Wednesday, March 03, 2010

Speaking...

...to a delightful gathering of a Catholic book club - convivial, talkative, cheerful. Lots of excellent books to buy or borrow.

I remember, back in the 1980s, being part of a small working party looking at the future of the Church in Britain and being told that by the year 2000 the Church in this country would have disappeared completely. It hasn't. Daft to try to predict the future. Among the developments not foreseen were the New Movements, the explosion in Catholic publishing and the numbers of people who would be prepared to buy the resulting books, and the influence of initiatives that seemed remote and far-away, such as World Youth Day...and having an international Catholic TV network broadcasting in Britain would have seemed virtually incredible twenty years ago...

1 comment:

Malcolm McLean said...

You don't really need any resources to publish a book or pamphlet these days. Print-on-demand means that you can get copies as you want them, at very reasonable price.

What you do need is a community of people to act as readers. I've found that advertising is expensive and ineffective, whilst you get quite a high penetration simply by putting things at the back of church with an honesty box.