08 August, 2008

"The One Week Bible" Not Catching On

Carol Stream, Il - Tyndale House Publishers reported on Thursday that since the release of The One Week Bible three months ago sales have been "significantly less than expected." Sales reports for the first quarter show that a mere 13 copies have sold since The One Week Bible hit the shelves in May.

Many are already familiar with the popular One Year Bible, available in a variety of translations and conveniently divided into 365 daily readings taking approximately 30-35 minutes each, allowing the reader to steadily read through the whole Bible in a period of one year. But The One Week Bible is designed to be much more "intense," dividing the Bible into seven readings of roughly 10 hours and 20 minutes thus allowing a person to read the whole Bible in one week.

The idea for The One Week Bible was developed over the last year at Tyndale House. Various audio Bibles that have been released have shown that the Bible can be read through from beginning to end in about 72 hours. With this in mind Tyndale set out to release a Bible for people who wanted a more "intense reading" of Scripture. Tyndale first designed and test marketed The Three Day Bible, in which the Bible was conveniently divided into three "daily" readings of about 24 hours each, but the product was received rather poorly. Tyndale then began working on The One Week Bible hoping to attract a larger audience.

But now the extremely poor sales have become a major concern for Tyndale House. Having printed over 40,000 copies and having only sold 13, marketing directors are beginning to question whether or not the release of The One Week Bible was the wisest course of action.

"We knew going in that this was going to be for a particular market, but we weren't expecting sales to be this low," said Tyndale Vice President of marketing Roger Schultz. "We're going to try and restructure some of our approaches to marketing and see what develops. Perhaps we need to target more specific audiences with, say, The One Week Women's Bible or The One Week Teen Extreme Bible."

3 comments:

Darrin said...

I figured out that if I read the whole Pentateuch today, then on Day 5 I should only have to read Haggai. So that day I can have some time to myself, you know, for important stuff.

Anonymous said...

10 hours and 20 minutes for seven days? Is that true?

I'm tempted to try.

Peren said...

I own several copies of the One Day Bible, but I've never gotten around to starting it. I always end up forgetting about it until around 1 AM, and by then it's too late to start, so I have to wait until the next day.