is a cop out and maybe not, but Joseph Smith said teach them correct principles and they'll govern themselves. And I don't know. I don't know how I feel about that completely.

Kent Larsen [00:03:56] In some senses, I think that it's possible that. The church maybe has swung a little bit too far the other way in taking Arrington out of the position and trying to stop that whole period of time. I also think that I'm not.

Kent Larsen [00:04:23] I think also it's a question of exactly what you expect out of people. Let me put it this way. If a member of the church studies history and comes up with an idea that explains what happened in history and he's going to start writing a book about it, and if the church doesn't publish it or this monopoly that you're talking about doesn't publish it, what's this person going to do? Is he going to not publish it? Is he going to stop just because that monopoly won't publish it? I think not. I think he's likely to go outside the church and, and publish it anyway.

Kent Larsen [00:05:06] And then you have a question of what I call share of voice. Who in the public's mind is, for want of a better term, shouting the loudest. It's got the most presence in talking about the issue and advertising about the issue, in discussing the issue.

Kent Larsen [00:05:26] I don't think the church can hope not in today's world to control and let people only hear its voice and the members only hear its voice. And then there's the issue of non members who are going to hear this voice anyway. You've got to get the message out there. And if you don't bring the appropriate and the ones that are talking about things the way that you're comfortable with inside and let them publish. If you push them out and you push other people out, you're just going to make there be more voice on the other side. I'm not sure if this really helps.

John Dehlin [00:06:09] No, if I can give you a parallel, Greg Otterson, I believe is his name is the head of church PR Is that his name, Greg or Michael Otterson? Anyway, Michael Otterson, yeah. This Otterson guy recently struck a deal with the Washington Post which. Where he would blog about Christianity and spirituality issues, et cetera. And I just died when I found that out because as expected, as soon as he starts publishing things on the Washington Post blog, who is it that flocks to the blog to ask him really hard, disturbing, controversial questions? It's all these disaffected Mormons, or as they call it in the Internet world, the demu.

John Dehlin [00:06:51] The disaffected Mormon underground. They swamp and flock to his site, and two out of three comments on his blog postings are from very angry, disgruntled, highly controversial disaffected Mormons. And this happens. You know, there's a blog site called ldscio.org where comments get made there. And just, just a couple weeks ago, byu, a blog at BYU affiliated with the business school, started requesting business proposals from young, aspiring LDS entrepreneurs about how to build a positive LDS influence on the Internet from almost a marketing sort of management consultant perspective. And they had to take down that blog post and shut it down because 40 comments ensued from, again, these disaffected, angry people who, as you described, have been pushed out.

John Dehlin [00:07:46] And the volume and the noise ratio of these people to the faithful was overwhelmingly skewed towards the disaffected. So. So, yeah, yeah, so I totally buy what you're saying there.

Kent Larsen [00:08:01] We're creating is the word gets out. I mean, these things get out anyway. And if you don't talk about them, take the stuff that Richard Bushman talks about in Rough Stone Rolling, okay? All of the facts that he talks about, or virtually all of them, they've been out there already, those disaffected members and non members that don't know anything about the church at all other than what they hear from disaffected members, which are plenty. They know all about these things. Okay? They're all over the place. Okay. And who's out there that's talking and showing our side of the story? No one. Why? Because we have these cumbersome processes where everything's got to be approved by the central church and we won't let people talk and discuss things.

Kent Larsen [00:08:44] I was in the shower the other day and it occurred to me, you know, one of the problems with the church's unit websites for the wards and stakes is that only members can see them. Well, if any members can see them, then we've lost this positive view of what goes on in a normal Mormon ward. People don't know what the norm is for us, okay. It's not there. It's disappeared. It's behind the firewall.

Kent Larsen [00:09:16] And the worst part of it is if you're ward. Let me give you an example. Our stake last month held as it has every year for many years, its annual Messiah sing in where you go in and sing the Messiah. There are tons of people in New York love classical music, love the Messiah would come to our chapel and sing with us. Okay, okay. How are we supposed to publicize and let them know that's those unit websites certainly don't have help us?

John Dehlin [00:09:52] Okay, sure.

Kent Larsen [00:09:53] The way we're supposed to do is we're supposed to go to the local LDS church public relations committee and they're supposed to get the word out and they don't. The end the individual members of award and stake. There's no website that goes up where we can say, you know, send out an email to all our friends saying hey, this is what I'm doing here. Here's where you can find out about it. The mechanism is not there.

John Dehlin [00:10:15] Right. So. So I also just have to interject, I think your idea, I do think that the social and the cultural component of Mormonism is huge. And you said to me before we started this podcast, and I think you mentioned it earlier on as well, that the stronger the culture, the stronger the members devotions to the church. If you weaken and neuter the culture, then you lose members much more rapidly than you do by disaffection through knowing some history facts.

Kent Larsen [00:10:48] If you look at activity rates around the world among members of the church, it bears it out. In the Intermountain west is where you have the higher activity rates. And as you get farther away from the Intermountain west and farther away from the center of the culture, those activity rates go downhill until where you get places like South America or Africa or the Far east where activity rates traditionally get down in the 20% range. And if you've been served a mission in any of those kind of places, you. You also may have gone to some of the weakest and most remote branches in those particular areas and you find that you have 95 plus percent inactivity rates in those weak little branches.

Kent Larsen [00:11:34] Why? Because there's no conviviality that's going on. People aren't with other people. There's no social aspect going on in what they're doing. Nothing for them to come to church for other than the worship service.

Cultural Imperialism and LDS Publishing Challenges

John Dehlin [00:11:49] But this brings up a real big dilemma that I know you're going to be sensitive to. I have A cousin who works in the correlation department at the church. No, in the editing portion of the church. And one of the prime drivers of correlation necessarily hasn't been a concern about controversial historical topics. It's been trying to create a manual that will strip out all the cultural imperialism of US centric, American centric sort of culture and making it so that it can be translated and used worldwide. Well, if we're talking about trying to grow culture that's American based and then push that in the Latin America and Asia and Africa, what about the concerns of cultural imperialism and stripping the people of their own native cultures as they try and, you know, assimilate into our culture?

John Dehlin [00:12:40] Do you have any thoughts about that? Because I really do believe that in many ways the church, it means, well, they want to strip out that, make it so that it's easily convertible to all these different countries and also respect the local cultures and not try and swamp them with ours and say you always have to wear a white shirt and a tie and you always have to sing Janice Cat Perry songs, et cetera.

Kent Larsen [00:13:00] Absolutely. And it's a balancing act. Part of it's just the way things go. I mean, we send missionaries from North America to some of these remote areas of the world and the only thing those missionaries know is, is how it was done at home. And so they unconsciously, whether they want to or not, export North American culture to these, to these people. No two ways about it. And in some sense there's nothing you can do about it. Okay.

John Dehlin [00:13:27] Yeah.

Kent Larsen [00:13:30] Other, you know, I don't know, maybe, maybe they need to have, you know, cultural sensitivity training or better cultural sensitivity training for missionaries at the various MTCs around the world.

John Dehlin [00:13:43] So it's a complex issue.

Kent Larsen [00:13:44] More importantly, yeah, it's a topic that's got to be worked on and worked on at all levels. The church, you know, it's a real problem. It is a real problem in the book publishing world. I've actually blogged on this issue.

Kent Larsen [00:14:00] I'm very disappointed with the way things have gone for Spanish and Portuguese, the two largest languages in the church besides English, and the two where there obviously ought to be publishing going on just because of the vast numbers of people.

Kent Larsen [00:14:19] It seems to me part of the assumption here with language is exactly the assumption that we have that everything has to be translated for them and it's just garbage. It's not true. We need, if anything, the people in Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries to be writing their own materials and hey, if it's good, let's translate it to English, then It makes better sense to do it that way economically, and it makes better sense culturally, both of those things. If we could get that stuff happening and jump started. If we had publishers and bookstores in these foreign countries, and they do exist to a degree, it's happening a little bit, just not to where anybody knows.

Kent Larsen [00:15:09] If it was happening enough, I think activity rates would go up. I think people would be more members of the church, and I think our culture here in the United States would benefit from an influx of diverse and interesting new ways of exploring and understanding our wonderful culture and our wonderful gospel.

John Dehlin [00:15:32] What you represent is a pretty significant pendulum swing because as I understand it, before correlation, before the 50s and 60s, things were autonomous, things were independent. Latin America came up with its own hymnal, maybe, and things were encouraged to be local and grassroots. But it was decided that that was a problem, that we needed standardization, we needed to make it easy to duplicate, and so we correlated. And now what you're saying is that it might behoove the church to consider a pendulum swing a little bit back in the other direction to allow more local produced materials and autonomy on the local level.

Kent Larsen [00:16:12] I had a call earlier today from a woman who represents a bookstore in Chile that's trying to get Spanish language materials from here in the United States. And I have some of that stuff for sale on my website on MormonPavilion.com Books from the first LDS Publishing imprint in Spanish, Zarahemla. Editorial Zarahemla.

Kent Larsen [00:16:40] And I don't. Well, that's the reason she called me. And in our discussion, we talked about this issue, and people there in Chile just don't have it quite in their minds that they could write their own stuff. And the publishing they're doing is to the small extent that they're doing. Any publishing down there at all is translations from English of different materials put out by the church.

Kent Larsen [00:17:06] It would be wonderful. But the reason that. The interesting thing that here is the reason that she said that they're doing this, and the reason they're doing it is because the translation in Salt Lake isn't happening fast enough, it seemed to me. Wouldn't it be better to go ahead and give these people the English.

Kent Larsen [00:17:27] The English copies of this material as soon as possible, let them do the translation, approve it in Salt Lake, have somebody that's good go through it and approve it. Okay. And you spend less time and money in Salt Lake, spend more time, maybe money in Chile, and have something that's localized for Chile but still correlated.

John Dehlin [00:17:50] Sure.

Kent Larsen [00:17:51] Okay. I'd also draw a little Bit of a line between the church itself and the stuff that's doctrinally important and the broader elements of culture. Yeah, I'm, I'm all for having novels and plays and everything written in Chile. I think that would be great. I'm not certain that I want General Conference addresses written in Chile. I think those do need to be correlated. There is a balance that needs to go there. And yeah, perhaps the church itself has put the pendulum too far, but I would argue that more of it is that our culture as a whole hasn't quite reached it, so that the people there can develop their own culture and pull the pendulum more towards them for cultural items that are not part of the doctrine of the Church.

John Dehlin [00:18:43] Right. So just to sort of close on this point and then I'd love to move back just to the implications on the publishing industry and the church. But you know, it reminds me a lot of the Internet. You know, Internet 1.0 was very much a pull model. When people got out their browsers, they expected to consume information to pull it down.

John Dehlin [00:19:06] You know, as you know, Time magazine made us people of the year because now the Internet, the web 2.0 is all about blogs and podcasts where people become not only the consumers of consolidated, you know, media company provided content, but, but they also now become the producers of the content.

John Dehlin [00:19:24] And it seems like when it comes to non doctrine related culture, we used to allow a lot of locally produced user created stuff somehow that's been neutered along the way. And what you're calling for is sort of a culture 2.0 within Mormonism or maybe 3.0 where we revert back to user member generated cultural content.

Kent Larsen [00:19:52] Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

Impact on Independent Bookstores and Content Diversity

John Dehlin [00:19:55] So let's close by talking about what the implications of this acquisition might be. How does this affect independent bookstores? How does it affect the content? Do you think it's going to be a good thing? Are there any benefits or positive things you see to it? Do you see any negative things? What's the outlook for this acquisition?

Kent Larsen [00:20:19] Well, I don't see too many good things coming out of it. I mean, obviously it has the potential of turning a bit more money to the Church. Okay. Over time. And there may be some marginal improvement for current Covenant authors who may see possibly higher royalty rates or things like that. It's also possible that this would give Desert Book and siegelbook their combined operations, the ability to open more stores because they'd have that much bigger financial resources.

Kent Larsen [00:20:58] I tend to doubt that a lot of that's going to go on because what you See, from publishing mergers elsewhere and from the efforts of other people, you know, what's happening in the main publishing world, other acquisitions is not that at all. The number of titles after a merger tends to go down. We saw it when Desert Book purchased Bookcraft. The number of overall titles that were produced over the next few years, three or four years, went down. Desert Book is, you know, they're probably still publishing more than they did before the Bookcraft merger, but nowhere near as many as Bookcraft and Desert Book together were publishing just before the merger.

John Dehlin [00:21:46] Right.

Kent Larsen [00:21:46] I can't see the same thing. The same thing's going to happen with Covenant and Deseret Books publishing operations. They may still maintain Covenant as a separate name and everything as they have with Bookcraft, but they're going to find some schema for putting them in and, you know, they'll decide that in terms of future projects, all new authors are going to go to, you know, of this particular genre are going to go to Covenant, and new authors of this particular genre are going to go to Deseret Book and Desert Book and Covenant are not going to compete for authors.

Kent Larsen [00:22:23] That means when there's, you know, we know the capitalist line here, you know, when there's competition, the benefits accrue to the people that are selling that are, or the people that are buying. You get better stuff going on.

Kent Larsen [00:22:39] The general public benefits, because the two companies are combined. They don't have to give in, give as much to the authors, and they don't have to give as much to the general public. One of the reasons I kind of doubt that the overall number of stores will go up, at least not in the short run, is simply they're so dominant now in the market, something like 60, 75% of the stores. It could easily be 75% of all retail sales of LDS products, at least among or all retail sales made at LDS stores.

Kent Larsen [00:23:22] It's so dominant that you just wonder, how hard do they really have to try? Who are they competing against that they have to really try to beat them in general, I've looked at this acquisition and one of the things that in any kind of acquisition, from a business standpoint, you look at it and you go, okay, this is all fine and good to do, this acquisition, but where in the acquisition is the synergy? Where is the thing that makes one plus one more than two? Right, okay. That produces something extra out of it. And my problem with this merger on the highest level is simply I don't see the advantage. Where's the synergy?

John Dehlin [00:24:08] Right.

Kent Larsen [00:24:09] You know, the amount of shelf space isn't going to go up. They basically have the same overall customer base, the two companies. So it doesn't mean that Deseret Book products will now get to new customers that they wouldn't before. And it doesn't mean that Covenant and Seagull Book's customer base will grow either.

Kent Larsen [00:24:30] It's the same people, sure. In fact, in a lot of places, although they claim that the stores are separate and going to be managed separately and that they work on two different models, are going to continue to work on two different models, that is discounter and full service store.

Kent Larsen [00:24:51] There's still going to be a lot of markets where there is, you know, a desert book store, you know, metaphorically on one side of the street and a Seagull bookstore on the other side of the street. And anybody that's a manager has to look at that and go, okay, in this situation, does it really make sense? Or could we do the same thing by, oh, let's combine them in the same building and make it half Seagull and half Desert Book. And that way we can cut employees and we can still have the same kind of thing going on with the two different models, but we can save all these costs.

Kent Larsen [00:25:34] It seems to me that eventually those kind of. That kind of analysis is going to work out and win out. And actually the number of stores will go down eventually.

John Dehlin [00:25:47] Sure, okay.

Kent Larsen [00:25:50] And as this happens, as the number of stores go down, as the fewer authors get published, our culture suffers. The amount of choice that consumers have will go down, the prices will go up. You know, less authors published means weaker culture. It means less, fewer ideas out there, fewer ways of looking at things, fewer enjoyable things to read. That's the hurt. That's the problem.

Evaluating the Monopoly Question in the LDS Market

John Dehlin [00:26:20] When you think about monopoly. And I know you're a big believer in capitalism. I am, too. One of the big questions about whether there's a monopoly is whether or not there are large barriers to entry. You know, if you think that culture is good and the people want interesting books to read and thoughtful books to read and diverse books to read or music or whatever, you know, what's to keep, you know, a new seagull from springing up that can kind of do the same thing, Are the barriers to entry huge is the first part of my question.

Kent Larsen [00:26:50] The barriers to entry are substantial. Okay. In the retail end of it, in the stores, the book publishing. I'm not concerned. There are lots of different book publishers, LDS books, publishers. We've had over the past five years an explosion of LDS book Publishers, simply because of the impact of new technology, the Internet, E books, print on demand. All of these technologies have made it extremely easy to get a new book published.

John Dehlin [00:27:20] Who are some of these publishers? Who are some of these publishers, just for our listener's sake?

Kent Larsen [00:27:25] Well, it runs the gimmick. Everybody from Spring Creek, which is one of these new ones, there's a guy up in Idaho named Wind River Publishing. It seems like every time I turn around, there's another one I've heard of. There's a Parables Publishing that's located, I believe, in Maryland. There's my own operations. There's what else I remember. I can't remember the name of this person up in Boston. And many of them are not just self publishing their own little materials. They're publishing the works of. In fact, most of the ones I've mentioned are works of other people. You know, they're operating like a traditional publisher.

John Dehlin [00:28:07] And to what extent are these technologies

Kent Larsen [00:28:08] got to the point where you can do it in your spare time? You really can.

John Dehlin [00:28:11] To what extent are these publishers right now carried at Segal Books or Deseret Books?

Kent Larsen [00:28:17] Oh, hardly at all. Part of the. There's kind of. There's no barrier to actually getting the book published. The barriers are almost gone. It literally can cost to start up. A new publisher can cost less than $1,000. And in some cases, if you really know what you're doing and where to cut costs, probably less than $250. Okay.

John Dehlin [00:28:39] Wow.

Kent Larsen [00:28:40] It's just nothing. And that's not only true in books, it's true in music, not quite true in film. But

John Dehlin [00:28:49] how are these groups marketing and how are they selling their books?

Kent Larsen [00:28:53] That's really the problem. It's easy to start a publisher. What's harder is to sell the books. And the difficulty you have is getting into the bookstores or getting to where you can sell the books. Now, the US Industry as a whole has made it quite easy to get a basic level of distribution done. If you go most of the print on demand companies and the printers that service them have ways. So once you sign up your book with them, the book automatically shows up on Amazon.com and in some cases barnesandnoble.com and a host of other little Internet websites.

Kent Larsen [00:29:36] So you get a basic level of distribution that helps to a degree. People come across those books, but it doesn't get you the kind of sales that a desert book could get with the same title, because the vast majority of members of the church don't find out about it. And so the Real hard part of publishing these days is not getting the book in print. It's the selling. It's the distribution of the book.

New Publishers, Reader Habits, and Market Realities

John Dehlin [00:30:06] So it sounds like what you're telling me is, yeah, there's a bunch of new publishers popping up, creating all these new books, but few people are buying and reading them.

Kent Larsen [00:30:14] Well, I would say the average sale per title, number of copies sold per title is probably quite low in the neighborhood of 100 or a few hundred in many cases a year instead of. Traditionally, before Print on Demand came along, a book really needed to sell at least 1,000 copies in its first year, or it was just a failure, it was not going to make money. Now, if you can put it together yourself and you don't have to pay people a lot of editing fees and time editing and time designing the book and upfront fees like that, yeah, you can do a new book for as cheap as $100 or less if you know how to do it.

John Dehlin [00:31:03] Interesting. So that could become profitable quite quickly, if you're able to.

Kent Larsen [00:31:07] It can become profitable quite quickly. And literally, printing a book and running a book off of that only cost you $100 to produce. You have to sell 20, 25 copies before you break even. Okay.

John Dehlin [00:31:22] Right.

Kent Larsen [00:31:23] And then after that, you know, it's. It's the selling price less, your. Your printing cost, and that's your money, you know?

John Dehlin [00:31:30] Right. So there's an opportunity there with. With the lower. Lower barriers to entry in terms of publishing. There is an opportunity here that people should be aware of.

Kent Larsen [00:31:39] There is, but I call again, I have to qualify it. Okay. It's about the selling, and it's about the marketing. And in that area, we're quite hobbled in a lot of senses. Desert Book and the acquisition of Seagull and Desert Book. I don't know exactly how it'll shake out. They claim that they're going to keep the same organizations, which would mean you'd have separate buyers for Desert Book and Siegel. But again, I wonder how long that's going to last. How long before somebody says, well, you know, we should have only one buyer for this particular kind of book instead of two. And Siegel Books buyer and Desert Books buyer should be the same person. And then when you're in that case, then, well, if you can't convince that person to buy your book and put it in stores, you know, in terms of the LDS market, you're dead.

John Dehlin [00:32:33] Right. Well, let me propose to you the

Kent Larsen [00:32:35] guy up at Wind River Publishing. He posted on. On motleyvision.org this morning saying that he'd already had a situation where Desert Book refused to carry one of his books because Desert Book had a similar title and he claimed that the sales were 20% lower than he'd expected as a result.

John Dehlin [00:33:00] Interesting.

Kent Larsen [00:33:01] Yeah. Now another way that the LDS world hobbles people is that there aren't ways of publicizing and advertising the books that we do do.

John Dehlin [00:33:16] Yeah.

Kent Larsen [00:33:16] So if you're an independent publisher and you can't get your book into Desert Book, you can get it on the Amazon. But how are you going to tell members of the Church that it exists? What newspapers do you advertise in? What magazines do you advertise in? You can't advertise in the Ensign Friend or any of those magazines. How do you let them know the Internet? Well, you know, I'm. I've. There's a. There's a phenomenon that I've. I've discovered as I've gone through this and that is that many members of the church don't use the Internet for Mormon related stuff.

John Dehlin [00:33:54] Right. Sure. It's too scary.

Kent Larsen [00:34:01] Well, I disagree. I don't think it's necessarily too scary. In fact, I think most members don't find the Internet particularly scary. They've worked out their ways of avoiding the content they don't like. I think it's just compartmentalizing their lives.

Kent Larsen [00:34:17] They don't think of the Internet as the main source for going and finding things about Mormonism and for finding Mormon culture. And so they don't. I should also add, I think this is the majority, the vast majority of members of the church don't use the Internet to find out much about the Church at all or their Mormon lives. They use it maybe to go to their local LDS ward page, but even that they don't do much.

Kent Larsen [00:34:49] I've participated from time to time on a list on the Internet called LDS Clerks, which is a discussion for clerks, ward and state clerks. And the feeling I get from them is that, you know, 80, 90% of the people in their ward, most of whom have Internet access, don't use the ward web pages at all.

John Dehlin [00:35:13] Right.

Kent Larsen [00:35:14] I don't. From the volume of people that I see going to the bloggernacle, I think that we've got 90% of the members of the church that don't know the bloggernacle even exists.

John Dehlin [00:35:26] Sure. Yeah.

Kent Larsen [00:35:28] I think that email lists are few and far between and the number of people participating there is very low. Look at it this way. There's over 5,000 wards and branches in the United States and LDS clerks maybe has 200 members. Okay, right. Where, where is everybody? In clerks, of all people. You know, they have Internet access. They do, Right. We should have 2500 members on LDS clerks and there's 200.

John Dehlin [00:35:56] Sure. Well, I have, you know, I have two sort of questions I want to pose to you, and they're almost proposals as much as they are questions. But let me start with the first and then I'll jump to the second. The first is, let's take Rupert Murdoch and Fox News as an example for how we might approach this issue.

The Internet, New Media, and Mormon Cultural Expression

John Dehlin [00:36:18] You know, before Fox News, there was a perception that there were only three networks for news. You know, abc, cbs, NBC. And maybe there was cnn. And the consensus and npr. And the consensus was that were all of them was that all of them were very liberal.

John Dehlin [00:36:36] And so what Rupert Murdoch did quite masterfully with Roger Ailes or whoever it was, was create an alternative, fair and balanced, a conservative approach to news as a response to all these liberal outlets. And so they ended up florid. You know, Fox News ended up doing quite well and becoming quite a significant player relatively quickly because they branded themselves as not the other guys. As you think about Richard Dutcher's experience in Mormon filmmaking, yeah, he was able to sort of grandfather Mormon filmmaking. But very quickly, you know, the schlocky, goofy, you know, Mormon cinema emerged. That was, you know, fun. And I enjoyed a lot of it.

John Dehlin [00:37:20] But you know, in a way, they sort of destroyed Mormon cinema for, you know, the next few years because people now won't go see another one of these goofy, goofy, silly movies. And so I say to Richard Dutcher, you know, what if, what if you started presenting your movies and movies like yours as not traditional Mormon cinema and building a market for an alternative to what everyone has come to either ignore or hate. And so I'll propose that as well, you know, you know, a lot of these independent publishers, you know, a lot of these people who care about Mormon art, Mormon culture, you know, what if we banded together to form a non correlated alternative to Mormon culture and a bookstore that sort of tried to consolidate the needs of all these independent publishers into a non deseret book entity that could, that could really push this stuff and market and brand itself in a consolidated way as the alternative to correlated, rigid, sometimes schlocky or kitschy Mormon art?

Kent Larsen [00:38:31] Sounds great. I think it could happen. There's some caveats and some small problems with portions of what you said. I definitely think the cooperation ought to happen and I don't believe it has yet. I think that, I think there are kind of prototypical things like that that are happening.

Kent Larsen [00:38:55] There are places to buy these kind of books. There are lots of publishers that are offering stuff that are more alternatives than what Deseret Book and Covenant and the mainstream are publishing. That's starting to happen. It's easier to do in publishing, of course, than it is in film. Film. The problem is that budgets to make a good film run into the millions of dollars and you run into the funding problem.

Kent Larsen [00:39:24] It's hard to break in and do what you're saying unless you really make stuff with fairly low production values. So books, I think it can and it should happen. There needs to be more of it and there needs to be cooperation. I think those things would be excellent things to work on.

Kent Larsen [00:39:47] We maybe ought to have a little independent or literary publishers, Mormon Literary Publishers association or something along those lines. It would be a pretty small group at this point in time. We're talking no more than five publishers probably. But yeah, it could happen. In terms of offering an alternative to desert book as a place to sell books, I think some things are being tried. There's a lot of Internet based stuff. But again, you have the same kind of problems that you have with film. It takes a lot of money to open a bookstore in the neighborhood of hundreds of thousands of dollars to do it right and to do it so that you could actually get the word out and make money.

Kent Larsen [00:40:38] And I'd say of those hundreds of thousands of dollars, you'd spend at least half of it simply promoting that the bookstore is there. Bookstores are so much more expensive than people think. And compared to starting a publishing company, they're so much more expensive that it's really hard on top of it. You have a big problem of the general trend in the United States and in the LDS book market of independent bookstores going out of business.

John Dehlin [00:41:12] Sure.

Kent Larsen [00:41:13] The number of members of the LDSBA in 2004 was 190. I think the year before that was 200. And some at one point they had 260. They're now down to around 120.

John Dehlin [00:41:26] And this is again an association.

Kent Larsen [00:41:28] This is the number of retail stores and retail members that are stores.

John Dehlin [00:41:32] Okay, so how about not responding with brick and mortar, but responding on the Internet with a consolidated independent Mormon book?

Kent Larsen [00:41:40] I think something like that could work to a degree. I think you have a number of competing places that are trying to do that. Sunstone has its little Internet store. My Mormon civilian could, could fill that role and has some interesting stuff on it. There are a few others that are doing Similar projects successful or not successful to varying degrees, it would cost still some money because you do need to try to stock some of these things, and that means you have to spend thousands of dollars, if not tens of thousands of dollars of investing in your initial stock. So could it happen and should it happen? Yes. It's maybe not as easy as it might seem, but yeah, it could.

John Dehlin [00:42:36] Does Mormon Pavilion promote books that you don't publish?

Kent Larsen [00:42:39] Then yes.

John Dehlin [00:42:40] Okay, so what is Mormon Pavilion? What are you trying to do with it?

Kent Larsen [00:42:43] Mormon Pavilion, Originally the idea was to build a book, a brick and mortar store for the New York area. And then when I purchased and became, you know, I purchased this Portuguese language business, lucid Brazilian books, I inherited with it an already operating store, Internet store. And at that point I figured, well, I can mirror the website and do exactly the same thing that I do for the lucid Brazilian books in the Mormon area.

John Dehlin [00:43:15] Right.

Kent Larsen [00:43:16] And it was a convenient way to. To make sure I had an outlet for the books that I'm publishing and distributing for other people. And you know, of course it's very easy to just simply at that point add a new title. It's not that hard.

John Dehlin [00:43:30] Right.

Kent Larsen [00:43:30] The only real question is one of stock. So.

John Dehlin [00:43:35] So are you hoping to grow that into something?

Kent Larsen [00:43:38] I am hoping to grow it into something more. I would like to it to eventually be the LDS bookstore for the New York City area. I think like all bookstores these days, you need a strong Internet presence. One of the fortunate things I have in Mormon Pavilion at this point in time is that the mechanics of the website are quite strong. They're solid, it works well. And do you have a shopping cart?

John Dehlin [00:44:09] You have a catalog? You have a catalog and a shopping cart and all that stuff.

Kent Larsen [00:44:13] Okay, so absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:44:15] Well, maybe we need to promote it a little more. That is MormonPavilion.com is that right?

Kent Larsen [00:44:20] That's right.

John Dehlin [00:44:21] So. But you don't. Why do you limit it just to the New York area? Because you don't want to deal with fulfillment and stuff. I mean, why?

Kent Larsen [00:44:27] I mean, I mean, the brick and mortar store for the New York area. I don't. I think that building a chain of stores is. Would I say no to it? No, I wouldn't. But I think that I'd rather get a brick and mortar store in one place off the ground first before I even think about across the nation or something like that.

John Dehlin [00:44:50] So you're thinking brick and mortar in New York then?

Kent Larsen [00:44:53] Oh, yeah. I think it's inevitable. The church has grown here quite soon, strongly, quite substantially. The audiences, if not big enough, now it's getting close to big enough. The point I'm trying to make with the Internet website, part of it is these days independent stores almost have to have the Internet website. It's probably the major reason why independent bookstores in general are going out of business is because they're getting beaten up from Amazon.com and other stores, other Internet stores. And unless you have a competing presence where you can bring in sales from other places, I don't see how you can survive. I think that Internet presence helps brick and mortar stores sell.

John Dehlin [00:45:50] Sure. Well, let me ask you a final question and then let you wrap up or conclude however you wish. But could it be that there's a bigger problem that can be characterized by Tom Kimball, a quote that he often likes to make? Tom Kimball likes to say, if you ever want to hide something from a Mormon. Can you finish the sentence?

Kent Larsen [00:46:13] I can't.

John Dehlin [00:46:14] He says, if you ever want to hide something from a Mormon, put it in a book. And his sort of. His sort of position is that Mormons don't read. And if they do read, they go to Deseret Book and buy Russell M. Nelson or Dallin H. Oaks latest book or Gordon B. Hinckley's you know, book. They certainly aren't going to read Catcher in the Rye or Grapes of Wrath or the Backslider or, you know, books that are more substantive and meaningful. So there's sort of meet the customers where they are, and there's another business strategy which is sort of create a market. Have you ever thought about how to get Mormons to read more and to care more about refined, elevated culture and ideas?

John Dehlin [00:46:55] Or is the church's desire to encourage centralization and correlation sort of kept the Mormon culture on milk to the extent that they no longer want meat? And you don't have a. You don't have a customer base that demands fine literature and that demands fine art because they're satisfied with the Sunday School manual and the latest Ardeth Kapp book and whatever comes out of Temple Square and music in the spoken word.

Kent Larsen [00:47:31] You know, I'm going to have to say I really don't know. In a lot of ways, I really don't know. I suspect that Tom is both right and wrong. It easily could be that members of the church don't read as much as others.

Kent Larsen [00:47:52] But, you know, that's true in a lot of places around the world, and there's still book industries that exist. And it's true in a lot of places around the world. And interesting Thoughtful books still get published for those little markets.

Kent Larsen [00:48:08] I think it's more a matter of what are we doing? I think the question we should be asking is more along the lines of what are we doing to expand and make available what we've got and the thoughtful materials that we have to a broader audience.

Kent Larsen [00:48:28] I think part of Kahm's frustration is not just that Mormons don't read, but also that his company in particular has been unfortunately, in my view, thumbnailed and positioned as being unfaithful to the church.

John Dehlin [00:48:47] So you're actually a somewhat, I think, supporter.

Kent Larsen [00:48:51] When you say signature books, they go, oh, that's that publisher of very questionable books that I shouldn't be reading. And I suspect that a lot of what Tom is reacting to is that kind of problem. They get slammed with it fairly successfully, I think.

Kent Larsen [00:49:13] On the other hand, I do recognize that there's kind of an anti intellectualism that kind of goes through the church sometimes, that people want to dive into a lot of details. In many areas. I'm still positive though. I think that there is enough people that do and a growing market even in that area that.

Kent Larsen [00:49:45] Still a vibrant LDS book industry can grow and will grow eventually. In my view, the problem in the LDS book industry is not the kinds of books, so much the kinds of books that we're publishing, but more one of the amount and the kinds of distributions that we have.

Kent Larsen [00:50:07] If you go down the list of Desert Book and Siegel Books stores and where they're located, you can see the problem. They're located for the most part in the in and out and west a little bit in California, they go as far east as possibly St. Louis and nothing east of the Mississippi. See how many members of the church there are east of the Mississippi other

John Dehlin [00:50:31] than the DC Store.

Kent Larsen [00:50:34] Well, the DC Store is not a desert bookstore.

John Dehlin [00:50:36] Oh, right, right. Oh, okay.

Kent Larsen [00:50:38] You know, you know, and yes, there's independence in a lot of these places. Yes. But you know how many areas there are that are not being met by some kind of brick and mortar store? Yes, we can have stores on the Internet and yes, that can solve problems, some of the problems. But again, you know, how many areas of the church are effectively not being reached? Even English speaking areas of the church that are effectively not being reached reached. You know, Australia and New Zealand have, you know, one and two members. Bookstores between them perhaps. Right, okay. New Zealand, until Chile came along. New Zealand had the highest proportion of its population that were members of the church, at least in terms of countries with at least a million in population.

Kent Larsen [00:51:30] New Zealand has a lot of members of the church there. Okay. That's why you had the New Zealand temple there before the ones in Australia and why they had the little high school that the churches owned there. You know, this isn't even getting back into the language issue.

John Dehlin [00:51:51] Right.

Kent Larsen [00:51:51] Okay. A large part of the problem that we have gets down to one of distribution. How do we get the books into the hands of the members, let them know that they exist? And a large part of the problem is our fuddy duddy thinking. We assume that, you know, the only way to do this is to set up a brick and mortar store in that area and have everybody come to the store.

Kent Larsen [00:52:21] Or we assume, well, we'll just do an ML.com and put it all up on the Internet and that's the only way for it to happen. I think we've got to broaden our thinking beyond that. We've got to come up with other ways. We've got to, you know, maybe we need to pay individual members to be representatives of, you know, ex publishing company or Mormon publishing companies in general and have them sell the books door to door to their neighbors or, you know, sell them from their home or just be representatives who can go to a country like, you know, Guatemala or Chile or someplace where they're income levels are very low and where they can just simply help their neighbors who are illiterate or don't have Internet access or whatever, get the books they want.

Kent Larsen [00:53:07] Or how about they've got Internet access so they're the distribution point. I think there's a lot of ways to do things and you know, the LDS industry in the whole is not exploring any of them. They're just not interested. They're so interested in their little intermountain west area of distribution and everything else doesn't seem to exist to them.

John Dehlin [00:53:29] Right. Or how about the support and creation of book clubs to encourage little small communities to buy and read books and to review them and provide feedback, etc.

Kent Larsen [00:53:40] If we sit down and think about it, there's a lot of ways to build readership and build a market. Okay? And not happening. Nobody's coming up with these influential, interesting, exciting new ideas and nobody seems to be willing to put their money where their mouth is and say we're doing this and putting all the effort into it to try to make it work. And realizing of course, that probably two thirds of these kind of ideas will fail.

Kent Larsen [00:54:14] But if we're going to proceed, somebody's got to try them. One of my biggest disappointments with the LDSBA is that in the 10 years that I've been going to the LDSBA, I have yet to see a single effort that the organization has been made to expand the LDS market.

Kent Larsen [00:54:37] Yeah, they hold their conventions and everything, but in terms of actually getting NEWT stores started or figuring out ways to get books sold in other languages and everything, they don't do squat. They don't do anything.

Hope for Collaboration and a New Mormon Generation

John Dehlin [00:54:52] Well, Kent Larsen, maybe this the glimmer of hope in all this is that we have a new generation of Internet savvy Mormons who are listening to this podcast. And what this can represent to them is a challenge to band together, to collaborate, to unify, and to figure out a way to tackle this very important problem. I think you've done a great job of laying out why this is important, what the risks and challenges are, what needs to be done.

Kent Larsen [00:55:19] Thank you. And I would invite anybody that's got those ideas or wants me to help them with ideas or wants me to give them ideas that they can approach or ways of doing these things to contact me because I'm more than happy to, to discuss this and work with people to get some of this stuff happening, to expand the market and to make Mormon culture a vital part of Mormons lives around the world and not just in the near Mountain West.

John Dehlin [00:55:48] Yes. And remind our listeners two things how they can contact you, but more broadly, what are the blogs or Yahoo groups that people can join to plug into this very important culture conversation?

Kent Larsen [00:56:02] Well, I don't know that there's lots of places where you can do it. MotleyVision.org is certainly one of the places. I'm very active there and I invite everyone to correspond with me there. That's probably through this, for this particular kind of thing. The best place to contact me so it would simply be KentotleyVision.org also if they join the association for Mormon Letters. That's a wonderful place for going over a lot of these issues. There's a lot of years there that are interested in seeing this kind of expansion in Mormon Letters. And if they'll watch motleyovision.org, i have one or two ideas that I'll probably announce there to try to get something happen in Spanish and Portuguese and I'd love to see a few people come and help us there.

John Dehlin [00:56:58] And there's also the Mormon Library Yahoo Group.

Kent Larsen [00:57:00] Right, The Mormon Library Yahoo Group is another one. It tends to be more for books about history and more for book dealers than for new books. But yeah, it's a great group of people and A lot of these ideas would be very relevant there.

John Dehlin [00:57:17] Well, Ken Larsen, I just want you to know that I believe that what you're saying and what you're communicating is extremely important. And I want to thank you for being willing to come on the show and talk to our Mormon brothers and sisters to help move the bar a little bit in this regard. So thank you.

Kent Larsen [00:57:33] Well, thank you, John. I appreciate the forum and I appreciate what you're doing with Mormon Stories, and I look forward to seeing many more years of this kind of, of reporting and promotion of ideas about Mormonism. I appreciate you what you're doing. Thank you.

John Dehlin [00:57:48] All right, once again, listeners, thank Kent Larsen for coming on. If you want to check out his website, once again, it's mormonpavilion.com or motleyvision.org is that right?

Kent Larsen [00:58:02] That's right.

John Dehlin [00:58:02] All right, you guys, thanks a lot. Thanks again, Ken.

Kent Larsen [00:58:05] Thank you.

John Dehlin [00:58:07] This program has been a production of Mormon Stories pop podcast. To comment on this episode or to peruse the archive of past episodes, please visit us online@mormonstories.org Also, please consider supporting Mormon Stories podcast by making a contribution today.

Transcript © 2026 John P. Dehlin. All rights reserved. Brief quotations are welcome with attribution and a link to mormonstories.org; all other use requires written permission.