By Emelina S. Almario
This article is part of a series for Adarna House’s 45th anniversary. Emelina S. Almario shares what she has learned from running Adarna House—from working with different people, to understanding their market, to dealing with competition.
In my personal Klasrum Adarna on doing business, three lessons stand out: ecosystem, market, and competition.
Lesson One: Ecosystem
Simply defined, the ecosystem of Adarna is the network of all the people, organizations, and processes involved in creating, producing, distributing, selling and reading books that work together like a community. It is designed to change with time. What were the most important parts of our ecosystem as I navigated Adarna’s world?
Book creators. During his years in Adarna, Rio nurtured a cadre of book creators, writers and illustrators, now looked up to as the pioneers in their field. Succeeding generations of book creators continue to dominate Adarna’s ecosystem; the increase in their numbers are attested to by the creation of Ilustrador ng Kabataan (InK) and Kwentista ng mga Tsikiting (Kutiing). Adarna keeps a very lean staff of writers and illustrators; instead it relies on submissions from aspiring book creators or handpicks established book creators for titles to be published. For Adarna, book creation is not just the promise of generating sales but also an opportunity to curate books for children, resulting in even better children’s book creators for the country.
Department of Education. An international consultant was commissioned to conduct a study on the private publishing sector of the Philippines. One of his most important conclusions was the needed support from Department of Education (DepEd) purchases for publishers in the country to survive. Indeed, our growth has much to do with the large purchases by DepEd for their LibHub project, a brainchild of Undersecretary Mike Luz who proceeded to meet book publishers, including me, at his DepEd office to excitedly discuss his project. As well as with the DepEd orders for our picture books and reference books as Supplementary Learning Resources. When DepEd declared a moratorium on buying books, we were lucky not to be one of the publishing companies that folded up. But we felt the pinch and do not look forward to it happening again in the future.
And finally, technology. It has affected the distribution of our books, whether hard copies or soft. In the digital space, Adarna started with book apps that did not take off, then moved into an e-book library, BuriBooks which created a lot of interest in private schools and helped us survive the COVID years. Online selling, whether through Shopee, Lazada, or our bookshop, is now ingrained in our operations.
Lesson Two: Market
For the longest time, we had limited understanding of our market, who our customer is. This in spite of Peter Drucker’s mantra that the purpose of business is to create a customer and that the customer defines what the business is. Adarna had long prided itself on serving the children in the early grades of public schools. There was no question about who our customer was. Then, from a family planning report I was preparing in my health consultant persona, I first picked up the idea of market segments. No such thing as a monolithic market group of married women of reproductive age. The group could be broken down further in terms of income, age, number of children ad infinitum. Yet to be added was the untapped group of unmarried women. Using the same lens, I realized that we saw the market of Adarna as a monolithic group of children which it was not. Our first cut of market segments was according to buyer type: schools, bookfairs, NGOs, bookstores, and dealers, primarily because each buyer type brought in cash in a different manner and cashflow was a survival issue.
Ani insisted that we had to upgrade our product and move beyond the low income market that Adarna had initially catered to. She wanted a look that could proudly be displayed beside imported story books in bookstores and that could appeal to the private school market. Adarna’s proof of life would be in awards won. I remember one year when we did not win any award and consoled ourselves over an expensive steak and wine dinner after the awarding event, plotting which titles in the following year we would devote special attention to in search of awards.
We moved away from newsprint and started working with camera-ready files with partner-printers rather than supplier-printers. To tap into the households that held on to English, bilingual editions became our norm. Let’s get out of our early grades mindset, we decided. So we wooed the very young readers with board books, answered the teachers’ request for big books for their storytelling sessions, created an intermediate reader product line also known as chapter books, followed the worldwide call for young adult titles, tried to branch out into manuals and activity books and reference materials, and had fun with graphic novels. We experimented with what we saw as our markets but were always timid in our approach, wanting each product line to be self-supporting with a limited number of titles to support it. Not all succeeded. And to be honest, our product lines were always supply, rather than demand-driven. Perhaps we did not have resources to throw into market research; perhaps we did not fully understand the nuances of the market and thought winning awards meant winning the market, or perhaps it was an arrogance we had developed built on our being the oldest and largest publisher of children’s books.
Lesson Three: Competition
Adarna had entered the world of children’s books almost as a monopoly - the brainchild of the finance manager of the Nutrition Center of the Philippines. But once outside that organization, although still very much a monopoly and still with the most number of book titles as well as institutional partners, we soon realized that there were other players in children’s book publishing.
Once, I asked an economist friend why he was so generous teaching others about a field in economics where he was the Philippine guru. What I meant was that he could well monopolize all the consulting jobs in that particular field. His reply: because when I teach others what I know, I create more consultants with my expertise and together, we make the market for our expertise grow. In effect, he was saying that competition won’t kill you; in fact it will spur the growth of the total market.
I always remember his words when I visit our book fairs which now house a section on children’s books. I remember when I had first wanted to join the Manila International Book Fair and knew I could only do so by asking another publisher if we could share a booth. The publisher said no and it took several years before Adarna could merit a space in the Book Fair. Today, there is a whole section on children’s books in the Manila International Book Fair and the Philippine Book Fair, thanks to Lampara Books, Hiyas Books of OMF, Chikiting Books of Vibal, Tahanan, ABC Educational Development Center and many others. There are enough publishers to merit an annual National Children’s Book Awards, separate from the Manila Critics Circle Awards. Competition spurs the growth of our market, indeed grows the market and with it, the children’s book publishing industry.
Competition also keeps Adarna on its toes. We keep benchmarking quality against others, measuring market share more religiously, studying the customer values for bestsellers that we did not publish, comparing price points. We also learned to appreciate and admire the growth trajectories that others took. Lampara Books, an imprint of Lampara Publishing House, Inc. had started with its Easy to Learn Books in 1997 but we began to feel its soon formidable presence in the market in the following years. Publishers of children’s books are a friendly lot—perhaps it’s because we work with a delightful and fun segment of the book market. But behind that friendliness, there is always that shrewd assessment of how the other stands. At the Manila International Book Fair or at the Philippine Book Fair, where are the queues for children’s books longest? Is Adarna still the publisher of choice in children’s books? But the mood changes when we participate in international book fairs. On that stage, the children’s book publishers of the country become one, sharing in each other’s success. We leave our separate kingdoms to form an industry and to take pride in ourselves and others. Adarna was not an exhibitor at the first Bologna Children’s Book Fair that Ani and I attended. But how delighted we were to find out that Lampara was there, bearing our country’s flag. We were not two separate children’s book publishers; we were the children’s book publishing industry of the Philippines.
The story of Adarna House continues in upcoming essays. Like and follow us on Facebook and Instagram to catch the next release.