Clem Jackson met up with newcomer to the UK Christian trade, Paul Bootes, to find out more about the man and his plans for the UK businesses he recently acquired

Paul Bootes is Managing Director of Koorong, Australia’s largest Christian retailer and now a player in the UK following the company’s acquisition of Authentic Publishing, together with eight Wesley Owen shops and the wesleyowen.com online shop.

Koorong operates 18 stores across Australia plus a thriving Web Store. Last month Bootes made a visit to the UK to meet up with his new UK team, suppliers, distributors and other key contacts. I met with him just three hours after he landed in the UK to find out more about the man and his plans for the UK.

CJ: How did Koorong get started and how did you become involved?

PB: The company was started by my Mum and Dad in the late 1960s in our house. But it grew and started taking over the garage and several of the other rooms in the house (we had a fairly big house). So in 1978 we moved into our first retail store in West Ryde in Sydney.

At the time I was teaching English at a High School, which I had been doing for about eighteen months, but we needed someone to run the business full-time so in 1987 I gave up teaching and got involved.

CJ: You also have a distribution company in Australia - Crossroad Distribution – I understand.

PB: Yes, Crossroad is a wholesale distribution company which primarily, almost exclusively, does DVD and music distribution and copyright administration plus a bit of book distribution as well.

CJ: Is that primarily local (Australian) product?

PB: No it’s mostly from the USA and UK - from around the world really. We distribute for EMI, Provident-Integrity, the Furious guys and then we have a lot of Veggietales and other DVD product which we license in Australia.

CJ: With regard to retailing how do you see the role of the retailer in relation to a) downloading music and b) the emerging e-book market?

PB: Well the digital world provides huge challenges for anyone involved in the information/ entertainment business. I think selling physical product in High Street environments is tough and is going to continue to be tough.

CJ: Do you have a ‘magic-wand’ of an answer to the challenge?

PB: No, we just keep doing what we think we know how to do in terms of retailing. Our view is that the book is not as much of an endangered species as the CD. In children’s books and gift books we think the tide of the digital onslaught won’t come in as quickly. But a lot of books have already moved to the digital format and will continue to do so.

CJ: So do you see the day when your shops are selling e-readers and e-books in store?

PB: Well we will certainly be selling e-books across all our retail stores and websites before the end of this year – including Wesley Owen. As far as the e-reader side goes, well that’s a pretty crowded market already, especially after today’s launch of the iPad from Apple. So I doubt we would want to sell e-readers, although we do have that option and have looked at some of them but at this stage it’s not something we plan to do.

CJ: In the UK Christian market it’s said that less than 10% of regular churchgoers ever walk through the door of a Christian bookshop. So what would you say is your approach as Koorong/Wesley Owen to dragging more people back to the bookshops?

PB: Well over time, we’d like to increase the marketing to the consumers to encourage them to come into the stores; that would be one thing. But we also want to give them the opportunity to buy online, or by telephone, or to come into the store – anyway they want really. In a sense we’ll let the consumer decide what’s the best way for them to order and to interact with Christian books.

CJ: As a result of your entry to the UK market, are we going to see an increase in product coming into the UK from Down-Under and vice-versa? Will we see more Australian artists and authors?

PB: I think that on the publishing side Authentic will be looking at what opportunities we have to introduce Australian artists and authors to this market. The popular UK authors don’t sell that well in Australia although we do quite well with the academic and apologetic side.

CJ: Is that cultural?

PB: We don’t know. We have tried to ‘break’ a number of UK authors over the years, without much success. It’s hard to understand, maybe it’s partly cultural, but we certainly have more success with American authors than we do with the popular UK authors.

CJ: One of the distinctives of Authentic Publishing is the very positive relationship they have with their authors. Will Koorong continue to provide that level of support?

PB: Well we certainly want to get right behind our authors, and the books we publish, and make sure that we market and sell them as much as we can. Clearly we didn’t buy Authentic just to let it tick over. We want it to grow as a business and we want our authors to have maximum exposure and maximum promotion.

CJ: You mentioned marketing there. When we spoke recently you said that one of the distinctives of Koorong was aggressive marketing. What does that mean in practice, what will we see?

PB: On the retail side I think we will have compelling offers; I think there has been a trend in the UK, from what I’ve seen, to emphasise digital marketing and we want to do that but we don’t think the catalogue style of marketing is dead either.

CJ: Koorong is a very successful company in Australia; there’s a much nicer climate over there; your family is there; so why did you want to get involved in the difficult UK market?

PB: Well it did seem like a good idea at the time, that’s for sure, and perhaps you should ask me that question in six or twelve months time. But we were quite attracted to the Authentic Publishing business – we’ve been keen for a while to acquire a publisher, it’s really the only segment we were not in. We also felt there was an opportunity in the UK to try out some of our marketing/sales ideas on the retail/consumer side as well. I guess we felt, on the retail side, it was a challenge to see if we could make it work.

CJ: For readers who are not retailers, and who perhaps have not been in a Wesley Owen for a while (or ever), what would you say to encourage them to come and have a look?

PB: I think it’s very hard to get the exposure to the whole breadth and depth of the Christian product, thoughts and competing Christian worldviews anywhere but in a store where you can look at the whole range of product arrayed. So I would like to think that as we stock up the Wesley Owen stores, with more inventory and more range, that it will be an interesting and exciting place for people to visit and see what is available.